I truly appreciate all the honest feedback and tough love
Let me share a bit more about why and how we're building Giftit:
The problem - it's hard to give both fitting AND surprising gifts.
We've surveyed hundreds of people including our beta testing community and stumbled across the following conundrum:
- 90% of people don't share their wishes unless they're asked
- 75% of people don't know what to get and don't want to ask
This obviously leads to an information gap between gift-givers and receivers which frequently leads to crappy, impersonal, duplicate gifts or no gifts at all.
In the US alone, economist Prof. Waldfogel has estimated that this racks up to a $20B loss which represents the difference in actual value of the gift and the perceived value by the receiver.
Our solution - Giftit's social wishlists and the Sherlock chatbot
- Once you download the free Giftit app on iOS or Android, you'll be able to select any of your contacts (who don't need to be on Giftit)
- Sherlock will then anonymously reach out to this contact on either iMessage or WhatsApp and start chatting with them about their wishes, current interests, etc.
- From the app, you'll be able to see in real time the transcript of the conversation of Sherlock with your contact and get shoppable gift suggestions.
- If Sherlock is not asking something specific you want to know about, you can inject a message into the conversation which will directly show up on the chat app of your contact (e.g. "what's your dress size?")
---
I'll be the first to admit that this is definitely not for everyone. I would personally not use this for gifting someone I spend a lot of time around since I typically know what they're into. However, there's a long tail of people in my life like old friends, family, etc that I live far away from and that I'm a bit more clueless on.
If you're someone that doesn't mind asking directly for people's wishes or sharing them without being asked, then this is probably also not for you.
I encourage you all to give it a try and share more feedback
Let me share a bit more about why and how we're building Giftit:
The problem - it's hard to give both fitting AND surprising gifts.
We've surveyed hundreds of people including our beta testing community and stumbled across the following conundrum:
- 90% of people don't share their wishes unless they're asked
- 75% of people don't know what to get and don't want to ask
This obviously leads to an information gap between gift-givers and receivers which frequently leads to crappy, impersonal, duplicate gifts or no gifts at all.
In the US alone, economist Prof. Waldfogel has estimated that this racks up to a $20B loss which represents the difference in actual value of the gift and the perceived value by the receiver.
Our solution - Giftit's social wishlists and the Sherlock chatbot
- Once you download the free Giftit app on iOS or Android, you'll be able to select any of your contacts (who don't need to be on Giftit)
- Sherlock will then anonymously reach out to this contact on either iMessage or WhatsApp and start chatting with them about their wishes, current interests, etc.
- From the app, you'll be able to see in real time the transcript of the conversation of Sherlock with your contact and get shoppable gift suggestions.
- If Sherlock is not asking something specific you want to know about, you can inject a message into the conversation which will directly show up on the chat app of your contact (e.g. "what's your dress size?")
---
I'll be the first to admit that this is definitely not for everyone. I would personally not use this for gifting someone I spend a lot of time around since I typically know what they're into. However, there's a long tail of people in my life like old friends, family, etc that I live far away from and that I'm a bit more clueless on.
If you're someone that doesn't mind asking directly for people's wishes or sharing them without being asked, then this is probably also not for you.
I encourage you all to give it a try and share more feedback