James Beshara
CEO of Tilt
Discussion
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James Beshara
@jjbeshara · ceo @ tilt
Hi – I’m James Beshara, cofounder and CEO of Tilt. We built the Tilt platform to give people an easy and highly social way to organize and collaborate financially -- whether it's renting a boat with friends, a tailgate for Saturday’s big game, sending the Jamaican Bobsled team to the Olympics, a mayoral race, or protecting a community from rising crime, Tilt has powered it all. I’m excited to be here and answer any of your questions!
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Erik Torenberg
@eriktorenberg · Former Product Hunt
James - thank you for joining!
1) What is the current state of crowdfunding? What's the future look like?
specific sub questions:
1) Will crowdfunding platforms eventually get into taxes?
2) Will anyone be able to invest in startups without being accredited investors?
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James Beshara
@jjbeshara · ceo @ tilt
@eriktorenberg Hey Erik! Crowdfunding is one of those terms that can mean 100 different things to 100 different people. Our version at Tilt is focused on a mobile world, where we think a huge future lies for crowdfunding/getting people to pool and share resources for anything and everything in their daily lives. If people get used to the concept of being able to pool their resources instantaneously/simply to collectively achieve what individually wouldn't be possible, then I don't know where the ceiling is for where it can go.
The current state, I think, is that people have been hearing a lot about "crowdfunding" are familiar with the first generation of "crowdfunding" platforms, but that it hasn't really spilled into their daily lives or the mainstream in a really meaningful way (it's kind of like where blogging was 10-12 years ago... a LOT of hand-waiving, but it took things like Twitter on the consumer side and Wordpress on the enterprise side before we started to see it in our daily lives, either through people like Shaq tweeting his thoughts or entities like Forbes publishing content that we're all reading all hours of the day through the power of online publishing/wordpress).
I think the future will be more mainstream, more accessible, more personable, and more mobile.
Ryan Hoover
@rrhoover · Founder, Product Hunt
James! What does crowdfunding look like in 5 years?
Emily Hodgins
@ems_hodge · Community and Marketing, Product Hunt
@jjbeshara thanks for joining us today! 🙌 what's the best advice you've ever been given? Flip side, what's the worst?
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James Beshara
@jjbeshara · ceo @ tilt
@ems_hodge Marc Andreessen once told me that the best founders understand “nuance.” They can hear completely conflicting advice between Monday and Tuesday that are both correct and be able to make sense of what’s right for their specific company. In other words, you can always gain insight from others, but you should never outsource your thinking. The only true generic startup advice is that there is no generic startup advice, so constantly put advice through a lens of “what makes sense for *us*.”
Nick Reed
@nickreednr · Queen's U
Hi @jjbeshara, how do you determine what user-feedback is most relevant to the next development cycle?
On a recent call with the Tilt Canadian Ambassador Team you spoke about how Tilt is OBSESSED with its users, and iteratively develop based on their feedback. But with such a broad user-base, pulling you in so many direction, how do you choose what feedback to focus resources/change around?
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James Beshara
@jjbeshara · ceo @ tilt
@nickreednr Thank you for being a Tilt Ambassador and power user, Nick! This is actually really easy in practice. we view tilt as a content platform like any other content platform (just so happens our content is $$), so similar to a content platform like reddit, facebook, or product hunt, you can actually just focus on the 1-5% of users that create the *most* content and see what they want more of... much higher ROI than generic user feedback or asking people that haven't used the product what they would want in it to get them to try it.
Anna Roubos
@annaroubos · Director of Communications, Filld
@jjbeshara what apps are on your home screen?
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James Beshara
@jjbeshara · ceo @ tilt
@annaroubos about five social media apps (love my peeps) -- and then my antidote, my two favorite meditation focused apps (calm and headspace).
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James Beshara
@jjbeshara · ceo @ tilt
@cheneybell haha! my lovely wife making an appearance on here! it's funny you mention that because you're probably thinking that our lil dog wendell is our mascot.... BUT there is an even more interesting story here... Not many people know this, but @alexisohanian, co-founder of reddit, actually began to create the tilt mascot back in 2013. When we were about 9-10 months in, he said Tilt needed a mascot and started to draw a meerkat as our mascot "because it was one of the most social, communal animals"... we got to about two or three drafts but never actually implemented it. I still have it in my inbox probably waiting for a reply from me.
Cheney Beshara
@cheneybell · artist, Cheney Beshara Art
@jjbeshara @alexisohanian omg I remember that, loved that lil meerkat!!! how bout a meerkat + weenie dog mash up named Tilty?!
Chris Powers, Jr.
@iamchrispowers
Hey @jjbeshara! Are you able to share the likelihood that a Tilt campaign creator will create a 2nd campaign vs how likely a Kickstarter campaign creator is to create a 2nd campaign? I.e. Repeat customers
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James Beshara
@jjbeshara · ceo @ tilt
@iamchrispowers I don't know the repeat rate for creators on kickstarter, but our repeat rate and retention is a major focus for the entire company. Tilt is "the easiest way to collect, fundraise, or sell to your community" and when you try it once, there is a *very* high likelihood of you doing it again within 8 weeks, and my favorite stat is that we see communities get more and more ambitious with their tilts over time (for example, by the third time a user uses tilt, he/she becomes 5x more ambitious with their goal).
Kingsong Chen
@kingsongchen · Founder at Lace, Marketplace for GovTech
Hi James, what were some early decisions/resources that helped Tilt achieve such fast growth?
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James Beshara
@jjbeshara · ceo @ tilt
@kingsongchen one of the pivotal early decisions was being really flexible with where tilt "started out"... we originally thought that non-profits would be a big focus, but then we started seeing groups of friends take to the product more and more and start to grow virally. with my first crowdfunding platform, i was very dogmatic about the vision and how we'd get there -- with tilt it was very different, stubborn on the vision but *really* flexible on the how/the narrow edge of the wedge to get there.
Bryan Kim
@freshbreakfast · Chief Artist Enabler @ Think Steady
Hey James, Bryan here, crowdfunder of the musicians. My partner and I were talking the other day: while we're long-term bullish on direct-to-fan online commerce, we're less sure on which transaction model to chase. We're starting to see fatigue in traditional crowdfunding, in that it literally fatigues artists stress levels to run a highly public and deadlined campaign, then plan logistics of fulfillment so many months after transaction. The #'s seem to suggest that there's backer fatigue too -- at least in music. Have you seen similar fatigue in other verticals? If so, what "social commerce" format did these former crowdfunders go towards, if anything at all?
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James Beshara
@jjbeshara · ceo @ tilt
@freshbreakfast hey bryan. we actually have a lot of thoughts here. come by the office sometime, and we'd be glad to share. i think it is all in the expectation management that happens with crowdfunding (and the mismanaged expectations that lead to a less than stellar first-time experience). I think the future will be about dialogue with your community, and a constant flow of collaboration, rather than the current model where a band or creator does one crowdfunding campaign every 2 years, and it is all about one big effort -- in music specifically, there is a reason that artists have gone from full length EPs to releasing more singles/more content more often to their community over the years. It's not a major focus of ours right now, but I think we will see the same when it comes to collaboration and co-creation around commerce.