Give For Free wasn’t always ‘a platform to raise funds for charities’. The original idea, proposed by Patrick, was a platform to exchange free stuff. But why would that work? The motivation for givers was to help them get rid of stuff that was cluttering up their house. Anything old or unwanted would be perfect for the platform. For takers, the motivation is clear. You can get anything you want from the platform for free.

Will this work?

While this made sense logically, I was skeptical about whether this would work, and I continued to be skeptical until Xu Jie discovered the FreeCycle community, which is a worldwide movement to pass on stuff for free. There was even a local chapter for the community, which really boosted our confidence in the feasibility of our plan. As their current method of exchanging goods was a Facebook page, we were confident we could build a platform complete with features more suited to their purposes.

Their Motivations

At some point, the decision was made to pivot and get charities involved. This made the project more complicated on several levels, something I failed to consider thoroughly. Looking back, I wonder if we rushed into this before thinking of all the implications of the decision.

When we decided to make it a fund-raising platform, all of us immediately focused on clearing the technical and logistical issues in the way i.e. building donation features and onboarding charities. I feel like we may have neglected to re-evaluate the motivations for the parties involved.

For charities, they get $$ with little work on their part. The only ‘downside’ might be that they have to put their name and reputation on the line, like if they supported us publicly but GiveForFree turned out to be a scam.

For givers, it seems like the motivation is unchanged. They still get to clear out their old stuff, but help contribute to charity at the same time.

For donors/wanters, their motivation is different now. We’re trying to position GFF in a way that they’re getting the item for free, conditioned on them making a donation, but it’s still clearly different from getting the item really for free. They’ll definitely be evaluating whether they really pay XX for an item.

Why would people visit GiveForFree

Personally, I think we might have neglected the donors aspect. Anyone who enters our site right now will feel like our site is just another ecommerce website, which isn’t how we want to position ourselves (putting ourselves in direction competition with Carousell). We’re also not confident that GFF will be the first thing that people think of when they want to buy something. With regard to this, I think we have to rethink why donors would come to our site in the first place. If they’re here solely to make a donation, then what are the items for? Why not make a direct donation. If they’re here to buy something, then why not go to Carousell or Amazon, which is more likely to have their item. A site like GiveForFree is unlikely to have whatever they want, given our current scale.

If we do not fix this fundamental problem, it is likely that we will lose givers as well. If you’re unable to get rid of your items via the platform, why would you even bother to spend the time listing it.