Gift Starter

Aerie Ewen spent over a decade in the consulting and services industry at Logic 2020, advising world-class brands like Microsoft, Google, and L'Oreal. But after 12 years in corporate, she felt the pull to build something of her own. The idea came to her gradually, brewing in the background until she decided to test it out at a hackathon. She won first place—validation that felt real enough to take the leap.

Gift Starter launched as a B2B e-commerce plugin in 2014. The vision: help retailers and brands offer their products in fractional, affordable pieces. Aerie brought on roughly 27 different e-commerce partners and brands. But something wasn't working. "We didn't have the right product for what we were trying to do," she reflected. The experience was also too consumer-facing; they were touching retailer customers in ways that created friction. By mid-2015, after a few months of iteration, they pivoted hard to a pure consumer model.

With the pivot complete, Gift Starter relaunched as a destination for consumers to crowdfund purchases. The mechanics were elegant: take a $1,000 sofa, break it into $20 or $50 chunks, let 20 friends pitch in, and once funded, ship the sofa to whoever organized the group. It's part gifting platform, part payment solution. Revenue trickled in slowly at first—only $12,000 for all of 2015, and only from the latter half of the year. But the team was learning fast.

One early pivot taught Aerie something crucial: customers didn't love the gifting narrative. They loved the payment experience. "Towards the end of last year, we found that customers weren't valuing our gifting experience. They were actually loving our payment experience," Aerie explained. This insight shifted the entire product roadmap. Gift Starter wasn't just a gifting platform anymore—it was becoming a payments API that could handle multiple payers transacting anything in commerce.

Aerie also made smart decisions around equity. Her original co-founder, who did the early coding, left within the first year before his one-year cliff vested. She'd structured the vesting schedule to be founder-friendly but protective of the company—he got nothing, a lesson many founders learn the hard way.

By early 2016, Gift Starter was a team of three full-time and three part-time employees, fueled by $525,000 in convertible note financing from angels. Revenue was projected to hit $50,000 in 2016. Aerie made money two ways: an 8% transaction fee on consumer purchases (split across multiple buyers, so minimal per-person impact) and commission on products fulfilled via dropshipping. All the while, she was working around the clock—getting just three to four hours of sleep—while her newborn son was just eight weeks old, with her mother helping with childcare.