We're a 2.5 man team vs millions in VC. Please review our skunk-works project

http://www.giftdish.com/

by giftdish • 14 years ago

54 44 14 years ago

giftdish9• 14 years ago

We wanted to end the boring Facebook "happy birthday" post, so we built GiftDish.

GiftDish is a social gifting site, helping users manage important gifting events and makes giving personal gifts simple and social.

After months of off-hours work, we convinced our employer to let us spend some "official" time working on this. In that time, numerous competitors have launched or are close, including startups backed by Greylock, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia. Still, onward we go...

The site is still very much in beta - All thoughts and feedback would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

nanijoe2• 14 years ago

For the record, I don't find it meaningless when someone wishes me happy birthday on facebook (or using any other medium). For me, saying the actual words "Happy Birthday" is my preferred method of being wished a happy birthday... You may want to re-word the first line of your post.

giftdish9• 14 years ago

nanijoe, agreed, some can be meaningful. Changed to boring.

tzaman• 14 years ago

I don't even care if people say it in person when FB reminded them. The only ones that count is from people that remembered it on their own!

frankdenbow• 14 years ago

Who are these other startups you're talking about? The closest I know of is Karma, which is more focused on physical gifts.

Cantdog4• 14 years ago

Karma's one. Others include Groupgifting.com, Ugift.in, Wrapp, and YouGift.

k33n• 14 years ago

Keep going! It's more fun to compete with no funding! It frustrates competitors with deep pockets.

giftdish9• 14 years ago

Thanks!

rubynerd• 14 years ago

> sign in with Facebook

I don't have an account, so I basically just closed the tab

First impressions, your product allows me to give people e-gifts that are actually worth something instead of pixels

But, the whacking great "Facebook" button makes me kinda close the tab

Give me the ability to import my iPhone's contact book (Protip: iCloud is a single page app backed by some client-side MVC framework, so basically a free JSON API once you've got the login stuff worked out), then overlay reminders x days in advance on my iCalendar to go to your service and buy a gift, then you can handle everything from there

But, I'm always an edge case :)

Good luck, I hope you work everything out OK

ccollins• 14 years ago

Great looking site and clear focus, but your Facebook Connect permission requirements caused me to give up before trying your product!

Getting past the home page requires connecting with facebook and providing the following info:

Your basic info

Your e-mail address

Your birthday

Your relationship status

Your photos

Friends' birthdays

Photos shared with you

This app may post on your behalf, including status updates, photos and more.

I suggest you allow me to browse more of your site while not logged in, limit the initial permission request to just my basic info + email, and/or provide alternate login method.

giftdish9• 14 years ago

Collins,

Good points, we know people will be turned off by Facebook connect (as evidenced by comments...), and we're working hard to add more login options.

We definitely should not require "extended permissions" at login, we should wait until the posting is needed.

ben1040• 14 years ago

If the only way to sign in is with Facebook, then I guess I'm not signing in.

Edit: I realize you may have done this because it makes it easy to just quickly slurp in your friends' birthdays through the Facebook API. But I am willing to do more legwork on my behalf because I have other special dates I might want to give gifts for, and I am willing to manually key those in myself along with my friends' birthdays.

empire29• 14 years ago

I really like this idea, but dont have a facebook.

Its frustrating that I can't get into see all the gift options without logging in. You should make that "... and may more" reveal the full list of GC options.

I do appreciate the short walk-through near the bottom though.

brackin2• 14 years ago

This is the kind of business where your competition really doesn't matter. They can't take away from your business very easily, as in they can't make deals with certain partners to cut you out and being first to market or having lots of leverage doesn't matter.

Focus in the product. The site is great, although it's hard to know what a gift is at first glance. It almost has the look of an eCard site, which lead me to believe it was those annoying virtual gifts. The first three lines don't mention gift cards, just gifts.

There's a difference, I like the idea of sending someone a gift card with this slick product but not virtual or physical gifts. For me this makes all the difference.

The idea of giving something with physical value but digitally makes a lot of sense. I think this model could be taken further if after some traction you made deals with certain partners to offer more or make it even more unique.

giftdish9• 14 years ago

Brackin,

Agreed, we need to clarify what types of gifts you can give. Digital (e)Gift Cards are one of the types you can give, they're delivered instantly but have physical value, as they can be redeemed online or printed out and redeemed in-store.

brackin2• 14 years ago

Yeah, very interesting business. I think the option to post to a wall might be interesting. Part of giving a gift is the social gratitude that you have given a gift. Which is why these 'pay for virtual gift' apps in Facebook even exist and why people go as far as posting publicly rather than a message. It also makes the product very viral and would allow you to grow much faster, of course making message or wall post a choice.

Update: Thinking about it, not sure if it's possible as anyone could access your giftcard. If it is then it'd be interesting.

rdl• 14 years ago

This looks great, and one of the apps where social will continue to win over mobile.

I wish there were a way to do group buys of gift cards. There are a lot of people I'd buy a $1-5 item for, but not a $25 gift card. A $1 gift card is less than useless to he recipient. If you could do group contributions to a single gift card, a lot of the marginal $1 people could become $100 gift card.

Also, please add amazon.

giftdish9• 14 years ago

rdl,

You actually can give "group gifts", we haven't played up that point yet until we're sure the messaging is clear.

If you send a gift card, you can invite friends to contribute. The recipient will get one card from all of you, for the summed amount.

edit: Lot's more brands, including Amazon are coming soon.

nik_0_0• 14 years ago

I'm not quite sure why so many people are complaining about Facebook Connect... I know it is the hot thing to do, but this product is actually using the data from Facebook, not just requiring an account to login for sake of ease. The entire point of this project seems to be to hook into Facebook, grab the numerous events/birthdays, and then track those for you, so that you can respond. If you don't have a Facebook account, I don't think you are the target audience.

giftdish9• 14 years ago

nik_0_0,

You nailed why we're using Facebook connect, without it the site is very empty, since we can't automatically pull events in. We need to communicate that better.

koopajah• 14 years ago

You could connect with other websites where you can input each birtday date to remember, etc. A lot of friends are putting fake birthday dates just to check if people remember their real date and I didn't even put mine (or at least it is not displayed) but I have a google doc storing every birthday I want to remember. And no I don't want to wish happy birthday to everyone in my FB list, nor see "do you want to send a gift to XXX" and feel guilty about it.

TLDR : add the possibility to give dates/names/mail in the site instead of just facebook scraping.

king_magic2• 14 years ago

Looking through a couple of the comments, I see one of the most immediate reactions is disinterest in the product because it requires a Facebook sign-in. I think that attitude is a bit silly. Facebook has 845 million users. That's a pretty big potential user-base.

As for the site itself, it does look really nice. I agree with brackin's comment about it being a bit difficult to tell what a "gift" is at first glance. It took too much reading for me to figure out that this is different from all of those free Facebook "gift" apps.

I like the idea. I logged in, and was immediately impressed with how nice the site looks. The layout of events is really well done. Good luck guys, I think this could be really useful and fun.

fusiongyro• 14 years ago

845 million users is a lot, but it's not the entire internet. I still manage to have friends despite not having digitized them with a Facebook account, and I could still use help keeping track of their birthdays and what to get them--if that's what this site lets you do.

king_magic2• 14 years ago

Fair enough, but I think if you look at it from the developer's point of view, they are trying to get a minimally viable product in front of their target market - which happens to be immense. Yeah, sure, some people might be inconvenienced by not being able to use this without Facebook, but for now, they have an easy* way to connect with the vast majority of their target market.

*easy used relatively here

jasonkester2• 14 years ago

Two things this needs before it's the thing I'd want to use:

- Let me pick a specific gift. I don't want to give a $35 gift card. I want to give a remote control helicopter. Let me pick it out from Amazon and send it to somebody via email.

- Don't require Facebook. I want to send helicopters to everybody on my team the day we ship. I know their email addresses and that should be enough (it's enough to be able to send them money via paypal, so why not gifts through your thing?) I'm not going to friend them on Facebook[1], so at the moment there's no way to send them anything.

Fix that and you've got me. I've been looking for exactly this all week, so if you could do the things above I'd spend $500 through your site today.

[1] The important point here is that the people who you friend on Facebook are a different (though possibly overlapping) set of people from the people you give gifts too. I'm not going to add my Mother as a Facebook friend, but I'll send her gifts on her birthday.

Yes, there do exist people who add everybody they've ever met as friends on Facebook. But there are also people who don't. If you make it impossible for those people to send gifts through your thing, you're losing business.

duqee• 14 years ago

I agree on your first point, however I find your second comment an issue, with Facebook your friends personal details are already entered. With Paypal, you send money to people who already have an account, Well that is my understanding of this. But again the data is already inputted. Since this is such a new website building up a user base from sign up would require you to invite all your friends to register so they have the details neeed in the system to send such a gift. Correct me if I am wrong.

davweb• 14 years ago

With PayPal you can send money to any email address. If that address isn't associated with a PayPal account an email is sent telling the recipient to sign up to PayPal and claim their money. [1]

I don't see why giftdish couldn't work the same way: you send your gift to an email address and the recipient then has to open account to claim their gift if they don't have one already. Having a gift waiting would be a pretty strong incentive to open a new account.

[1] https://www.paypal.com/webapps/helpcenter/article/?articleID...

Cantdog4• 14 years ago

Hey Jason,

This is Charlie from the GiftDish team. I'm locked out of comments from the GiftDish account.

Thanks for the feedback.

1) We're currently evaluating product gifting. Currently, all gifts are "instant" and we're worried about the complexities around shipping/returns/etc that come with products. It's a great use case and we're trying to figure out the best way to do it.

2) We currently working to enable other sign-in options besides Facebook. As stated below, without automatic events, the site is very empty. Additionally, we're soon going to allow invites via email, so you can send gifts and collaborate with non facebook friends.

jasonkester2• 14 years ago

Why are we inviting people? Why are we collaborating? Isn't the "Sending Gifts" the main thing your site does? The mechanism you use to login should not affect that in any way.

Further, why is the site based on Events? I tried to send a gift to test it out, but there's no "Send a Gift" button. Why is that not a big giant element at the top of the page, sitting next to a box where I can type an email address?

Instead, I need to find the "add an event" button in the nav, then jump through a bunch of steps to create a new event with a date and find the one option in the list of event types that lets me actually send a gift without entering more information. Seems like a lot of unnecessary complexity that detracts from the central focus of the site.

That said, it's quite pretty. And the workflow to send birthday gifts to my facebook friends is pretty cool. You just need a way to send gifts to people who aren't in my Facebook list and/or aren't having a birthday.

enjo• 14 years ago

I agree with OP. This is a complete non-starter for me if I can't actually send physical gifts. I actually just assumed that you were an amazon affiliate play:)

prezjordan• 14 years ago

Saw this in r/startups a couple months ago - you made a lot of improvements, this looks absolutely wonderful. Where are you based?

Cantdog4• 14 years ago

Thanks for the compliments Prez,

We're based up in cold Portland, Maine.

sb1752• 14 years ago

This is so important. Buying gifts for people is such a pain. Just give me some simple suggestions and reminders and I'm hooked. I'll pay.

janlukacs• 14 years ago

Facebook login - no go!

hackermom• 14 years ago

The first thing that put me off was "Begin here <Facebook login button>". I don't use Facebook, I don't even have a Facebook account, and I am not sure how I feel about having something as personal as a Facebook account instantly connected and associated with another service, even just to try it out.

To state the obvious I have nothing further to say about your service, as the mere login procedure scared me away.

martswite• 14 years ago

As mirrored by a few people already, I would be interested in this product but I don't have a Facebook account.

Could you not provide options of where to pull event data from? iCal or a phonebook for example? This would give many of the users here a route into your application and you would still have the option of using the facebook api.

true_religion• 14 years ago

I would take off the 'Gift Social' part of the tag.

I'm a customer, not an investor, so please use traditional English.

LukeHoersten• 14 years ago

Who does your design? I love it.

rwillystyle• 14 years ago

I'd love to but I don't use FaceBook.

sequoia• 14 years ago

The hackerati clearly doesn't like this because of facebook connect. Remember that the average consumer has a totally different relationship to the 'net & facebook (if they use it) than the HN set. I saw your app requires access to friends' photos: it appears that this is to put a photo with the date in a nice little reminders display. Tinfoil hats notwithstanding, I expect many people will love this interface.

I use ghostery & abp & avoid facebook connect apps myself, but I recognize that I'm not an average consumer. I think many people will really like your application. In any event, keep in mind that the sample group here is tiny and not representative before overhaul the interface based on our advice. ;)

I might suggest making it clear what you do more quickly: "Automatically send gifts to Facebook friends on their birthday" or something. "Remember friends' special occasions and give personal gifts" is a bit vague, imo. am I supposed to remember them? Do I send the gift? What does this service do?

giftdish9• 14 years ago

Sequoia,

Thanks for the feedback. Agreed on the clarified messaging, we're working on that now. HN skews against Facebook, so I was expecting most of this feedback, we will start opening it up, but won't rush it.

We're a 2.5 man team vs millions in VC. Please review our skunk-works project

Related Stories