Turning a birthday gift challenge into a solution for collective giving
When my father's 50th birthday approached—a milestone celebration with guests flying in from around the globe—I wanted to give him something truly special. He had mentioned wanting an electric bicycle, but there was one small problem: it cost thousands of euros, well beyond what any single person would typically spend on a birthday gift.
That's when inspiration struck. What if we could pool our resources together?
I wasn't alone in facing gift-giving challenges. Friends and family had shared similar frustrations about organizing group gifts: the awkward money collection process, people who promised to contribute but never followed through, and the general messiness of coordinating with multiple people. There had to be a better way.
Instead of accepting these limitations, I decided to build a solution. I created Gifttim, a simple, streamlined platform that makes collaborative gift-giving effortless and transparent.
Putting Gifttim to the test
Before Dad's party, we launched our first campaign for his electric bicycle. The platform worked exactly as envisioned. We not only reached our funding goal but exceeded it, collecting thousands of euros from family and friends who were excited to contribute to such a meaningful gift.
The look on my father's face when he received his dream bicycle made every hour of development worth it. More importantly, the contributors felt proud to be part of something bigger, and the entire process was stress-free. Gifttim had passed its first real-world test.
Building the platform
We began with a clear vision: Gifttim needed to be both playful and professional. We developed a brand identity that felt approachable and trustworthy, with a logo and color palette that conveyed the joy of giving while maintaining the credibility needed for financial transactions.
“We developed a brand identity that felt approachable and trustworthy”
Phase 1: Custom Foundation
We initially built everything from scratch using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, creating custom components and styles that perfectly matched our vision. This gave us complete control over the user experience and allowed us to implement exactly the features we wanted.
Phase 2: Strategic Migration
As we began scaling and needed robust payment processing, we made the strategic decision to migrate to WordPress. This allowed us to integrate Stripe payments more efficiently while maintaining our growth trajectory.
The migration wasn't simple—we had fallen in love with our original design concepts and spent considerable effort recreating our custom components within the WordPress ecosystem. We even preserved our bespoke authentication system, layering our custom sign-in and registration interface over WordPress's native authentication.
Phase 3: Refinement
We completely rebuilt critical pages like the main account dashboard, ensuring that our original user experience vision remained intact while gaining the scalability benefits of the WordPress platform.
What's Next for Gifttim
What began as a solution to one family's gift-giving challenge has evolved into a comprehensive crowdfunding platform built for scale. We've proven the concept works, but we're taking a thoughtful approach to growth.
Our current focus areas include:
- Sustainable monetization strategies – avoiding high commission fees
- Scalability improvements – to handle increased user demand
- Market validation – to ensure we're building features people truly want
Want to know more? Take a look at the preview here.
