In this episode of the My First Million podcast, host Sam Parr and two guests explore the untapped potential of B2B gifting platforms. They start by discussing Thnks, a mobile app that lets users instantly send small physical or digital gifts (wine, chocolates, Uber rides, Amazon credits) to business contacts, and note the need for built‑in accounting and expense‑tracking features. The conversation then shifts to Alice, an AI‑driven service that scans a recipient’s social profile to recommend personalized gifts, with the option to donate the value to charity. Sam proposes a product built around deep integrations with enterprise tools such as Slack, Salesforce, and QuickBooks, allowing managers to allocate monthly gifting budgets, track balances, and automate approvals. They cite statistics – 89% of C‑suite executives believe gifting strengthens relationships and 56% of recipients are more likely to reciprocate – linking these data points to Robert Cialdini’s “Rule of Reciprocity.” The group brainstorms go‑to‑market copy that frames the service as a strategic, psychologically‑backed way to generate more sales and goodwill. Throughout, they emphasize the frictionless user experience, the importance of data‑driven personalization, and the business case for a platform that combines gifting, accounting, and enterprise workflow integration.
Chapters
There's this thing called Thnks, uh, T-H-N-K-S.
Where is that on here?
Oh, it's just right in the middle.
Oh, okay. What's that?
So I saw this in an Instagram ad or something like that. I thought it was kind of clever. So, um, B2B gifting. So what Thnks does, or I think it's probably thanks that they're trying to do, which is saying thanks.
Oh, that's stupid. I hate cute spelling.
Cute spelling.
Yeah.
Cute spelling kind of, kind of tripped him up there. Um, so what it does is it's like from your phone, you can instantly just send a little gift to any business acquaintance. So it's like you could send, um, you know, a, a bottle of wine. You can send a box of chocolates. You could send an Uber ride. You can send $25, you know, Amazon thing, whatever. Uh, so they have a whole bunch of different, um, digital gifts that are— it just looked the— in, in the ad, it looked frictionless of like, how easy this would be to just send this little thank you to everyone. So for someone like you guys, you guys have advertisers, we have guests that come on the podcast, and I know I would love to send them gifts. I know that I should. I know these little things go a long way, even though it just seems like they shouldn't, but I don't take the time to do it. And so I think if somebody actually made a really good B2B gifting platform that did both the actual gifting, so being able to send it to your contact, but also the sort of accounting for it. So keeping track of it in a spreadsheet and all that stuff. Maybe helping you expense it. I think that could be a big business. I think a lot of salespeople would use this.
I totally agree. The way— what do you point— did he do that?
No, there's a company called Alice and they do artificial intelligence powered B2B gifting. It's really cool. They basically scan your social profile and they figure out what your interests are. They send you an example of a gift they want to send to you, like on behalf of the company, and then you're able to either donate the value of that to a charity of your choice or pick from the marketplace, um, a gift of similar value.
That's badass. I like that. What the— what I would do, uh, one or two things. The first thing that I would do is I think the way that I would set this up is I would make it pretty heavy on Slack or integrate with Salesforce. So we've built a couple Salesforce plugins that we love and other people have asked us to give it to them. I—
what's an example of one?
I'm not involved in our Salesforce thing, but basically, like, one example is we've connected our QuickBooks and our Salesforce really effectively, which was a previous— previously a really hard problem. I mean, that's real nitty-gritty accounting stuff.
Gotcha.
But it was really frustrating. Another thing that we built in Salesforce was so that we— the way that we built our business is we can get a line of credit on our invoices and we've synced it all. We've synced it all up. So our bank knows which invoices we have based off Salesforce and things like that.
Right.
And it's really effective. But what I would do in this is I would hook it up to Salesforce or Slack and I would make it so you could send coworkers as well. And basically the boss puts your credit card down and he allocates it or she allocates it. So every employee gets automatically like some number of $10 to $200 a month.
Right.
And you have, you can like type in like send Henry a gift at San Francisco office.
Right.
And. Like for example, I buy gift cards for people all the time where someone has done something really cool or like Edie was saying her car's, I don't know if she, if her car's messed up, I'd be like, send Edie $100 Uber gift card.
Right.
That, I think that would be fantastic. And the way that I would build it is that it would remind every employee how much balance they have left at the end of the month. So you for sure know it's gonna get, right.
Get used.
That's kind of, that's really interesting. And I would also look at, What's the, what's the fruit baskets that are popular? Edible arrangements.
Edible arrangements.
Yeah. I would look at their, I would go, I think they're public. Yeah. I, I think they're publicly traded.
Yeah.
I would go and read all about how they do it and where they say are the biggest markets for their B2B clients.
Is it real estate agents who need to, you know, always be out there? Is it sales? Is it, um, you know, I don't know, whatever else. Uh, so there's some stats that are on here. I don't know who added these, but great. 89%.
Oh, he did. Alan did.
Nice. Alan, shout out to Alan. 89% of C-suite execs believe that gifting brings people closer together. Okay, love it. Um, and then after receiving a gesture of appreciation, individuals feel like sort of the, what, the, the rule of reciprocity. Um, so 56% more likely to reciprocate. And, um, and I think it's, I think it's great. Um, I have a friend, Greg Eisenberg, who's all about gifting. Ramon is a great gifter as well.
He's almost obnoxiously good.
Yeah. And so they, they just are so thoughtful. And by little things that go a long way, it just makes you love the person.
Yeah. So another thing I would do to run this company is I would go to— is it— it was a book called Influence by Robert Cialdini. He's got this thing called the rule of reciprocity. It's summed up in basically I can do a favor for Sean and he's going to do a favor back to me, even if he didn't ask for me to do him a favor. And it is likely that he will repay me back in a disproportionate amount. So, for example, there's been times— you could like go up to someone and you could be like, "Hey, you wanna— can I give you a Coke?" Or, "Can I give you like this small $10 gift?" And I could be negotiating with you for selling a car.
And get a deal.
And get a deal.
Right.
Or, for example, I could say something like, "Hey, can you grab my mail?" Or, "Let me grab your mail for you when you're out of town." And then 2 weeks later, I could be like, "Hey, can I borrow your car for 5 days?" typically people will do it. And so I would make the whole tagline of my company, which is like, I would make, I always think of like in terms of headlines and copywriting for sales pages, I would make the whole headline all about how you can manipulate, you have to use positive language, but how you can manipulate people by giving gifts. I mean that I, I would, what would, what would your headline be? I, I would go to that book, the Rule of Reciprocity, and I would, Find it interesting. In fact, maybe that's what the headline would be. It would be the definition of the rule reciproc— like I would make it look like a definition. Rule of reciprocity, like noun or something like defined as inadequate or, uh, uh, disproportional given in response to a gift.
Yeah.
In other words, we help you make more money.
So, so there's, there's is, I just went to their website, growing business through growing business with gratitude, build strong business relationships through efficient, personalized, and thoughtful gestures of appreciation.
