

We're a 2.5 man team vs millions in VC. Please review our skunk-works project - giftdish
http://www.giftdish.com/

======
jasonkester
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.

~~~
Cantdog
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.

~~~
jasonkester
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.

------
ccollins
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.

~~~
giftdish
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.

------
nik_0_0
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.

~~~
giftdish
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
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.

------
ben1040
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.

------
brackin
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.

~~~
giftdish
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.

~~~
brackin
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.

~~~
giftdish
Brackin,

That's actually how most of our gifts are sent. You can make a gift public or
private. If it's public, it's posted to the recipient's Facebook wall (and you
get all the social gratitude that comes along).

We make everyone login before seeing their gifts, so people can send gift
cards to the wall, and we make sure only the recipient can view it.

------
king_magic
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
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_magic
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

------
rubynerd
> 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

------
giftdish
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!

~~~
nanijoe
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.

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

~~~
nanijoe
How about, "We want to create a more exciting(fun?) way to say Happy Birthday"

------
sequoia
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?

~~~
giftdish
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.

------
empire29
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.

------
rdl
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.

~~~
giftdish
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.

------
martswite
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.

------
k33n
Keep going! It's more fun to compete with no funding! It frustrates
competitors with deep pockets.

~~~
giftdish
Thanks!

------
sb1752
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.

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

~~~
Cantdog
Thanks for the compliments Prez,

We're based up in cold Portland, Maine.

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

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

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

------
LukeHoersten
Who does your design? I love it.

------
janlukacs
Facebook login - no go!

------
hackermom
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.

