Token Gifts launches at Brown
Have you ever wanted to congratulate your roommate for doing well on a big test, but didn’t know how? Give a birthday present without breaking the bank, but don’t know exactly what to get? Forgot to bring your credit card to a night at the GCB? Now, there’s an app for that.
TL;DR - a group of Brown students has launched a platform for sending your friends (or yourself!) drinks at the GCB. Visit tokengifts.co to get started.
Token Gifts was launched last Friday by a team of Brown and RISD students. The web-app is the brainchild of Jenna Koo, a graduate student at Brown. I sat down with Jenna this week to learn more.
The team:
Koo and her co-founder—a long-time mentor and friend—first met in high school. Now, they are excited to be leading a team of engineers and graphic designers in the launch of Token Gifts here at Brown. Thus far, team-building has been the greatest challenge in the creation of the web-app, as roles have been shifting along with the project. That hasn’t stopped progress, though. “I could not let this fail,” Koo told me—and she did not. “Within a week, we had a team of four engineers. People are immediately interested,” she explained, reflecting on the hiring process after losing an engineer. “I can’t thank my team enough,” Koo told me, explaining that no matter what happens in the future of the project, everyone involved is ecstatic to be part of the creation of Token Gifts.
The process:
The original inspiration for Token Gifts came from the app Gifticon, a Korean gifting platform that allows you to send your friends small presents, such as Starbucks drinks, at any time. Gifticon has become extremely popular in Korea, and Koo saw an opening in the gifting market here in the U.S.
In the beginning stages of development, the team set out to learn more about young peoples’ gift-giving behavior today. With social media connecting us more than ever before, Koo explained to me, young people have extensive networks of friends, but are lacking meaningful ways to give them tokens of appreciation without breaking the bank. In response to the new rise of digital transactions, recent research at Cornell and Stanford has looked at “the network effect,” showing that receiving a gift on a digital platform makes a person 60-70% more likely to send one in return on the very same platform. Through interviews with young people in Providence and New York, it became clear that drink-buying would be a good jumping-off point for the app.
The future of Token Gifts:
“The future is whatever the users tell us,” Koo explained to me. The team hopes to someday expand beyond Brown, to allow people to send “any products that don’t have to be boxed,” like workout classes and other experiential gifts. For now, though, the Token Gifts team is committed to success at Brown, and want your help. Send any feedback to tokengiftsco@gmail.com or dm @tokengifts.co on Instagram, and Tokengifts.co may give you a free drink in return.