GiftRocket Blog

Announcing the API and Bulk Orders

2012-08-29T00:00:00-07:00

Over the last few months, the engineering team at GiftRocket completed a few improvements to our service.

Gift Card API: you can now programmatically purchase GiftRockets from your app. We’ve got a simple interface that allows you to POST to our API endpoint and make purchases on the spot. Browse the documentation and then contact us for access at support@giftrocket.com.
Gift Card Bulk Orders: rewarding people for survey work or need to send out mass GiftRockets as a thank you? Just send this spreadsheet to support@giftrocket.com and we’ll take care of it stat.

Finally, we’ve taken steps to reduce fees for our customers who pay via ACH. This is available to normal customers at checkout, but if you’re putting together a bulk order get in contact with us to discuss bulk pricing.

Cheers! GiftRocket Team

Where to Buy Gift Cards in New Jersey

2012-04-06T00:00:00-07:00

You may have noticed that it is getting harder to buy gift cards in New Jersey. Some of the biggest distributors of gift cards in the state are pulling their wares because of regulatory changes enacted by the state. Within months many New Jerseyans won’t be able to find gift cards in Walmarts, grocery stores, or convenience stores because companies like Incomm, Blackhawk, and American Express have decided not to do business there.

Fortunately, GiftRocket is still servicing New Jersey through online purchases. Visit our homepage to buy our online substitute for gift cards that give the thought of a local, personalized gift certificate, but without the restrictiveness.

Send a GiftRocket Gift Card Today

10 Reasons Why Marketing and BD Professionals Should Learn to Code

2012-01-09T00:00:00-08:00

Thanks XKCD!

I’m the marketing and BD guy at GiftRocket. I largely handle GiftRocket’s business relationships, press efforts, marketing strategies, and so on. But I’m not your typical marketing & BD guy because I also write code.

I’m by no means a good programmer, but I know the basics and they’re incredibly helpful. [1] Knowing how to write code makes me 3-4x more efficient at my job. I get stuff done faster and provide leverage to my team.

So to you non-technical web professionals out there, whether you do SEO/SEM, affiliate, community management, blogging, PR, or business development: learn to code this year. Here are 10 reasons why:

1. Coding makes internal data gathering easier.

Suppose you want to find out who your company’s most lucrative customers are. Understanding coding makes getting information like that very easy. It’s the equivalent of knowing how to use Google, only with your company’s data instead of what’s available on the web.

2. Coding makes external data gathering much easier.

At one point I needed to compile a list of hundreds of blogs by vertical. The non-technical process for this would be compiling a list of blogs from a directory into Excel and then visiting each to figure out whether it was relevant for our pitch.

Instead, I wrote some code that pulled the top 500 environmental blogs and their descriptions from Technorati along with their site descriptions. It was only (a few lines of code), but it probably saved me days of time.

3. Coding helps you automate other annoying tasks.

Here’s an example: let’s say you’re running an adwords campaign for your company. Managing keywords is usually easy to do online using Google’s web app, but when the number of keywords and ad groups gets sufficiently high, the web UI becomes burdensome. Fortunately, Google allows you to manage and upload your ad campaigns in Excel using a desktop app. So you can just auto-create ads based on a list of thousands of keywords and landing pages.

4. Coding accelerates your ability to develop and publish content.

I wrote and designed our infographic piece Your Gift Card Is Worth Less Than You Think. While I didn’t build the interactive bubble charts because I suck at javascript, I did nearly everything else. The thing to remember with pieces like this is that they only get good with constant iteration. Being able to write front-end code made it 100x faster to iterate on text copy, layout, colors.

5. Coding helps you take full ownership over your domains.

I run GiftRocket’s blog, and probably wouldn’t be able to do it if I didn’t code. We don’t use a typical CMS like Wordpress or Posterous[2]. We use a static site generator called Jekyll. Writing / revising posts in Jekyll takes a bit of comfort with code, because you have to run a server to see how your post will turn out. So instead of writing posts and having the engineers put them on the site, I just do it myself.

6. Coding helps you explain your product to technical business partners.

I’ve taken business development meetings with engineering teams at large corporations. As a startup, you can’t really afford to sound unknowledgeable to those people, so you get instant credibility when you can communicate to both the manager and their engineeers about the different features or limitations of whatever you’re selling, regardless of how technically they’re speaking.

7. Coding makes you a more versatile teammate.

Startups switch what they do. And often times, when product direction changes, marketing / BD work ends and engineering work starts again. When that change happens, your value to the company shoots up exponentially. You’ll actually have the background to sit down with the engineers and help them pair program out the new app, or if you’re really ballsy, building a significant component of it yourself.

8. Coding earns you the respect of your co-workers and potential hires.

This is true whether your colleagues are technical or not. If they’re technical, they’ll respect you for being able to speak the same tongue (or at least trying). If they aren’t technical, they’ll respect that you’re willing to get your hands dirty. If you’re self taught, they’ll respect you more. The same is true of potential hires. Marketing folks that code want to work with other marketing folks that code, even if they never do anymore.

9. Coding prepares you for your next thing.

You’ve moved on and either want to work on your own project. Usually the biggest issue marketing & BD folks face when looking to start a new company is finding a technical co-founder. Well, problem solved. If you cant recruit a more technical founder, at the very least you can build the prototype yourself.

10. Basic coding doesn’t take long to learn.

Fun fact: when we started working on GiftRocket, no one on our team knew how to code in any of the languages we use. Both my co-founders, despite having CS degrees, had never written a line of Ruby. This was one of my co-founder’s first apps: http://fierce-lightning-85.heroku.com/. And me- despite being one of GiftRocket’s founders, I had never seen our site’s codebase until halfway through YC. This was my first commit:

Take baby steps and learn on the job. Pick up a book and just look at your current website’s codebase. Ask your boss for a small side-project to work on. Get your hands dirty. Join Codecademy or Treehouse. Just do it. 6 months from now, you’ll be glad you did.

Notes

[1] I know basic Ruby / Ruby on Rails stuff, and can do most front-end stuff except complex Javascript. I don’t know algorithms, assembly language stuff, functional programming, databases, etc.

[2] Jekyll is better than Wordpress and Posterous for certain types of blog setups.

[3] People are probably curious about how I learned. I mostly grabbed books and read up about it. Ruby, the language, was relatively easy, but the Rails framework is pretty complicated. I used Rails for Zombies, The 3 Way, and Beginning Rails 3 To get familiar. I still don’t understand half of the black magic happening behind the curtains. I also got good at googling for how to do things and searching through documentation.

Why your startup should never release numbers

2011-12-19T00:00:00-08:00

Paul Hontz at the Startup Foundry wrote, “When a startup leaves out numbers I assume it’s because the numbers suck and you’re trying to sound bigger then what you really are. If you’ve just started out and the only people using it are your friends and family, tell us. There is no shame in that. People love rooting for the underdog.”

I think that’s terrible advice.

When a technology enables a new idea or problem-space, there are usually dozens of startups working on it. They’re all trying different variations of it to see what sticks with users. It’s like releasing a bunch of kids on an easter egg hunt.

Now let’s say one of the kids finds a pattern in where the easter eggs are hidden. If he tells the other kids about it, they’ll start finding easter eggs too. And that pudgy kid with poor eyesight who found the pattern to begin with– he just totally lost whatever advantage he had.

It doesn’t matter whether the numbers are good or bad. If they’re bad, then competitors will know what you’re doing isn’t necessarily working, and focus on other things. If they’re good, they’ll try to duplicate your approach.

There are probably cases where sharing numbers is okay. If you’re like Square or Instagram and are totally killing it and there’s no chance competition can catch up, great. Or if you want to do a pony show for investor / BD interest like Fab.com, also great. Just be strategic.

But early stage startups are cornered animals. There’s little upside in giving away information.

Stealth and speed

A startup has two things going for it: stealth and speed. My good friend Vivek has been hammering me with that philosophy for months now. Stealth and speed.

So sorry, Paul. No numbers.

Announcing the Best Gift Baskets of 2011

2011-11-14T00:00:00-08:00

When GiftRocket originally began the contest, we had no idea the number of nominations or votes that would actually get. We let the contest run for 3 weeks now and finally closed it out.

In terms of the numbers, we received 30+ nominations, which we narrowed down to 20 candidates across 4 categories, where 1500 votes were placed total.

General

Winner: Great Arrivals. Classy and convenient at the same time, Great Arrivals provides a plethora of upscale gift baskets for any occasion.

Runner-up: Red Envelope. One of the most popular online companies that offers more than just gift baskets.

Food

Winner: Laurel Mountain. They’ve been around since 1998 and are one of New England’s best.

Runner-up: Edible Arrangements. Edible Arrangements has a fresh fruit bouquet to make any occasion special.

Wine

Winner: Wine.com. Hand-picked wine and gourmet foods from the #1 online retailer of wine.

Runner-up: Uncorked Ventures. This boutique shop uses wooden cases for a nice premium feel to their gift baskets.

Chocolate

Winner: Chocolate.com. A name so big you’ve definitely heard of it, Chocolate.com specializes in more upscale chocolates.

Runner-up: Sweet Rexies. This retailer specializes in candy, but also has some great chocolate gift baskets.

Runner-up: Lake Champlain Chocolates. This Vermont-based retailer sends all natural chocolate gift baskets.

Keep an eye out on these online retailers’ websites for the GiftRocket Best Basket of 2011 logo as a seal of quality!

The GiftRocket team

YC Interview Stories and Advice from 8 Companies in YCW11

2011-11-08T00:00:00-08:00

Photo by Julia Mae

When we blogged about a YC application checklist, it was fairly easy to compile because a successful app is more dependent on people than the company. Moreover, the GiftRocket team had altogether reviewed many applications, so we had an understanding of what made some good and others not as good.

Interviews are different. We’ve only had / seen one. So we called in some favors from our friends in the YCW11 class and compiled the stories of 8 additional companies: Mailgun, Like.fm, Grubwithus, Earbits, LAL, Zerocater, and Tutorspree. (edit: added Tutorspree)

We asked each company five questions:

Traction: where were you at in the process when you interviewed?
Content: After you explained what your company did, what did the partners ask about?
What they liked: What did they find most impressive about you?
Hard questions: Did they ask anything that flustered you?
Advice: What advice would you give to companies going through the interview process?

The answers are mostly verbatim, with some light editing for readability.

Mailgun

Mailgun is an easy email service for developers.

Traction: “When we interviewed, Mailgun only had a few early customers. We missed bells and whistles like automated billing, and the sign-up process was not 100% automated, but we could sign up customers manually and could demonstrate that the product was making people happy.”

Content: “We were lucky enough to relate directly to previous frustrating experiences for YC partners. The first thing PB said when we entered the room was “We could have used you guys at FriendFeed”. It helped that everyone at the table was a programmer and the pain of dealing with email was something everyone could relate to. Email is a huge problem which stretches well beyond sending. Nobody disagreed with that. PB, being the father of Gmail, grilled us a bit on the specifics of email business to make sure we’re not making this up, and that was it.”

What they liked: “They did not comment much on our personas but I vividly remember PG getting super excited about the possibility of email-based RPC and giving each function in a program its own email address.”

Hard questions: “For some reason we were lucky enough to get only technical questions, i.e. they were probing for bugs. And we had “unit tests” for that: we knew the files inside out and made it very apparent right from the start.”

Advice: “Trying to prove something, it is often easier to have a single but amazing and irrefutable argument than a bunch of so-so ones. Walking into that room it helps to have a single killer answer to this one question: “why will we succeed?”. And no matter what they ask just go with it, because that’s really the answer they’re looking for regardless of the shape and form of the question on the table. Let them know we’re doing $100K/month and growing 120% week to week. Don’t hope for them to stumble upon your greatness, show it off yourself.”

“I think one of the most important things you can do to help your case is to have a working product (no matter how poor it is relative to your vision) and have evidence that people are benefitting from it. If they are paying for it, even better. Remember, the motto is make something people want. If you don’t have this, you had better be an expert at what you are building and be able to evidence this.”

Like.fm

Like.fm is a music recommendation service that works by automatically mining data on what you play.

Traction: “I had only about 10k users when I was interviewing. That’s not enough traction to justify ignoring all other factors. I think it’s a big enough number to show potential, not necessarily for the product, but that I can at least get something floating above ground.”

Content and hard questions: “I forgot what they asked me right afterwards. I think it was some stuff about why Last.fm users would switch.”

What they liked: “They seemed to like that I was going after a big thing (Last.fm and their millions of users). They did ask something that I wasn’t expecting, but I forgot what it was. Might have been why Last.fm users would switch over.”

Advice: “There are things you do that lets them know you really are committed, all-in, focused, and determined to succeed. Do those things, and make sure the partners know about those qualities before the interview is over.”

Grubwithus

Grubwithus is a site that helps you meet people over meals. They’ve talked about getting into YC on their blog, and are holding meals with founders for the upcoming batches.

Traction and content: “When we interviewed, we had just launched in one city: Chicago. They asked how we expected to get traction for a marketplace business.”

What they liked: “They were most impressed by how much hustle we had…and how we knew each other for years and had worked together on a ton of stuff.”

Hard questions: “They didn’t ask many questions that flustered us..the interview went really smoothly actually and we were pretty sure we got in after the interview.”

Advice: “Smile and be likable. YC is not just a 3 month program; the partners have to deal with you for the rest of your life, so they’re much more likely to fund people they get along with.”

Earbits

Earbits is commercial free radio for indie music. They’ve talked about getting into YC before here.

Traction: “When we applied, we had a beta site up, $110k in friends and family funding, 5 or 6 on the team, and 30-40 partners we were working with. We did not have any revenue.”

Content: “It’s all kind of a blur. They asked questions so fast that you often only got to say the first few words of the answer before you were onto something else, but that was generally a good thing because it meant they were excited and wanted to learn more. Mostly they asked why we were doing what we were doing and about how we were approaching trouble spots in our business.”

What they liked: “I believe what they found most intriguing about us was that we were approaching a very typical business with a completely new model and distribution approach. It was not some small adjustment to a typical business model - we were really revolutionizing the way a music streaming service would work and we weren’t scared of it. We knew why we wanted to do it this way, it was based on real experience, and we had a team with the perfect background to do it.”

Hard questions: “They didn’t ask anything that flustered us, but they kept asking question after question non-stop and we really wanted them to see what we had already built. They did not ask to see it; we had to make it a point to show them. So, we kept answering their questions with, “Let us show you the product.” After two or three times saying that, we finally managed to turn the focus to the demo and it was very valuable. If you have a good product or demo, make sure you show it off and don’t expect them to ask you to do so. But if you’re going to show them something, make damn sure it works.”

Advice: “Chill out, have fun with it. If you have what YC is looking for, it’s going to come out best if you go in relaxed and just engage in the interview like you’re chatting with fun people who love hearing new ideas. Be very flexible about how you think about your business. Answer their questions with your thoughts and back up firm opinions with data, but be ready to say, that’s a good idea or That may work. These guys have seen a million ideas. If you know something about your business for certain, you can tell them why, but if you don’t, you can expect that they’ll have valuable insights.”

LAL (LikeALittle)

LAL is a flirting site that has taken college campuses by storm.

Traction and content: “When we applied, we had an initial product and a good amount of traction. They asked us about the learnings we have had so far from the current product (although I don’t recall exactly).”

What they liked: “They were impressed by our team (backgrounds and history of perseverance), willingness to do groundwork to get users and user feedback, and initial traction.”

Hard questions: “They didn’t ask anything that flustered us.”

Advice: “Show that your team is 1) dedicated to doing whatever it takes to be successful. They know the number one reason startups fail is because they give up or stop trying so take that doubt out of their mind entirely. Number two is being extremely scrappy in talking to/listening to users on a consistent basis. Every week, there should be touch points with users and new insights about the product from users. Show that you doing that often.”

Zerocater

Zerocater helps companies feed their employees.

Traction and content: “When we applied, we had revenue on a very minimal product. We’d heard stories about how hard the interviews were, but we were lucky to have an easier time than others. It took us three minutes to explain the idea, and for the rest of the time, Paul was brainstorming ideas for us.”

What they liked: “We were solving a problem they’d experienced firsthand. Paul asked Jessica how she felt about organizing food for Y Combinator events. Her answer was an emphatic “I hate it!”

Hard questions: “We were generally prepared for all of the questions they asked.”

Advice: “Traction forgives all. It helped us have an easier time with the interview.”

Tutorspree

Tutorspree is an online marketplace for private tutors.

Traction: “We hadn’t launched yet, but we had managed to signup a couple hundred tutors, mostly in the NYC area. We had no paying customers at this time.”

Content: “They asked a lot about the size of our market, and how we differed compared to any existing competitors. We thought we were much better and gave them the reasons why. Tutoring is an enormous market domestically here in the US. ($7b)”

What they liked: “I (Ryan) had startup experience at SeatGeek which I think they liked - and also Josh was able to say he was the #1 diamond dealer on Amazon at the time. This was true, and they all thought it was cool and got a laugh out of it.”

Hard questions: “They asked how much customer acquisition costed us - we hadn’t experimented too much with PPC yet, so we told them we weren’t sure yet. We probably should have had an answer for this though.”

Advice: “Have a friend pretend to be PG and drill you with questions about your company. We did this and it seemed to be very helpful.”

GiftRocket

GiftRocket is an online gift card company.

Traction: When we interviewed, we had just switched to a new idea from what we wrote on our application. We had discussed it briefly with Harj in one of the video chats.

Content: They first asked us about the market and whether people would be willing to use this. We had done extensive research here and told them about our findings.

What they liked: They liked our idea a lot; they liked that we were going after something massive; they liked that we were willing to switch to an entirely new idea than what we applied with; they liked that we all wrote code and had the beginnings of a website / app within a short timeframe; they liked that we had already quit our jobs and were going to be working on this either way.

Hard questions: They asked about managing fraud and about how we’d market the product. We hadn’t thought through either. The marketing question was excusable since it was too early for us to run tests, and PG himself defended us on that point. The fraud one was less excusable and we rattled off some half-baked answer that wasn’t too impressive.”

Advice: If you’re early, know your market inside out. They asked us a few questions about market size, smartphone usage in the US, growth, and so on. We had the precise answers and communicated them with full confidence despite the fact we had come up with the idea days ago. As well, have something to show, even if its just wireframes. We had already started working on the website and an app. The graphics were extremely basic but it helped show that we were able to get stuff done.

Gift Cards and PR: The Underground Guide To Press Coverage

2011-10-26T00:00:00-07:00

Photo by Mike Bailey-Gates

When we launched in March, I spent a fair amount of time getting press coverage for GiftRocket. We haven’t been the most successful startup with PR, but we did decently for not having hired any professionals. We learned a lot over the course of that time. This article describes exactly what we did to get that PR, including the one tip for coldcalling journalists that made all the difference.

The Six Keys to Getting Press Coverage

You need a story

We built ours around three points. The vision: we believed gift cards didn’t have to work like normal store credits. The product: we emphasized that you could buy a GiftRocket to any store in the country. And the backstory: we explained how we ended up getting into YC.

If you don’t have a story, you can engineer one

Our initial story wasn’t great, but it was still passable. A better story would have boosted our success rates substantially. Here are some examples of great stories: Hipster giving away a fixed-gear and year’s supply of PBR is a great story. Swipegood giving away Start Fund money to charity is another great story. Other startups have had success with the young and talented founder angle. If none of those work, you can always start your own cereal.

You need to pitch your story to journalists

You can either get a warm intro, or cold call the journalist.

Getting a warm intro. We were introduced to people at TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, GigaOM, Lifehacker, and a bunch more by our investors and friends. A sneaky technique is to get an introduction from someone who has recently gotten coverage from that publication. They’ll have spoken to the blogger and will often just add you to a thank you note. Success isn’t guaranteed though. Our success rates were maybe 40% at best with warm intros.
Making a cold call. There’s a very specific technique to coldcalling a journalist. I swear by this technique now. Write them a brief email with very high level points, and tell them you want to get in touch. You should not expect a response from this email. Then, call their cell phone or office phone number the next day saying you are following up with your email and want to get a response. Follow-up with a brief email immediately after the voicemail. Chances are 25-35% you’ll get a response there.
Getting their contact information. Often times you can be sneaky and find it online somewhere. For smaller blogs, run a whois on their domain and use that number. For larger ones, make friends in the PR industry. I received the phone numbers for maybe 8-10 journalists from a very kind PR professional who I asked for advice.

You need to change your story for different types of blogs

Once we had exhausted tech blogs, we began to get coverage in environmental blogs by changing our pitch. We talked about the negative environmental impact of gift card plastics. This isn’t central to our thesis, but people ate it up. We maybe got 5 pieces of coverage out of this.

You need to use press to get more press

There’s a small social proof game going on in the press world. It makes it a lot easier to pitch blogs when you can say you’ve already been mentioned in other popular blogs.

Sometimes getting picked up by a specific blog will get you covered by a bigger one. Our TechCrunch mention led to more coverage. We got picked up by UrbanDaddy via the chat thing on our site. And Bloomberg Businessweek emailed us the following day as well.

You need to be determined

Many bloggers did not want to cover us. I was told by Eater National that they had no interest in covering us and that I needed to stop calling them. The GigaOM guy ignored 5-6 of my emails (granted, he covered a slightly different beat, but he didn’t accept any of my requests to introduce me to someone who did). Lifehacker never responded to my emails. But the persistence did pay off and help us get mentioned in several other publications.

Sidebar: you can be more successful than a PR professional

This comes from a conversation I had with a PR professional. Take this with a grain of salt, since my N is 1.

PR professionals do a few things really well. The first is that they’ll have a lot of the contact information for publications already, so they’ll be faster than someone who has to assemble that information. The second is that they’ll be able to help you craft a story.

But having a PR professional handle your story comes with costs as well. Journalists’ inboxes are so full of PR emails, so its a lot harder to cut through the noise. It makes a big difference if the email comes from someone with a title at the company. So your success rates are probably upped significantly. Moreover, you’re looking at $3-5k for a freelancer, and a larger monthly rate for a firm.

What lessons have you learned doing PR?

We’d love to hear about them. Let us know in the comments.

Five Startup Ideas GiftRocket Would Pay For

2011-10-19T00:00:00-07:00

Photo by Caveman Chuck Coker

We’ve had a lot of startup ideas based on the things we needed while building GiftRocket. These five came up within the last month. If you know a business that does these things, please do let us know in the comments.

1. Software that shows videos of real visitors using our website

We want to be able to visualize the way our users use our site. The end product is a screencast showing real users moving and clicking screens on our site, typing into forms, encountering validation errors, and so on. It’d be a great way to do user testing.

We could gather the data for this by doing click tracking, grabbing keyboard inputs, and watching scrolls, but we want something that would map that data into a video. We already pay for usertesting.com videos when we launch new features, so we’d probably be willing to pay for this too.

If someone executed on this well, meaning that they compiled and structured data to make decisions easier, they’d be guiding millions of dollars of spend. We’d use this company to pick accountants, payroll companies, office-space designers, lawyers, and a lot of other services we don’t want to spend time researching. I suspect a lot of local businesses would use it as well.

3. A wrapper around PayPal

A lot of our users use PayPal, and some of our product is built on top of it. However, a nontrivial amount of our users have trouble setting up accounts and moving money around.

It’d be nice to have an alternative UI that made the most common actions much more visible and easy to follow. Someone could probably put together a much friendlier front-end using APIs and ghost browsing.

For example, its frequently unclear to users whether they have confirmed their email address or not. PayPal won’t display a balance for users who haven’t, so to the user it looks like they haven’t received money. A better UI would have a large banner across the top instructing the user to perform that action. There are probably 5-10 similar UI issues that a new interface could fix.

The solution isn’t a new payment service. PayPal is big enough that people have to use it. A new UI seems possible, since there are companies using PayPal’s API creatively for businesses. What about for regular users?

We’d pay some sort of subscription to allow our users access. But we’re not really sure that this is a problem for a startup to tackle, or just feedback for PayPal.

4. An iPhone code editor with Github / Heroku integration

Often, when I’m on the go, I’ll discover a bug or something that I need to fix. Might just be a typo somewhere.

I’d want a text editor with basic git functionality built in and a way to push to remotes. An app console and a local server would be even more amazing. I don’t want to write lots of code on my phone, but I’d like to be able to pull the latest version of the codebase from Github and run a fix.

Using a virtual machine might be the best way to do it right now, but then I’d be looking at a desktop on my phone. There’s probably something much more phone friendly. Perhaps start with a way to pull and view the codebase from Github, and then add the rest incrementally.

5. Zerocater for startup swag

We’ve gotten busy enough that we forget to print t-shirts and get other cool stuff related to the startup. We’d pay for a service where we get a bunch of startup gear sent to us every couple months. We’d let them know how big our team was, provide a logo and some slogans and stories about stuff that happened, and we’d get back a bunch of cool shirts, tank tops, plush animals, stress balls, whatever.

Another problem we’ve encountered is that we’re not good at picking swag. Our last batch of shirts didn’t fit so well.

The service would probably be able to get way better prices than we could since they’d be ordering hundreds or thousands of the item (even if they were doing different designs on many of them). The gear would probably turn out better because the startup would know what works and what doesn’t. And the swag that came back would be more creative than what we’d come up with in 10 minutes. It’d be a great boost for morale.

Other ideas?

Know of companies that do these things? Have you had another idea you’d pay if existed? Let us know in the comments.

Voting Open for the Best Online Gift Basket Services 2011

2011-10-18T00:00:00-07:00

In our previous post, we announced that we were accepting nominations for the best gift baskets of 2011! We’re thrilled to have received over 35 nominations in four different categories.

The 2011 Nominees

Gift baskets have always been a thoughtful gift to send someone, particularly when you can’t make it to see them in person. The nominees we chose have accomplished a high level of service and set the bar for happy customers within the industry. GiftRocket is proud to announce the nominees for 2011:

Sweet Rexies
Lake Champlain Chocolates
Edible Arrangements
Chocolate.com
ChocolateGiftBaskets.org
Blooms and Baskets
Red Envelope
Gourmet Gift Baskets
Gift Tree
Basketfull
My Gift Basket Ideas
Laurel Mountain Basket
Wine.com
Zingermans
Golden State Fruit
Wine Country Gift Baskets
Great Arrivals
Uncorked Ventures
The Wine Country
The Wine Vine

The nominees range in size from mom-and-pop shops that sell gift baskets online on the side, to national retailers with numerous physical locations that all offer gifts. Pick your favorite and let us know who you think deserves to be called the Best Gift Basket Service.

Voting

Voting will be open for approximately 2 weeks. It will be open, and restricted to one vote per IP address. Feel free to pass along to your friends and colleagues. We’ve divided the nominees up into four categores: general, food, wine, and chocolate.

To vote, click here:

Vote!

Special thanks to our sponsors

We’d like to thank our sponsors, online gift retailer, GiftGenies, for helping us publicize the contest and announce the winners!

YC Application Checklist

2011-10-04T00:00:00-07:00

Photo by Ciro Cattuto

Now that YC applications are open and people are scrambling to put together their apps, I’ve had a bunch of founders ask me for advice on getting in.

Some Math Behind YC Applications

At current growth rates, there’s a good shot YC will fund over 80 startups in W12 (the last batches were 36, 44, and 63). PG and Harj have said that acceptance rates have stayed constant between 2% and 3%. So there could be 4000 applications this round. Assuming a partner reads each application, that works out to at least 400 applications a partner. Applications are about 2000 words. So each partner reads at least 800k words of application content, or the equivalent of 10 novels. [1]

For a given company, the partners just need to identify that there is some slight promise that makes an interview worthwhile.

The most efficient way to get through this number of applications is to create a set of heuristics that gives a quick sense of whether an applicant is worth interviewing. They’re going to be looking for the presence of any disqualifying information that might let them move on to the next application, or qualifying information that is uncommon enough to help the application stand out. [2]

PG and Harj have written about some of these heuristics in various places. I’ve compiled what I think are the major ones below.

Avoid Red Flags on your YC Application

Uncommitted founders. If determination is the biggest predictor of success, then lack of commitment from the founders is a sure-fire flag. One applicant mentioned that she was planning to return to her MBA program after YC. No bueno. The best signal founders can give is that they’ve quit their jobs, moved in together, adopted a dog, and are working on the startup regardless of YC.
Single founder. PG has said the odds of being accepted are much greater (roughly 4x) with a cofounder. So it isn’t insurmountable, but it places considerably more importance on the first founder, and his / her ability to get others on board within a short time.
Skewed equity splits, or weak founder relationships If one founder holds 90% of the equity and the other two are splitting 5%, there’s probably a strange dynamic going on between the founders. The same is true if the founders haven’t known each other for a long time.
Founders working on software who can’t code. “Chuck Norris can get funded by YC without a cofounder who can code. Others we decide on a case by case basis, but the odds are a lot better if you have a hacker cofounder.” If you are working on a tech startup, one of you should know how to code, or be actively learning.
Outsourced development. Maybe 20% of YC startups change their idea at some point during YC. It’s hard to be nimble when you need to explain your pivot to your Yugoslavian dev team.
Video that fails the airplane test, or no video. I’ve seen a video that an applicant posted online that was 2 minutes of incoherent rambling. It isn’t hard to pass this one– just look at the camera and talk like a normal person for 30 seconds.
Working on something that no one wants. Your idea doesn’t have to be amazing. But if you can’t convincingly answer who would use your product and why, that isn’t good.
Incoherent writing. PG wrote an entire essay about applying where the primary conclusion was “be concise and matter of fact”. Poor communication is a red flag because it means that it is X times more difficult to read the application. But it also indicates that the founders may not be great at communicating in general, may not be focused on the startup, or haven’t thought through the idea well enough to be able to describe it clearly to someone else.

Notice that there are a number of things that won’t be huge strikes against you. For example, ideas are hard to judge off of just a few paragraphs. Most could be promising, but its too hard to tell. The focus is really on the founders at this point.

Raise green flags!

The absence of red flags is a good sign, and when accompanied by some of these green flags makes an application a great candidate to interview.

Prove you can get shit done. A prototype, good GitHub profile, and good answer to “tell me something impressive…” help make your point. Talk about the side project you launched on HN. An MIT degree won’t hurt, but don’t expect it to guarantee you an interview either.
Work on a real problem. The world probably has enough local business discovery startups. YC cares if you’re working on a problem. Bonus points if it is one you’ve experienced yourself.
Be qualified to work on your problem. MemSQL’s founders are two guys with deep technical back-end expertise; the GrubWithUs founders used to run a pastry shop; the Earbits founders are former bandmates from LA. Those teams just make sense.
Show an acute understanding of the problem. PG has said the line that sold him on Dropbox was what competitors didn’t understand.
Have someone in YC vouch for you. A glowing recommendation from a respected YC founder will make the team pay more attention to your application than they would have otherwise. That helped AirBnB get in after the application deadline.
Be a past YC founder, or a founder / first employee with a prior exit. It helps immensely for any sort of investor to know that you’ve been through the life cycle of a startup before.
Traction trumps. A crazy looking growth curve can excuse a lot of other issues.

The distribution

There’s a fair amount of correlation in the flags. People who have had past exits will probably also write well and have a better idea of what sort of things would make good startup ideas, and have an easier time finding talented cofounders. This ends up creating a bimodal distribution of the quality of applications.

There’s some evidence of this when PG says that chances of getting an interview are either extremely high or 0. So given that distribution, and these heuristics, it is probably very easy for the partners to make decisions 95% of the time, with maybe some debate about the remainder.

So with a week left, hopefully you have a good team in place. So just focus on writing clearly and intelligently. Our first drafts were unintelligible, as were most of the other apps I’ve reviewed. But they get better with review.

Notes

[1] There’s a LOT of content in the applications. The word count on Dropbox’s YC application came in at about 2000. 400 applications is 800k words. The average novel is between 80-100k.

[2] Not too different from reading resumes and cover letters for analyst positions at I-banks and consulting firms. At my former consulting firm, I’d be given a stack of 300 and need to have them scored in a week. I had the process down to about 20-30 seconds an application. I think I could have had a computer do the process entirely using SAT score, GPA adjusted for major, and number of legit-sounding leadership positions in activities. Even university admissions aren’t that different. The academic index described in A for Admission describes the formula in detail.

Accepting Nominations: The Best Online Gift Basket Services

2011-09-13T00:00:00-07:00

Gift baskets are one of the most popular gifts throughout the year. People send thank you gift baskets full of wine and cheese, birthday gift baskets full of chocolate and gourmet foods, and custom gift baskets for special occasions. This October, people will be looking for rustic hand-woven gift baskets filled with candy corn and miniature pumpkins.

Who’s the best?

As e-commerce continues to grow, more and more people are buying gift baskets online. Hundreds of sites have popped up, from mom-and-pop florists expanding their operations online to big e-tailers who focus exclusively on selling on the internet.

So who’s the best? Who should you use? Using the power of crowdsourced opinion, the GiftRocket team is going to let you know who’s the cream of the crop. That way, when you buy, you’ll know you’re getting something amazing.

Announcing The Best Online Gift Basket Companies 2011

Step 1: Nominate your favorite gift basket companies using the link below. We’ll separate those companies into categories and contact them to let them know they’re a nominee.

Step 2: We’ll announce the public open voting event. We’ll gather a picture of the company’s best gift basket and open the polls.

Step 3: After a few weeks of open voting, we’ll announce the winners in a separate blog post. The winners get press coverage, bragging rights, and a badge from us for their homepage.

Nominations

Had a great experience with a gift basket company and want to help them get the recognition they deserve?

Nominate a company

Infographic: The Best Bacon Dishes in the USA

2011-09-06T00:00:00-07:00

Last weekend included two of our favorite holidays. Monday was Labor Day, a celebration of everything American. Saturday was National Bacon Day, a celebration of everything bacon. So the GiftRocket team figured we’d combine the two and highlight the best bacon dishes in the USA. The infographic we created will make you proud to be American and make you salivate at the same time.

Our data set uses social media ratings to find out the most popular bacon plates in ten major US cities: New York, San Francisco, Portland, Chicago, Austin, San Diego, Atlanta, Boston, Philly, and Seattle.

For example, in New York, Crif Dogs’ Bacon-wrapped Hot Dogs edged out Dessert Truck’s Pudding with Bacon Custard, Clinton St. Baking Co.’s Sugar-Cured Bacon Side, Le Bernardin’s Bacon Ice Cream, and Alta’s Bacon-wrapped Dates and Olives.

The list is perfect for figuring out your next weekend jaunt, tracking the right spots to visit when traveling to another city, or figuring out where to send a friend a GiftRocket gift card.

So on the heels of National Bacon Day and Labor Day, here’s the infographic. Scroll down if you’d like to embed it in your blog or website.

Embed in your blog:

Copy and paste the below code into your blog / website to share the infographic. Adjust the 500 in the width=”500px” code to fit the width of your blog. If you have any questions, contact us.

This content is licensed under Creative Commons. If you do share or repost, please provide an attribution link to http://www.giftrocket.com.

Does Paul Graham Get What He Asks For? [infographic]

2011-08-31T00:00:00-07:00

I first came across Paul Graham’s article, Startup Ideas We’d Like To Fund, in a Google search in mid 2010.

Though published two years earlier, I thought the article was the most thorough compilation of problem spaces for startups to tackle anywhere on the web. Before coming up with the idea for GiftRocket, we (the founders) treated it like a problem set. We’d methodically work through the list and have late night discussions about what kind of startup would be most likely to win the space PG was talking about.

Earlier this summer, I found myself explaining how nearly every idea PG outlined in the essay was being tackled by a startup today. Many of those startups were funded by YC, as recently as this S11 batch. And, YC-funded or not, many of those companies are considered to be “hot” in Silicon Valley these days. So yeah, YC has largely gotten what they’ve asked for.

I think that “Startup Ideas We’d Like To Fund” is one of the most prescient posts written in the past three years about the web 2.0 space. The infographic below maps recent YC startups and popular non-YC products / companies to the 30 categories outlined in the article. Here’s a larger version with years and comments. Please be sure to look past the image for some embed code and further notes.

Embed in your blog:

400px width version
<a href='http://www.giftrocket.com/images/blog/YC_large_900.jpg'></a>Created by <a href='http://www.giftrocket.com' style='font-size: 12px; text-decoration:none'>GiftRocket gift cards</a>

600px width version
<a href='http://www.giftrocket.com/images/blog/YC_large_900.jpg'></a>Created by <a href='http://www.giftrocket.com' style='font-size: 12px; text-decoration:none'>GiftRocket gift cards</a>

900px width version
Created by <a href='http://www.giftrocket.com' style='font-size: 12px; text-decoration:none; display:block;'>GiftRocket gift cards</a>

If you do share or repost, please provide an attribution link to http://www.giftrocket.com.

Notes:

There’s an obvious selection bias happening here. A lot of companies have tried to tackle these spaces and haven’t been successful. The ones that have been successful have been much easier to remember. Moreover, there are tons of companies (for example, GiftRocket) that YC has funded that don’t fall anywhere within the 30 listed.
Some of the companies don’t exactly fall into the space where I’ve bucketed them. For example, Disqus isn’t a news website. It is, however, related to the rise of blogging in that the company made a turnkey comments solution that ended up being used all over the blogosphere.

Greplin isn’t exactly a form of search that depends on design. But they are competing with Google, very directly at times. Conversely, while Hipmunk is a form of search that depends on design, they aren’t taking on Google so much as shitty flight search UIs (though Google is entering the space).

Perhaps my most egregious categorizations are the “buffer against bad customer service” companies. The intent of the category seemed to be finding a wrapper around particularly terrible experiences, like paying a parking ticket over the phone or booking a DMV appointment online (not great examples since they’re still somewhat terrible). But rather, I included two YC startups that are making it easy to communicate with people higher up in websites and physical stores.

Many listed companies fall into multiple buckets. For example, both Fitbit and Wakemate are companies that measure things that were formerly difficult to measure. But they are also examples of hardware / software combos.

There were several companies that matched the categories far better, but they were still off the record as of Alumni Demo Day.

You’ll notice that there are several spaces where I just didn’t fill in any companies. They were:

Enterprise Software 2.0 (#5): I’m just not familiar enough with that field to know any startups there. If you have thoughts, I’d love to hear them in the comments.

The webOS (#18): I think it is too early to say for any company, even including Google and Facebook. While there are startups pursuing this goal, right now they’re still building early versions of their product where it is too hard to tell.

A web-based Excel/database hybrid (#22): As far as I know, there isn’t anything like this out there. Google Docs does a decent job of scraping data and importing forms directly into spreadsheets, but Google Spreadsheets resembles Excel so closely that I don’t think this is what PG had in mind.

Thanks to the Crunchbase for providing easy access to company logos and founded-at dates.

Learning to Design: How I Bombed Art Class But Still Designed A Remarkable Website

2011-08-11T00:00:00-07:00

In December 2010, I was tasked with designing GiftRocket’s original website. As a former management consultant, my only design credentials were making too many powerpoint slides and getting a C in middle school art class.

So I spent a considerable amount of time learning to design things for the web. What I ended up building for GiftRocket was generally well received, and in one isolated unexplainable incident, praiseworthy. My design wasn’t the prettiest thing, but it was usable and intuitive.

But because of my lack of formal background in the topic, I also learned how to learn web design. In that now, I can break things down and explain how a new designer should approach the topic.

So, the time has come to document the process by which I learned to design, along with the resources I found most helpful. This post is really intended as an article to my former self, as an instructional on how to approach the topic. Here’s the three step process I would advise my former self to follow:

1. Determine your user flows.

When I started thinking about design, we only had a general concept for GiftRocket. We had to define how the product would work what features it would include, and how those features would translate into pages.

User flows are an imagination exercise in how users will interact with your product, put onto paper. In the process, a lot of important questions about product features come up. Here are two examples of some questions we had:

Should we have a shopping cart? Would users be purchasing for multiple people, or just for one person at a given time? If the answer was multiple people, then it’d be a pain for someone to re-enter credit card information. If the answer was a single person, we’d be creating an additional feature that no one used that would unnecessarily present an option to the user before checkout. We decided that most users would be buying one at a time (and ended up being right).

Should users redeem via native apps or a web app? Most mobile developers face this choice. We decided initially to build native apps. Below is a screenshot of the GiftRocket app:

Authentication is a problem with native apps. With web apps, you can send a user an email with a custom URL that automatically authenticates them. But with native apps, it isn’t possible to launch an app and provide it a packet of information, elegantly at least (If anyone has a good solution here, I’d love to hear it). In most situations, the user has to create an account and confirm it via email. Moreover, the user has to download the app as well.

We took the native app version of our product to Garry Tan during office hours, and he said “this is too complicated.” He was right– many users didn’t want to download an app, create an email and password, and confirm it– just to redeem their gift card. So we shifted to the web app model.

We should have invested more time here. It would have saved us engineering work and saved me from having to learn Objective C. Despite that though, there were probably 30 other small decisions we made about our product at the time. The hope is that based on this step, you have a well-defined set of flows, and a rough idea of how they translate to pages within your site.

Resources on User Flows

A Project Guide to UX- this book had some excellent information on flowcharting, but was more directed at a UX professional. Worth skimming.
12 Examples of Lazy Registration- A great overview of lazy reg. (not asking for information from a user unless it is absolutely necessary)
Rebecah Cox’s Quora Design notes- Rebekah defines how she got medieval on information hierarchy on Quora. My favorite quote is “A lot of decent features have been dropped or hidden or otherwise cut in order to pursue this goal but it’s helped ensure that only the most important information is on any given page. And with fewer elements comes fewer decisions a user has to make as they interact with the interface.”

2. Create wireframes

Now that you know the pages you have to create, and the point of each page– its time to create wireframes representing the content on the pages. The biggest challenge here is structuring the information in such a way that is logical, easy to follow, and hierarchical.

It’s important that your user be able to quickly identify what they’re looking at and where they are on your website. There should be a set of actions and accompanying text that guides them to the next step in the flow.

The first step is to remove every piece of content that doesn’t help a user progress along the flow (or at least take those pieces of information and set them to the side). Good design is reductionist. After that, the focus is laying out the information in a logical order.

Visually, follow the C.R.A.P principles (contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity) to arrange the remaining information. And don’t be afraid of whitespace. Look to other sites for inspiration.

Here’s an example of a page I wireframed in Balsamiq:

There’s a lot of good stuff happening in this wireframe. The header is big, and there’s a progress tracker that leaves the user clearly grounded in the purchase process.

However, the problem with this wireframe is that it isn’t specific enough. It isn’t a blueprint– its a vague definition of what the page should look like. Where do the labels on the text fields go? What are they? How is the stuff on the right, which seems like ancillary information about the gift, being separated from the form on the left? What does the footer look like? In retrospect, I would have invested more time into this phase.

Resources on layout and wireframing:

Don’t Make Me Think- This is a seminal work that defined much of our creation of user flows and wireframes. This is a must read for anyone learning design.
The Non-Designer’s Design Book- this book laid out the four principles of design (contrast, repetition, alignment, proximity) that helped us create a clean look for our site.
Whitespace Is Not Your Enemy- Helped me shake the habit of filling space with stuff. The title is now a favorite battle cry.
Redesigning Mailchimp- A great read on how MailChimp enforced hierarchy and consistency within their site by creating a set of rules and restrictions for the way that their site would appear.
Subtraction- Khoi Vinh’s Blog- The design itself is beautiful, but it is a sheer joy to watch him decompose it and show how he uses a grid system to maintain alignment and consistency with spacing.

3. Create mockups

If the wireframes serve as the blueprints for the actual site, the mockups are the interpretation of those blueprints. They should either be a real site, or be sufficiently detailed that you could open the images in a browser and get a sense for how the site would look.

I designed the site in Gimp & Inkscape (free relatives of Photoshop and Illustrator), but more talented front-end engineers can probably build directly in HTML / CSS.

There are probably three things to focus on:

Colors and feel. For the first time, you’ll be touching color. Focus on using a color palette that reflects your product. There are lots of resources online that helped us do this. Do things that are different contrast properly? Is the eye still being guided the way you’d like it to?
Usability. Do buttons look like things to click? Do things feel responsive and intuitive? Does everything feel legible?
Overall polish. Do things look pretty? This starts being far more subjective, but I’m still convinced that there’s a strategy here.

This was the mockup I created from the gift page wireframe.

I’ve found that this portion takes the most artistic talent and experience. You can get to the previous stage having only browsed the web a lot.

But if you’re new to this sort of thing– I suggest taking UI elements from other sites. Much like a new guitarist starts piecing together a song from licks he’s heard elsewhere. I fell into this category, and drew from a variety of influences:

Resources on creating mockups:

The Pantone Guide to Communicating with Color- the most important page is 63, which covers the different vibes that colors have.
Kuler- a great resource that helps you create and look at color swatches
The Smashing Book- excellent for learning a lot of the web 2.0 styles that pervade web design these days.
Design for Hackers- I’ve been impressed with David Kadavy’s blog posts, and have high expectations for his forthcoming book.

4. Iterate

Your first design won’t be right. Design isn’t too different than writing or coding. I generally agree with Paul Graham’s advice that it is best to bang out a quick first version, get feedback, and revise. I probably created a new design of the site every couple days for a few months, often showing off the latest mockups at YC dinners. The biggest change I’d make is investing in the user flows and wireframes more– it would have saved a lot of iteration on the mockups.

What design advice would you now give a younger version of yourself?

Six Key Lessons from a Design Legend (a before-and-after)

2011-08-07T00:00:00-07:00

When we first built GiftRocket 1.0, our team was absent designers. As the only one without a CS degree, I ended up spending a few weeks reading design books and mocking up the site before our March launch.

Eventually we recruited a professional designer named Mike Kus to help us out. We liked his emphasis on large text, illustration, and simplicity. He redesigned our site and we released the results last week.

I did a quick comparison of the before and after, and wanted to point out some things any developer can do to improve the feel of their site. Note that this isn’t so much about usability as it is about aesthetics and emotional design. Here are the tips:

1. Figure out your color palette.

We were extremely conservative when we started, So we made the site… blue and gray. I knew nothing about color theory and was reading the Pantone Guide at the time. The book called gray “classic, cool, sober, corporate” and our blue “calm, pleasing”. And as a result, the site felt exactly like that- sober and corporate.

Mike, experienced and unhesitant, presented the cream, gold, and black palette we currently use. Cream, a color Pantone defines as “smooth, rich, and warm”, became the new base of the site. Gold (“warm, opulent, expensive, radiant”) and black (“powerful, elegant”) were used as highlights to give the product a premium feel. Mesh that with Mike’s colorful illustrations and we hit the jackpot.

2. When it comes to contrast: go big or go home!

We suffered from two contrast issues. Firstly– the site just didn’t have any. The footer was just some links at the bottom of the page, separated by a horizontal rule. Our mobile site also lacked contrast.

Mike approached the app as a cousin to the website, using the same branding but inverting colors and layout. By using the black as the background, everything else became more vibrant.

3. Use large pictures.

Our business icons started out tiny at 60px by 60px. After Mike got through with them they were nearly 3x larger at 100px by 100px.

Moreover, in certain places he put a padded border around images, which made them appear even larger. The pie here really pops out. It looks delicious.

The impact was that the pictures of businesses stood out far more. Pictures convert (see AirBnB, Sosh, Earbits, and MunchOnMe). If you have the opportunity, enlarge what you’ve got and let the visuals speak for themselves.

4. Pay attention to typography.

We originally used Helvetica Neue for everything. We had no basis for the decision other than MailChimp did it, and we liked MailChimp (their influence on our design can be seen in our massive headers).

Typography affects the feel of a site, just like color. If Pantone had written something about Helvetica, the description would probably have been the same as their description of the color blue. Authoritative. Clean. Corporate.

Mike introduced a much more interesting set of fonts. Big, black rounded fonts for the headers, and Museo Sans for the text. The rounded headers added a fun vibe to the site, and the Museo Sans added just a touch of elegance.

Mike also applied text-shadows to nearly everything. As a result, the text felt more vibrant; if dark text received a light shadow, it looked embossed onto the page. If light text received a dark shadow, it protruded from the site.

This isn’t to say that you need to go willy-nilly with fonts on your site. Helvetica is a great typeface. But there are thousands of choices. Consider using something else, even if just for your headers.

5. Be bold with textures.

Distortion effects in Photoshop and Gimp go a long way. Mike made the cream background look like it was sandblasted with gold, creating a glittery feel that felt much more like a hallmark card. Moreover, anything that looked like it should be a scrip of paper– like the actual GiftRocket card– Mike made look like paper. Our gift form, formerly just a white background with some shadow, now felt like an actual certificate of some sort.

While I think clean, metallic backgrounds and menus are still in style (e.g. Apple), I suspect these textured backgrounds are becoming more popular (see Square’s old site and Frank Chimero’s work).

6. Repeat branding pieces for consistency.

Mike created a few branding bits– the swirly braces and the gold star. They’re displayed below, without comparison since we really had no branding bits on our first go-around.

Mike applied them everywhere on the site. They’re on forms. They’re in our app. They’re in our terms of service, which now has stars for bullets. Even the fake currency on the how it works has them. Take a look around the site and see how many you can count. To me, this observation was like noticing the FedEx arrow. I can never unsee it, ever.

It would be naive to assume that these six things alone are the reasons our site now feels better. But had we applied these tips to our own website earlier on, I think we would have had a more visually pleasing product.

Like what you read? Follow @giftrocket on Twitter.

Don't Burn Bridges: A 4-Step Guide to Networking in Silicon Valley

2011-08-02T00:00:00-07:00

Don't burn bridges! Photo by web@kstp.com

Networking in Silicon Valley should be the easiest thing in the world. The Valley thrives on a free exchange of new ideas, so people always want to meet other people who might have interesting ideas or connections. As a result, people I hardly know introduce me to people they hardly know. Sometimes I get cold-emailed.

On general principle, and since the numbers aren’t currently overwhelming, I’ll take any introduction that comes my way. Most of the time, I’ll go out of my way to help those people out. Most founders, YCombinator or not, would do the same.

However, about half of people I’m introduced to do something that makes me not want to help them out. I’ve been through enough of these intro cycles now that I’ve started to discern four distinct patterns. Here’s what they are, and how to avoid them:

1. Flaking on meetings

Last week, a kind-of acquaintance asked me for some advice on his fledgling startup, and wanted to see if I’d meet with him to discuss. I offered to have lunch with him the following week. That was the last I heard from him.

Radio-silence isn’t the worst thing in the world. I’ll still take the meeting in a couple weeks if the founder does end up getting back in touch. But I’ll be far less likely to help that person, since he’s going to have to really impress me to make up for my current impression that he’s a flake.

2. Forgetting to do follow-ups

One of my VC friends introduced me to a startup that he believed had a lot of potential. I took a 45 minute call with their main guy, who seemed full of energy and excited to get things done. I told him that they should apply to YCombinator, and offered to mention their application specifically to a partner to make sure it got a close look, under the condition that I could review it first. This is the type of thing I would have killed for before I was in YC.

Unfortunately, that founder never sent me his application.

A better networker would have sent me a draft the next day. Or even politely sent an email later that night that said “We decided not to apply. Thanks again for the feedback”. But I won’t ever recommend this founder for YC again.

3. Being transactional

Earlier this year I was introduced to another founder working on a music startup. Their team needed help with their YC application, so I spent 2-3 hours helping them revise and improve it. After I sent them a last piece of feedback about their video, I never heard back from them again.

When I invest time in others, I like to hear how things go. In this case, I felt used. I have little interest in helping this founder out again. For us, we made sure that upon launch we sent out GiftRockets to people who helped us out.

4. Not writing thank you notes

One startup founder cold-emailed me after our site launched, and asked me a couple questions. After I responded, he sent me a thank you email for my time. I later took an hour-long call with him to give startup advice. I’d be happy to introduce him to anyone I know. And I’ve never even met the guy.

I’m never peeved if someone doesn’t write a thank you note, but I’m consistently impressed when someone does. Thank you notes after meetings are rare. At GiftRocket, we took a page out of the Wufoo book and started giving t-shirts to the people who helped us out. It’s great for our brand, and it lets people know that we really appreciated their time.

Everyone in the Valley is busy, and I’m sure I’ve violated my own rules several times. But by just being a little bit thoughtful about your interactions with the people you meet in the startup scene, you can easily avoid burning what might be some very important bridges.

Announcing the GiftRocket redesign

2011-08-01T00:00:00-07:00

Giving a gift should feel great.

That was the basic direction we gave our designer, Mike Kus. Mike is a versatile and brilliant designer based in the United Kingdom. He took our general direction and, along with our existing content and flows, created the new GiftRocket site.

Some of Mike’s best work came out in the mobile app. The end product was something we all thought was visually stunning.

At some point in the future, we’ll document the entire experience of redesigning our site. But for now, kick the tires and let us know what you think.

The GiftRocket Team

GIVEAWAY: Guess When the iPhone 5 is Announced, Win $200 to the Apple Store

2011-07-28T00:00:00-07:00

Photo by Rob DiCaterino

The iPhone 5’s announcement is probably the most talked about tech event of the year. Speculation about when and what the iPhone 5 release will bring reached a fever pitch after Apple broke their historical release pattern by not releasing a new phone in June.

The questions stream in: will it have NFC? Support 4G? Be available on networks other than AT&T/Verizon? Have a larger screen? Do away with the home button? Have a design modeled off of the Macbook Air? Most people seem to think the iPhone 5 will be announced and presented between the last week of August and the middle of September, though there is of course no word from the always-secretive team at Apple.

Announcing the GiftRocket iPhone Release Contest

GiftRocket will be reaching out to some of our favorite tech bloggers to gather their predictions. What do you think the actual release date for the iPhone 5 (or 4S, if Apple calls it that) will be?

To participate:

Pick a specific date for the public release event when Apple announces the phone.
Post your prediction on your own blog with a link back to this post so we can track who has entered.
Email me at pooneet@giftrocket.com to get on the list (we are capping it so each participant has a reasonable chance of winning).

When the release date is announced, the blogger with the closest guess will win $200 to the Apple Store! (In the event of a tie, the winner will be randomly selected from the correct guesses).

Questions? Drop me a line at pooneet@giftrocket.com.

Top Six Gift Ideas for Matthew Berry Fans

2011-07-13T00:00:00-07:00

Matthew Berry, aka the Talented Mr. Roto, is perhaps the best known expert in the fantasy baseball universe. From his humble beginnings as a production assistant on The George Carlin Show, Berry is now the Director of Fantasy Sports for ESPN – which might just be the most amazing job title, ever. In addition to being a major source of inspiration for my own (currently in second place) ESPN fantasy baseball team, he and Nate Ravitz provide an entertaining wealth of information every weekday on their fantasy baseball podcast. From Pod Vader to Anne Hathaway, Matthew Berry inspires a host of gift ideas – and here we give you the best ones.

Photo by Pasukaru78

1. Your very own Pod Vader

Pod Vader produces Matthew’s fantasy baseball podcast for ESPN, and serves as Berry’s chief tormentor on the show. From playing a mean “comedy goalie” to missing cues for drops and generally giving Matthew a hard time, Pod Vader definitely lives up to his ominous sounding name. With this “pod” Vader plush toy, you can have your very own Pod Vader on your desk to throw around as much as you’d like.

2. The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract

Bill James is widely considered the father of sabermetrics. In fact, he coined the term, defining it as “the search for objective knowledge about baseball.” Just in time for this fall’s release of the Moneyball movie, starring Brad Pitt as Oakland A’s manager (and Bill James disciple) Billy Beane, this book is the perfect gift for any fantasy baseball fan. Especially for a fan languishing in 12th place in their mixed-team league with nothing to do but begin prepping for next season (I know, Berry says to never give up…but the last place team in our league has only 78 HR and 368 RBI – what is he supposed to do?).

3. Erik Bedard, Edwin Encarnacion, and Dan Uggla Jerseys

Matthew Berry’s willingness to own up to his bad calls is wrong is unique among prognosticators. This year his three biggest flops have probably been Bedard, Encarnacion, and Uggla. Berry predicted Bedard would get 15 wins and 175 strikeouts; at the all-star break, he has 4 wins and 85 K’s. Given that he’s been on the DL since the end of June and won’t be ready to come off until at least one start after the break, he’s not going to come close. Worse is Encarnacion, whom Berry predicted would hit 30 dingers at the start of the season – he has 6 at the break. But even that doesn’t compare to the absolute terror that Dan Uggla has been for fantasy owners – Berry predicted a .300 average with forty home runs, and Uggla has 15 home runs with a .185 average at the break. Show your support for Berry’s picks with some authentic game jerseys!

4. Tickets to a Pittsburg Pirates game

Berry’s love of the Pirates has stayed consistent from the start of the season – and unlike Bedard, Encarnacion, or Uggla, they’ve actually lived up to his predictions with a 47-43 record at the break (just 1 game out of the first place tie in the NL central). If you or your friend live near an NL-park (or in Pittsburg itself), give the gift of seeing this underdog team in person!

This extra-lovely photo by Blair Waldorf

5. Anne Hathaway Boxed Set

Berry’s infatuation with Anne Hathaway knows no bounds – in his preseason article, he even ranked her ahead of Megan Fox (that would have been like ranking Kemp ahead of Pujols! Oh wait – that would have worked out just fine…). Start your custom boxed set at the beginning, with Princess Diaries. From there, move on to Brokeback Mountain, The Devil Wears Prada, Get Smart, Bride Wars, and finally Alice in Wonderland – quite the spectrum.

6. ESPN insider and rotowire.com subscriptions

If you want to give someone the ability to take their fantasy game to the next level, give them subscriptions to ESPN insider and rotowire.com. Insider will give you full access to Berry, Ravitz, KaraBell (ding!) and the rest of the ESPN team. Rotowire.com will provide you with the fastest and most in-depth player news out there so you can stay one step ahead of the competition (this is why I picked up Bonifacio before Berry talked about him as a replacement for the injured A-Rod on the podcast).

The Top 5 Comicon Gifts (hint: #3 is buying Nathan Fillion 900,000 Twitter followers)

2011-07-08T00:00:00-07:00

Photo courtesy of RavenU

Comicon, cherished as the world’s biggest celebration of all that is nerd, is finally here. Even though it has lost its underground street cred with references in Entourage and Kevin Smith flicks, it’s still going to be frickin’ awesome. So you know someone who is going. We do too, and we like gifts. Here are the top 5 gifts for the Comicon goer:

5. A Stormtrooper Costume

There’s going to be at least 1 awesome costume party this year. Get him something better than a regular stormtrooper costume: this one goes for $670 online and ought to make them stand out.

Photo courtesy of RanH

4. A Viking Quest Poster.

A show within a show, where the actor plays an actor running a booth at a Comicon. It’s so meta…

3. Buy Nathan Fillion 900,000 followers on their behalf

You loved him in Firefly. Serenity wasn’t selling out- it was better. And the man produced a video about that swampiness down under. He’s now on a quest for 900,000 twitter followers by the start of Comicon. Go to an agency and buy him what he needs on behalf of your man. Why? No reason.

Photo courtesy of kevindooley

2. Crowd control equipment.

It’s going to get hot in San Diego, especially in a convention center where one half of attendees are dressed in heavy costumes, and the other half keep swarming around them. Consider some practical tools, like this hat, and this water bottle. Stay cool.

1. A reservation on their behalf at a decent restaurant in San Diego.

The lines are going to be unbelievably long at any good restaurant at San Diego. Your hombre will be stuck eating outside of the Marisco’s German truck and he won’t be happy about it. We suggest a reservation to Sally’s or Blue Point.

Restaurant Gift Card Market Bigger Than NASA Space Exploration Budget

2011-07-07T00:00:00-07:00

Photo courtesy of Paul Williams

The restaurant gift card market is probably bigger than $5B dollars a year. According to the National Restaurant Association, 2011 total restaurant spending is forecast to total $604 billion, roughly 6% of aggregate U.S. consumer spending. We conservatively estimate, using this proportion, that the size of the restaurant gift card industry is at or over $4.8 billion per year.

What $5B means

Looking at this data from the restaurant owner’s perspective is even more striking. According to the NPD Group, there were approximately 580,000 restaurants in the U.S. at the start of 2011. The $4.8 billion estimated restaurant gift card industry works out to $8,275 in average gift card income every year at the nation’s restaurants. Compare that to NASA’s $3.7B Space Exploration budget. While restaurant gift card spending is not likely to be evenly distributed across all restaurants, it is a safe assumption that gift card programs play an important role at most of them.

Anecdotally, a longtime restaurant industry insider recently relayed to me the story of his first job in the business, for a small Italian restaurant in Maine. He said that the gift cards the restaurant sold during the Christmas holidays generated enough cash flow to get the restaurant through the tough winter months. At the other end of the spectrum, the nation’s top restaurants sell hundreds of thousands of dollars of gift cards each year.

The pros and cons of gift card programs

There are lots of reasons to have gift cards. It is almost inexcusable as a restaurant owner to not have one.

Revenue. Since the gift cards are all pre-paid, the restaurants get immediate revenue.
Breakage. Not all gift cards are completely or even partially redeemed – estimates of the amount of gift card “breakage” are around 25%, so restaurants pocket roughly 25% of the value of each gift card without having to give anything of value in return.
New customers. Gift cards drive customer traffic to specific restaurants – potentially leading to new customer acquisition.

But gift card programs have costs too.

Significant staff investment. It takes time and effort to create, process, sell gift cards, not to mention maintaining proper redemption records.
Logistical drawbacks For smaller restaurants, customers often just won’t buy if it isn’t convenient for them to do so online. Look at this disaster of a gift certificate form at Gary Danko San Francisco.

The future

The way that customers interact with restaurants and other businesses is changing dramatically. More customers want to interact with businesses by “checking in” when they are there using services like foursquare and Facebook Places – foursquare grew by 3,400% in 2010, as users checked in over 381 million times.

These customers also want to share their restaurant experiences by posting on their Facebook walls or tweeting. Restaurants have generally been slow to respond in kind to this new demand from their customers, as few restaurants put significant effort into interacting with their customers through social media such as Facebook and Twitter. The gift certificate has remained simple and unchanged, but will it stay so for much longer?

Notes

We published a version of this article in Restaurants & Institutions Magazine. Below are some notes on market sizing:

Total dollar value of gift cards given out in the U.S. every year: $80 billion
Total dollar amount spent at restaurants in the U.S. every year: $604 billion (according to the National Restaurant Association)
2010 U.S. aggregate GDP: $14.7 trillion
Consumer spending’s proportion of aggregate GDP (remember C + I + G + Xn?): 70%
2010 U.S. consumer spending: 70% of $14.7 trillion, or $10 trillion
Percentage of consumer spending that is on restaurants: $604 billion / $10 trillion = 6%
Applying the same percentage to the total dollar value of gift cards given out, we get our estimate for the restaurant gift card market: 6% of $80 billion = $4.8 billion. Note: the $80B is a conservative estimate of current gift card spend.
This number is probably a conservative estimate, as housing is a third of consumer spending.

Baseball Stadium Food

2011-06-23T00:00:00-07:00

Photo courtesy of Bakers love

Summer officially began this week. In addition to the long days, great weather, beach outings, and barbeques, baseball games are a quintessential part of the American summer experience. Every one of major league baseball’s 30 stadiums offers a unique experience that reflects the cities and the teams the stadiums represent. Here are our top 8.

1. Fenway Park

Fenway Park is the oldest professional baseball stadium still in use today. Home to the Red Sox since 1912, a trip to Fenway is a crucial baseball experience for any fan, even if you root for Sox’s arch rival New York Yankees. The focal food here is of course the Fenway Frank, the all-beef hot dog made famous by the Park.

2. Yankee Stadium

Heading South from Boston, the next stadium on our list is home to the New York Yankees, arguably the most famous franchise in all of professional sports. The current Yankee Stadium, also referred to as “new” Yankee Stadium, replaced the original 1923 Yankee Stadium in 2009. One of the big changes at the new stadium is a distinct improvement in the dining options, including the Lobel’s prime beef sandwich. For $15, you can experience the delicious combination of hand-carved prime rib, beef jus, and some horseradish sauce on a soft bun.

3. Citizens Bank Park

The Philadelphia Phillies are the oldest same name, same location team in American professional sports, but they have only played in their current ballpark since 2004. Seeing as this is Philadelphia, the featured food at Citizens Bank is the namesake Philadelphia Cheesesteak. Although the debate rages on, consensus seems to favor Campo’s (formerly Rick’s) as the best place to grab a tasty steak (with whiz, of course!) in between innings.

4. Camden Yards

Camden Yards, home to the Baltimore Orioles, opened in 1992. The stadium is home to one of the most famous occurrences in baseball, when Cal Ripken, Jr. played his 2,131st consecutive game, breaking Lou Gehrig’s seemingly untouchable 2,130 mark. Camden Yards is also home to some great barbeque, courtesy of Boog Powell, former Orioles 1st baseman and 4-time all-star. Go to Boog’s and score a hearty plate of barbeque pork!

5. Wrigley Field

Wrigley is the second oldest ballpark, losing out to Fenway by just four years for that title (it was built in 1916). Wrigley is a park that oozes tradition, from the ivy-covered wall to the hand-turned scoreboard to the required trip through the bars of Wrigleyville before each game. Make sure you experience another piece of Wrigley tradition– a Chicago-style Vienna beef hot dog.

6. Busch Stadium

Home to the St. Louis Cardinals, Busch Stadium opened in 2006. That year was also only the second time a team won the World Series in its first year in a new stadium. It is fair to refer to Busch Stadium as the “House that Albert” built, but with no contract in place after this year, it is anyone’s guess whether Pujols will be around to lead the team in the years to come. Take your mind off of Pujol’s impending contract decision with one of Busch Stadium’s trademark foods, a bacon-wrapped barbeque hot dog.

7. Coors Field

Coors Field, home to the Colorado Rockies, is located in Denver, Colorado. Coors Field was formerly called “Mile High Stadium” because it is over 5,000 feet above sea level (the exact mile mark is in the 20th row of the upper deck). Because the lower air pressure at this altitude lets hit baseballs travel further, Coors Field has long been known as a very home-run friendly park. In addition to being the highest park, Coors Field is also home to perhaps the strangest specialty food item– rocky mountain oysters, or fried bull testicles, located in section 144– a can’t miss.

8. AT&T Park

Our last featured stadium is home to the reigning World Series Champion San Francisco Giants. AT&T Park has been open since 2000, and due to an overly active telecom merger environment has changed name three times since then– from the original Pacific Bell Park to SBC Park and then finally to AT&T Park. Regardless of the name, the unmistakable scent of garlic has long wafted over the park, courtesy of the famous Gilroy’s garlic fries.

Do you have a friend, son, father, significant other, or coworker lucky enough to score some tickets to a game? Make sure they have a great time by sending them a GiftRocket to the ballpark– the only way to send a gift card to a sporting event! Tell them to spend that money on iconic food items at some of the country’s best baseball venues.

Give the gift of a Napa Valley wine tasting

2011-06-15T00:00:00-07:00

Photo courtesy of Sullivan Wine

“Wine is sure proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy” -Benjamin Franklin

Out of all of the trips I’ve been on, none has satisfied as consistently and completely as going wine tasting in California’s Napa Valley. There is something magical about tasting wine in the same place where the grapes were grown, harvested, and fermented into the good stuff. Since I’ve been there a few times, friends and family often turn to me for suggestions on where to go. Below is a perfect itinerary for a great Napa wine tasting day trip. I only included 3 actual vineyards so you don’t have to worry about finding a designated driver and you can have a relaxed experience at each one. Vineyards don’t generally offer gift cards, so use GiftRocket to give a gift to any of these great experiences!

11:00am: Sullivan Vineyards

Start your trip by driving up route 29, past Napa, Yountville, and Oakville until you reach Sullivan Vineyards, located on Galleron Road in Rutherford. The Rutherford appellation is excellent for growing hearty cabernet sauvignon grapes, and Sullivan Vineyards bears this out. Sullivan has one of the most intimate, calm, and friendly tasting experiences of any vineyard I’ve been to. Make an appointment and allow yourself at least an hour and a half. If it is nice out, they will do tastings in a beautiful courtyard between the tasting room / barrel warehouse and the family’s house. The owner’s dog, Apollo, usually greets guests at their cars and is a great tasting companion.

Sullivan Vineyards is a small, family-run vineyard that focuses on deep red wines (their phone number is 1-877-BIG-REDS); they produce about 4,200 cases per year from 26 acres. They make a “casual cabernet” that is a blend of 75% cabernet sauvignon and 25% merlot, a full bodied and spicy merlot, a big, mouth-filling cab, and a Bordeaux-style blend of cabernet, merlot, cabernet franc, and petit verdot. All are excellent. The tastings are seated and relaxed– definitely no attempts to rush you through or anything and no “hard-sell” tactics at the end of the tasting. These are people that know and love their wines– a great start to your wine tasting trip.

12:30pm: Lunch at La Luna or Gott’s

By this time you will probably want some lunch. There are two great options that are within a 10 minute drive of Sullivan Vineyards– La Luna taqueria and Gott’s Roadside. La Luna is located on Rutherford Road – from Sullivan head south on route 29 and take a left onto Rutherford Road (the Rutherford Grill will be on your left). La Luna is just down the street on the right. Order a burrito or taco (carnitas is their specialty) from the friendly crew at the back, grab some fluids to stay hydrated, and eat your lunch on one of the tables behind the restaurant that overlook a vineyard. This is a locals place – you won’t see many tourists at La Luna (their loss).

The scene is very different at Gott’s, where the line can easily reach 30 people on busy Saturday afternoons. Located about 5 minutes north on route 29 from Sullivan, Gott’s is an updated version of the great American roadside diner. Burgers and shakes are what they’re known for, and both are excellent.

2:00pm: Hopper Creek Vineyard and Winery

After polishing off your burger or burrito, head down south on 29 back toward Yountville to Hopper Creek. Hopper Creek is even smaller than Sullivan, at just 2,500 cases of annual production. They split this between 5 varietals– chardonnay, merlot, cabernet sauvignon, zinfandel, and syrah. I love zinfandel and syrah, and Hopper Creek has full-bodied, deliciously spicy versions of each.

The tasting room is small, and since the space doubles as their barrel warehouse, you’ll get to enjoy the tantalizing vapors of oak and evaporating wine as you taste. The tasting room staff is extremely down to earth and friendly, and usually offers healthy pours. Because it is such a small place, appointments are necessary, but don’t let that prevent you from stopping by!

3:30pm: Elkhorn Peak Vineyard and Winery

“The last stop of the day is a similarly small-production spot at 2,500 cases per year. Elkhorn Peak is located a bit off the beaten path up a steep hill in the Carneros region. Because of the cooler climate relative to the rest of the Valley, delicate grapes such as pinot noir flourish in Carneros. Elkhorn Peak makes excellent pinot noir and chardonnay from these grapes.

You will certainly need an appointment to taste here, as owner/grower Ken Nerlove does the tastings himself. If you don’t call ahead, he is likely to be out in the fields when you come by! Ken is a great teacher and taster, and if you ask nicely he may walk you through the fields, show you some of the gadgets that winemakers use to decide when to pick grapes, and give you some wine grapes to try fresh off the vine. From there, you’ll get to taste his excellent wines in a beautiful tasting room.

At this point it will probably be after 4:30pm so it is time to head home! Stop at a great restaurant in Yountville, Bottega, Ad Hoc, or if you’re really lucky, the French Laundry. Or drop by the Fremont Diner on the Carneros Highway between Napa and Sonoma– a roadside diner with excellent burgers, pulled pork, and spicy fried chicken that you can eat outside while gazing at the gorgeous rolling hills of Carneros. From there head home and start planning your next trip to the Valley!

A Top 5 List for Father's Day Gifts

2011-06-06T00:00:00-07:00

I’ve never been unprepared for Mother’s Day, but Father’s Day seems to creep up on me every year. The Onion got it right with this one.

But for a father, this sneaky June holiday is a perfect excuse to celebrate being the man of the house. My dad treats it as the one day he has total immunity to do what he wants. For the past couple of years, I have taken the approach of egging him on and choosing a gift that makes sure he’ll have one of the best days of his life. Here are some of my best ideas from the past few years - pick one up for your Dad by June 19!

An afternoon at the cigar shop

Photo by Elliot P

My mother always looked disapprovingly at my dad when he lit up a cigar on a special occasion. He claimed that it was “only for the taste” and that he never inhaled, but she was unappeased. That was enough to get him to stop for the most part - but if there is ever a day when it would be appropriate to unwrap a nice robusto, Churchill, or presidente, Father’s Day is it. This year, pick him up some delicious cigars from your favorite Latin American country at a fine tobacconist, such as Grant’s in downtown San Francisco.

The James Bond DVD Collection

Photo by ralphhogaboom

I grew up watching Diamonds Are Forever and Goldfinger on TBS. My little sister and I didn’t believe in the bogeyman, but we believed in Jaws - in my opinion one of the best Bond villains, aptly played by Richard Kiel. My father told us that Jaws would take us away if we were bad kids (part of me still believes him). Anyway, my dad continues to get pissed off when TBS swaps out Sean Connery for their Love Actually marathons. Make sure he never has to settle for Hugh Grant’s awkward grin instead of Connery’s brilliantly self-assured Bond with this classic collection. I got him this gift a few years ago, and it has been one of his favorites.

A trip to the track

Photo by OrangeAcid

The interesting thing is that it doesn’t really matter what kind of track. A dog-racing track is good. Horse-racing track– better. A high-school-track track… if your dad is the gambling type, I’m sure he’ll make do. Bonus points if you can somehow turn it into a business meeting. The Golden Gate Fields are a fine example, and a short day-trip away from San Francisco.

Wine tasting / Beer tasting

Fathers love to see the places where their adult beverages of choice are bottled. This tradition goes back to conquistador Ponce de Leon’s search for the Fountain of Youth, a supposed brewery of sorts with the ultimate bottling - the elixir of eternal youth. Case in point: when my father came to visit me in San Francisco and I brought up the remote possibility of a trip out to Napa to see where his favorite wine was bottled, he jumped at the opportunity. From there the primary purpose of the trip changed from a college visit for my sister to a 50 mile trip through California’s beautiful wine country. This Father’s Day, buy Dad a tasting at a vineyard or a brewery tour at his favorite brew producer.

Grilling meats and equipment

Summer is here and that means grill season is on. Steaks. Lamb. Venison. Ribs. Hickory wood. A grill so hot that you can only run it on low heat. Smoke pouring out making all of the neighbors jealous. 7-year-old girls get ponies. 60-year-old dads should get lamb shoulder and some dry rub. Omaha steaks

First post

2011-05-25T00:00:00-07:00

Welcome to our blog! In this space we plan to feature gift ideas, talk about trends in gift giving, and explore ways to make gift giving easier for the sender and more enjoyable for the recipient. For example, in the next few days we will be posting about some great Father’s Day gift ideas. If you have any ideas or requests for stuff you’d like to see on this blog, feel free to email us at blog@giftrocket.com.

We’re making gift cards better

Gifts should be fun. People shouldn’t have to sell or trade gift cards, or worry about spending exactly the right amount. At GiftRocket, we created a gift card we’d actually want to receive, that works for any business. All the recipient does is check in at the location and then gets a PayPal credit for the full gift amount. For more information, check out how it works.

Thanks for stopping by!