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Apply HN: Snapchat for gifting

2 points by idealboy ↗ HN
Seedling is bringing the experience of in-person gifting online by enabling friends, families and communities to co-create an interactive gifting experience.

Online gifting today solves the transaction, but fails to deliver the personal connection of in-person gifting. But we don't gift to transfer assets, we gift to strengthen existing relationships and help build new ones. And research shows nothing does that better than shared experience.

Plant a Seedling for a loved one and invite others to help it grow. They add a video or image message and an optional fund contribution. On harvest day, it's all combined into a unique gifting experience and delivered to the beneficiary.

We have an early prototype, and planted a Seedling for YC as part of our application: https://www.giveseedling.com/#/grow?token=d357781b6feade82a17200e36ae2d66e

There's no fund in this Seedling - just messages. We've asked YC alumni we know to add video and image messages, which will be combined this Friday and privately shared with YC and everyone that contributes.

Now we'd like to open it up to the entire HN community.

If you'd like to add a message to the YC Seedling, just email me at luke@giveseedling.com and I'll send you an invite. What kind of message can you add? Whatever you want. Just make sure you're okay with YC seeing it!

Some prompts to get you thinking:

1) I read Hacker News because...

2) I applied to YC because...

3) The biggest issue facing tech right now is...

4) In the next 10 years, I'm most excited about..

5 comments

[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 22.4 ms ] thread
akyker20
Nice idea guys! I would love to receive a "gifting experience" like this for a birthday or graduation. It definitely beats a dull card in the mail or even some piece of junk I will probably never use. Quick question: Any idea how you would turn this into a business? Would you take a percentage of the contributions? I think that would be a bit odd. Would you make the original "seedling" planter pay?
idealboy
Thank you! Yes, we have two revenue models.

The first is business to consumer. We take 2% of fund contributions and 8% on affiliate referrals. Our goal is to keep the cost below a greeting card. The average gift card is $50, which would translate to a cost of $1 for the Seedling.

The second is business to business. We take a 5% royalty on each licensed transaction. We're building our technology as modular web services so we can license some of the underlying functionality without compromising the Seedling brand. For example, Amazon could license and white label the Seedling experience and integrate it into their checkout flow.

To illustrate how that scales:

B2C: $1 billion fund contributions processed

B2B: 20 million licensed transactions

Total revenue: $110M

jay_kyburz
I think this is an interesting idea. I would be concerned that a lot of people give gifts as a way to sidestep having to actually express your feelings for somebody. That may be my introverted male perspective.
idealboy
Thank you. We know that not everyone will want to add sentimental messages, which is why we're working on a variety of Seedling themes. For example:

Q&A: Choose from a list of questions to answer ("How did you meet Bob? What was your first impression?")

Dance Off: Record a 5 second video of yourself dancing. All videos combined and set to selected dance track.

Growers can also take a photo or upload an image if they prefer.

People connect and deepen relationships in all kinds of ways, and we want Seedling to support whatever that looks like for them. I have a buddy that would really like a Seedling where everyone adds a photo of their cat, and another that's really into zombies. How cool would it be if all his friends put on zombie makeup and added a video? Not super sentimental, but it would mean a lot to him.

We want to build a flexible platform and then get out of the way so that people can connect in the ways they feel most comfortable.