father in July of last year when he noticed that the stroller he wanted appeared at different prices depending on which website he visited. “So, I went looking for a tool that would search the Internet to let me know if the stroller was available for a certain price,” he says.
Worth It officially formed as a company a few months later, and by this past September, Kaminsky had quit his financial planning job to devote himself to the Houston startup. He worked with partners to develop the software and estimates that he has 7,000 users currently.
Worth It also receives percentages from retailers for each sale through their affiliate marketing programs. Kaminsky says its edge over competitors, such as New York-based Hukkster, is that it can search across all websites, not just the original site where a shopper has found an item. He says the startup has raised money from friends and family but declined to disclose how much.
The next step: Expanding its partnerships with online retailers.
Loop & Tie (Austin, TX)
The pitch: The gift card’s sophisticated cousin
How it works: Sara Rodell, Loop & Tie’s founder and CEO, describes the website as a way to combine the ease of a gift card with the uniqueness of a “picked-especially-for-you” gift. Users choose among collections at different price points—$25, $50, $75, or $100—and either opt for a specific item to give or let the recipient choose among the items in that category. “Once they click the link from e-mail, they are directed into gallery of choices but don’t see the price,” Rodell says. “The redemption part is hidden.”
The website features a box of salted and crushed espresso caramels and a three-ounce Izola pocket flask for $25 to a package of eight steaks from grass-fed cows on Texas ranches and a large terracotta slow-cooker for $100. (Loop & Tie’s premise sounds similar to Wantful, a New York and San Francisco-based startup that ceased operations in September, after having successfully raised $5.5 million in Series A funding, including from Seattle retailer Nordstrom.)
The backstory: As an institutional stockbroker at UBS, Rodell found arranging for clients’ holiday gifts a time-consuming and inefficient process. “There were kosher clients that don’t drink; someone whose kid had peanut allergies,” she says.
When she finally found gifts tailored to her clients, they were usually from mom-and-pop stores, which had websites that didn’t save orders or billing information, which meant she had to re-enter each order each year. Her first go as a gifting startup was an app called “The Next One’s On Me,” where people could gift food or beverage items at Austin restaurants and bars through a system of tokens.
But the need to have one-to-one conversations with each of the establishments proved to be unwieldy. So, Rodell switched the emphasis to retail products. She and her co-founder Jeffrey Schwartz, who is the startup’s COO, worked with local developers for the site and have raised $625,000 from friends, family, and angel investors.
The next step: Given her work history, it’s not surprising that Rodell sees the most opportunity in large-scale giving by businesses. “You want to send gifts that are more remembered than a branded coffee mug or a fruit basket,” she says.
