GiftYa: The idea and the failure to launch

Here is part two of “A Company’s Journey to Disruption,” a column written by Wolfe LLC team members where we will share experiences and insights on what has helped us succeed in the past and present.

The idea: 

This is when we had the idea of GiftYa, the gift credit. We thought, what if we can help to disrupt the gift card space like we disrupted the gift certificate space with gift cards themselves? Who better to do it than us? 

The gift credit is the idea of using your current financial instrument – like your Visa card in your pocket – and use that to issue and track the use of your gift. For example, say I buy you a GiftYa for Joe’s Coffee Shop on the corner near your house. You get a text from GiftYa for the gift that I have sent you. You click the link and connect your Visa card with GiftYa. 

Behind the scenes, we connect it to Joe’s Coffee shop. We are then alerted when you go to Joe’s Coffee shop and buy a coffee. We then credit your Visa card with the gift! If we could do that, then there would be no more loss! No more one-use gift cards adding to the 15,000+ tons of wasted gift cards per year! No more criminals using gift cards or stealing gift cards from grandma who thinks she is using them to pay for her fake IRS bill (you know those creepy calls we all get). 

So, we met up with Patrick Ledbetter and Adam Ludwig who had the same ideas we did. They were trying to solve a way to buy a beer for each other as a credit onto their Visa cards from across the USA. What better idea for gift credits! We filed and were awarded patents for our idea. 

We named it GiftYa, and in 2012/2013 we invested $1 million to try to launch it! We thought we were off to the races! But not so fast. 

The failure to launch: 

The only way GiftYa could execute on the tracking of transactions, at the time, was to integrate with the large financial institutions – like PNC, Bank of America, and the like. We developed the website, the app and we thought we could get PNC, B of A and others on-board fast, but that was not the case. They would not give us access to their userbase. They said their userbase was theirs, and that they would not provide us with the user’s transaction information even with the consumer’s approval. 

This devastated us. All the work on patents, the website, logo, app…down the drain. We knew we had a better product. The gift card was broken, but we were not able to fix it. So back to selling gift cards we went. Selling a broken product. But the idea never left our hearts and minds. And with criminal activity ramping up, even more, we knew that we had to solve this problem.