Quick Pitch: Giftiki provides friends a free and social way to pool small monetary gifts together so givers don’t have to break the bank and recipients can get what they really want.
Genius Idea: Group gift-giving for cheapskates.
Group gifting sites add social and digital convenience to the tedious task of combining funds for a friend's gift. San Francisco-based Giftiki launched Monday with a few interesting twists on the online collaborative gifting paradigm.
Giftiki, for starters, is less about recruiting folks to add big sums of money to a pool for some predetermined gift, and more about using the power of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter to get several people to chip in small amounts -- givers are limited to adding $1 to $10 to a Giftiki pot -- for a gift of the recipient's choosing.
Here's how it works: After signing up, you're prompted to send a Giftiki. Pick a Facebook friend, add a monetary contribution (up to $10), pen a personal (but still public) message, select digital gift wrapping and enter your credit card information. Voilà. You've just sent your Facebook friend a few bucks. Plus, because the Giftiki is posted to the recipient's Facebook Wall, your friend's Facebook friends can see it and chip in to make the pot size grow.
The lucky Giftiki recipient can opt to cash out funds to a prepaid American Express card or transfer them to a partner gift card. At launch, partners include retailers such as Macy's, Starbucks and Sports Authority.
The idea behind Giftiki first started to take shape after he celebrated a prior birthday, says Giftiki CEO Justin Stanislaw. "I got a lot of unwanted gifts, plenty of Facebook messages and text messages, but really nothing of substance."
Stanislaw then reached out to friend and future co-founder Bryan Jowers. "We were just fed up with getting gifts we didn't want," Stanislaw says. They weren't the only ones fed up. The Giftiki idea found favor with The Brandery, a consumer marketing accelerator program, and the startup later went on raise $1 million in funding.
We like it too. It's easy on the eyes, quirky in all the right ways, simple enough to not make gifting a chore and cheap enough (who doesn't have an extra dollar or two to spare?) that it might actually work.
That's not to say Giftiki is perfect -- but there does seem to be promise.
Look for an iPhone app, gamification incentives and member wish lists in the near term, and maybe even wedding registries in the more distant future.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, PLBernier
Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark
