GiftyDuck

With a bunch of tweaks based on what we learned with our MVP soft launch, we started actively promoting the service outside of our family and friends circle.

We tried launching a Google Ads campaign, and quickly realised that we have no idea how to market a product.

I had spent my whole professional career thinking that marketing was something I needed someone else to handle because I didn't have the right brain for it, so I'd never spent the time trying to learn it. I'd also never truly realised the value of marketing, and its importance much earlier in a product life cycle - ideally at the ideation phase when trying to determine whether there even is a market for a product.

I decided that day that I would become a developer that does marketing. I've already learned so much this year about building a product, including a lot about how not to do things, but now that I have the motivation that I need to learn this new skill, I'm excited to see where this takes me, and hopefully GiftyDuck.

With the naming issue behind us, we launched our MVP to family and friends, with the hope that people would add their family and friends using our email-based invite system and the service would spread viraly.

However, aside from a few loyal friends and family acting as ambassadors, hardly anyone was inviting other people things ground to halt at around 40 users. For GiftyDuck to stand a chance at being sustainable, we needed a LOT more users.

We realised that for most people, it didn't solve a problem that was at the front of their mind at the time they were exposed to it, so they didn't invest much time in setting it all up.

We also realised that a lot of people didn't know the email addresses of their loved ones! And that the our invite emails looked a bit spammy.

We added a "personal message" field to our email invites to make people feel more comfortable sharing invites, and more comfortable accepting them. We also added "invite links" that people could share via whatever means they liked and where they control the narrative completely.

We also started working on some onboarding email automation in the days after a user signs up, that helps guide them based on what activities they had and hadn't taken in the app so far.

The original name for GiftyDuck was Wisha. It fit our service perfectly, not only because of how it tied in with our wish list features, but also because it's an Irish word for "surprise". We had applied for the trademark in several countries and things were looking good.

That was until one day, when woke up to a letter from legal firm on behalf of a very large company who did not appreciate the similarity of our name, and claimed that people might confuse our brand with theirs. While they didn't have trademarks in our primary country, they had already applied for one, and also claimed they had a reputation and good will.

Without mentioning them by name, suffice it to say that the only reputation I was aware of was extremely negative. The similarity of our names was completely unintentional as I would never want our product to be confused with theirs.

Unfortunately, despite advice that we had a very good case, we were advised that due to their size, it wasn't worth the cost and effort for us to stand up for ourselves.

So we embarked on an incredibly painful one and a half month exercise to find a new name that we could register in our target countries that would be all but guaranteed to be safe from another attack.

The result - GiftyDuck.

We'd already spent money commissioning a logo for Wisha and had spent a bunch more on finding and registering our new name, so we decided to keep our existing logo, which we still loved, but unfortunately doesn't incorporate the thing that the name suggests it would - a duck.

We built a functional mock-up using Vue and Tailwind CSS and presented the idea to a business-savvy contact of ours for opinions. The data in the app was hard-coded, but you could click around and get a feel for things.

We couldn't think of a succinct name for "family and friends", so we decided on calling them "lucky ducks" - the people you give gifts to.

After some promising feedback, we then made the mock-up real by replacing all the harded coded mock data with an API and real data.

We presented an early version of the product to family and friends to watch how they used the product, and immediately found a big problem...

Our idea was based on the assumption that people didn't know what to get for other people. It turned out that people had just as much trouble working out what they wanted for themselves! They weren't able to fill out their wish lists with anything practical - mostly just things like lambos...

Our solution to this was to build "Gift Ideas" into the app. But not gift ideas for other people - gift ideas for you and your wish list!

I'd spent my entire career building things for other people. Mostly SaaS, which I love building, but I dreamed of more freedom and control over what I was building. I decided to jump in the deep end and quit my job to focus full-time on something...

I reached out to my friend, Jay. We'd worked really well together on the Australian Marriage Equality campaign back in the day. I knew he had a bunch of ideas, but not the technical skills to build them. I had the opposite problem.

After chewing over a few ideas, each with varying logistical difficulties, we settled on building a free service centered around wish lists. It would help people know what gifts their loved ones actually want, and help people guide their loved ones into getting gifts they actually wanted in return.

We wanted people to be able to add items to their wish list by just entering an product URL, and we would fetch the image, name, and price for them automatically.

We would make our money by creating affiliate links for any URLs where we had an affiliate relationship. Our users would get a free service, and we would benefit just by them using it. A win-win!

We also wanted people to be able to manage all their gift giving occasions in one place, without having to worry about things like what date Mother's Day falls on that year. We also wanted to send reminders for these occasions that allowed enough time to order a gift online.

So we started working on some UI elements for it. Not the logo or the nav bar, but just little pieces of the UI that were unique to the app. Like the forms for adding your loved ones, and for adding wish list items...