Friend Funding – a Piece Of Cake

Friend Funding – a Piece Of Cake

Christchurch Start-Up One Great Gift has come up with the novel idea of giving away Christmas cakes for office parties as a way of getting feedback from users of their crowd funding website.

As Managing Director and business mentor Terry Fullerton says “Having a great idea is just the first step of turning a new company into a successful business. The trick is to give people a taste of what the product can do and what better way than giving away Christmas cakes.”

One Great Gift is a new way of using crowd funding to solve the age old problem of collecting money for a gift for a friend or someone at the office. The big difference from other crowd funding sites like Kickstarter and GiveALittle, which collect money from the general public, is that with One Great Gift the fund raising is just done within the circle of friends who the gift is for.

In order for people to get a cake all they needed to do was to set up a campaign on www.onegreatgift.co.nz and then find 10 people who filled in the Contribute Now form with $0. As Terry says “Once they got 10 people on board we hand delivered the cake. It has been a lot of fun and a great way of showing people how easy it is to use the website.

The idea of giving away cakes came from a strategic planning session we were doing in which we were challenged to verify our key assumptions about who are customers were and what mattered most to them. Rather than just sending out a survey to possible customers we realised we would get much more meaningful feedback from people who had actually used the website to jointly be a part of a campaign for a gift. Hence the idea of giving people the challenge of getting 10 of their friends to be a part of getting a Christmas cake.”

One Great Gift started as an idea at a Christchurch Startup Weekend in 2014 when eight strangers got their heads together to develop and pitch the concept of a website that helped friends suggest gifts. From there the idea evolved into an easy way for friends to get together online to buy a gift and that has now expanded to include collecting funds for a group activity such as a function or a fun night out.

The Startup Weekend eight is now four key individuals whose diverse experience and skill-sets all play a part. “We couldn’t be more different,” says Fullerton.” Cam Richardson is the enthusiastic recent graduate, Paul Hill the business-savvy family man, Graham Robertson is the angel investor and I’m the grey-haired entrepreneur who’s spent a career commercialising new technologies.”

Between them they have a history of start-ups. Fullerton has started and sold five enterprises since leaving Canterprise, the University of Canterbury’s commercial centre, where he was CEO. Co-director Hill has taken ‘perceived opportunities’, including a wastewater filtration device and an insulation product, through design and patent to commercialisation, and Richardson, who’s just 22, caught the start-up bug through his involvement with University of Canterbury Innovators, and with Entré, a student club for entrepreneurs. “I started there with some ideas including a new bike lock concept and then got the opportunity to work with One Great Gift on a summer start-up Scholarship.” In addition Robertson has lots of Board experience including being a former president of Federated Farmers and ex-chairman of Crop and Food Research.

As Terry says “Like any start-up raising awareness of the product is the big challenge and while the cake giveaway was primarily a way to get to know our customers it has also been great for boosting our profile on Facebook and other social media” .

ENDS

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