An Overview Of Give Freely

2 Aug 2024 · 3 min

Watch on YouTube

2:42

In this interview segment, a former TripAdvisor executive discusses his new venture, GiveFreely. After a 20‑year tenure at TripAdvisor, he left to pursue another startup, ultimately creating GiveFreely—a browser extension that functions like a mash‑up of coupon tools (Honey, Capital One Shopping, Rakuten) and Amazon Smile. Users install the extension, select a charity, and when they shop at any of roughly 10,000 partner stores, a popup appears at checkout offering to donate a percentage of the purchase to the chosen charity. The founder illustrates the experience with a personal example of buying printer ink on Staples, where the extension prompted a donation. The conversation highlights the founder’s motivation, the product’s seamless, URL‑free operation, and its potential to simplify charitable giving during online shopping.

Of course, after an incredible run at TripAdvisor, you know, you're at it again with your next startup. So could you maybe share a little bit more about, you know, what you're building now with GiveFreely?
I will. Thanks. Like, I stepped down from TripAdvisor because I was doing it for 20 years, felt I had one more startup in me, realized after 20 years if I didn't leave, I wasn't gonna find the time to come up with the next idea. But other people can do it. I'm just too focused operationally on what I do day in, day out. So I left Trip without an idea, came up with several different ideas, liked this one the best. It's called GiveFreely. It's a browser extension. It's kind of a mashup between Honey or Capital One Shopping or Rakuten and Amazon Smile. And if you remember Amazon Smile, you could sign up, go to smile.amazon.com, and half a percent of everything you bought on Amazon went to your favorite charity, you had over a million to pick from. So with GiveFreely, you install a browser extension and then you can forget all about GiveFreely. You don't have to remember any URL or going to anywhere, but as you happen to be shopping at any of 10,000 different stores, a popup will appear when you put something in. This happened to me the other day. I was shopping on Staples. I needed more ink for my printer. I'm gonna let it find the right ink, add it to my shopping cart.
Boom!
Pop-up appears saying, hey, do you want 2.6% of this purchase to go to the MS Society? Which was the charity I had chosen. Like, yes, please. Click. Done. Bought my ink. It arrived, and the MS Society got 2.6% of my $80 ink purchase. Add that to the rest of my shopping habits for the year. Maybe times 20 million people, and that could be as much as $500 million or a billion dollars a year going to charitable causes, nonprofits, uh, all around, uh, all around the world. Amazon Smile was doing $100 million a year in donations on just one store at a half a percent and average commission rate is closer to 3%. And now I just need 10, 20 million users. And as they say, I'm all set. Reach out to me afterwards if you have any interesting distribution ideas. Free to use, of course, givefreely.com if you wanna try it yourself.