Beacon is a Kickstarter-meets-Groupon site that helps you raise funds with Bitcoin

Have you ever wanted to run a Kickstarter project without all the complexity, hassle, and fees that come with accepting donations through services like Amazon Payments and Paypal? One man in Beijing may have the solution for you. Meet Beacon, a crowdfunding and crowd sales platform that – at least for the moment – accepts donations only in the form of Bitcoin.

Longtime watchers of Beijing’s tech scene probably know Beacon founder David Lancashire as the man behind the online Chinese-learning service Popup Chinese. Lancashire told Tech in Asia that despite the beta launch of Beacon, Popup Chinese is still what’s keeping the lights on in his apartment. But after some major life changes, he was inspired to pursue some new projects, too. One of those new projects is Beacon.

At present, Beacon is very simple. Signing up and listing a project will take only a few minutes, and the fees are negligible. Whether your fund is successful or not, you’ll be required to pay a 0.0001 BTC (US$0.03) transaction fee. That’s it.

Using bitcoin to process donations makes the costs of crowdfunding much lower than they would otherwise be, says Lancashire, but that’s only half the advantage. Raising funds in traditional currencies requires navigating the “absurd and opaque” regulations legacy banking systems have for crowdfunding. And indeed, to use Paypal (for example) for crowdfunding you’ll need to meet a number of guidelines and potentially provide the company with a mountain of documentation on everything from your own identity to your company’s business plan.

On Beacon, there are none of those hoops to jump through. Lancashire acknowledges that in the long run, the site may accept donations in other forms of currency to expand the base of potential donors, since many people don’t have bitcoin. In fact, he says the site’s back-end is built to support other currencies in the future, although adding that support is not an immediate priority. For now, things are staying simple.

A sample project on Beacon

Beacon isn’t just simpler than its competitors in terms of currency: it also lacks the aesthetic bells and whistles of Kickstarter or Groupon. Beacon’s web-interface is deliberately simple compared to sites like Kickstarter, said Lancashire. “One reason is cross-platform usability. Another is that Beacon supports both defined contribution (Groupon) and flexible-contribution (Kickstarter) projects and with new features under development it makes sense to minimize the complexity of UI changes.”

“That said, I’d encourage you to try creating a project in Kickstarter and pay attention to how much you are asked to do,” he added. “You may appreciate the way Beacon intentionally simplifies the process!”

What Beacon offers is definitely simple. Whether crowdfunding fund-raisers will embrace it is a separate question, but at the moment Lancashire isn’t worried about audience size or income from the site. “The focus now is trying to get a sense of how and where Beacon can be useful,” he said. In fact, he’s not even really looking for seed funding at the moment. “If it makes sense to take funding I’ll consider it, but early-stage funding in China is a market for lemons. I don’t think dealing with it is a productive use of my time at this point.”

Just because he’s not looking for funding doesn’t mean Lancashire has set his sights low, though. The beta site is temporarily parked on a Chinese .cn account but he told Tech in Asia that the target market for Beacon is “obviously global.”