The following interview is a conversation we had with Andrew Forman, CEO of Givz, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $3 Million Raised to Make Donating, Not Discounts, eCommerce Brands Ultimate Growth Lever

Andrew Forman
Thanks so much for having me on. Excited to be here. 

Brett
Yeah, no problem. So before begin talking about what you’re building, let’s start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background. 

Andrew Forman
Yeah. So who am I? That’s a tough question. So I guess I’ll start at the beginning. So on the background side of things, I did six years of investment banking, so I’m a bit of enigma to some people because I did six years of investment banking while at the same time doing five years of running my own nonprofit and being the treasurer of a nonprofit. So I kind of had these two yin and yang things, the work that paid the bills and then the nonprofit that gave me a bit of more of meaning in my life. I went back to Harvard Business School for two years to kind of switch gears, switch careers and end up starting my own company called Givz. And so I’ve been running this company now for five years. We went through a significant Pivot about two years ago, and so happy to talk about any all of that stuff as we go here. 

Brett
Sounds good. So I have to ask, were you full on finance bro? Did you have a Patagonia vest and everything? 

Andrew Forman
So I think I was just like right after the Patagonia vest. Also, I’m not super trendy, right? So I know that’s maybe not trendy, but trendy for bankers. I probably should have had the Patagonia vest, I guess is the short answer, but pretty well into the finance bro scene, I guess, but pull myself out. 

Brett
And what about the nonprofit? So that seems like an interesting thing to do. So earlier in your career, I feel like a lot of people do that in their sixty s. Seventy s when they’re looking for purpose. What kind of purpose were you looking for so early on and what drove you to start that? 

Andrew Forman
Yeah, so even with the nonprofit, I didn’t think I was going to start something. But as it turned out, a friend of mine was like, hey, I have this idea. I really want to make it come to life. She went to NYU. She ended up studying abroad in Jamestown, Ghana for a summer, and she was there. And the kids asked her over and over again, like, hey, I need books. They never asked her for money. They never asked her for food. They just asked her for books. So she’s like, I want to send, like, 30,000 books to Jamestown, Ghana, and I want to run the after school program with NYU students who are there who can then read the books to the kids. And so she’s like, I need to make this come to life, but I need some money to be able to ship those books across. 

Andrew Forman
We need people to man book drives and do all this kind of stuff, and I want to start a nonprofit. And I was like, you know what? All right. My whole family are accountants, right? And so I was like, okay, everybody’s an accountant. We should be able to deal with the paperwork to set up a five one, C three. But I’d never done it before, and at the same time, I’m the numbers guy, so I was like, okay, I’ll be the treasurer of this thing, and I will raise we didn’t need a ton of money. We needed 10,000, $20,000 a year to keep this thing going. So in New York, with my investment banker Bro friends, we should be able to raise that money and do something good for the world while were just making money out of money. So that’s exactly what I did. 

Andrew Forman
And so that was the real impetus there. She deserves all the credit. She is the one who went to Jamestown once or twice a year, and that’s one of my biggest regrets, is never actually going to Jamestown during that time period. But we did. We shipped 30,000 books across the ocean and had a good time doing it. Nice.

Brett
That’s amazing. Now let’s switch to a couple of questions just to better understand what makes you tick as a Founder and as an entrepreneur. So is there a specific CEO that you’ve studied a lot from and really learned from the most, would you say? 

Andrew Forman
It’s funny because I get asked this question on podcasts a bunch in real life, a bunch. And the first time I got asked it was, who do you look up to that you think if we tag them in the comments of this post that they may actually respond? And so at that point, I said Mark Cuban, because I know that he’s known for responding for these type of things. And also, quite frankly, I just listened to how I built this with Mark Cuban, and he owns the Mavs, and I’m a big sports guy, and so I thought that was a good answer. So now I’ve just been saying it over and over again, and hopefully one day he’s actually going to respond. It hasn’t happened yet. Been a couple of years. But he is an amazing individual and I’d say that’s probably one that he’s got his hands in so many different things and the fact that he does respond to Cold emails and all that kind of stuff and at least has a reputation of doing that. 

Andrew Forman
I think he’s pretty cool. 

Brett
We’ll make sure to tag him in this interview and let him know that he’s your favorite and we’ll see if that can help you get a response. 

Andrew Forman
Love it. What about books? 

Brett
Is there a specific book that’s had the greatest impact on you so far? And this can be a business book or it can just be a personal book as well. 

Andrew Forman
Yeah. On the business book side of things. It’s The Hard Thing about Hard Things by Ben Harwitz. I think that is something that I keep coming back to. I’ve read it twice now on my third trip around because being a Founder is just really hard and you have to make incredibly tough decisions that you frankly don’t want to make, but you know, are right in your gut and you have to follow through on those and it’s really tough. 

Brett
Yeah, I love that book. His stories are just so gnarly. He took the company public, not out of really there was no other option. Right. They had to take it public and situation when they did it. 

Andrew Forman
Yeah. It just encapsulates so perfectly whether I wish mine was that I had to take the company public. Right. But even like the stories about having to fire people and just all that kind of stuff is just so real. 

Brett
What’s his line in there? It’s something like it doesn’t take a lot to have a bold vision for the future. What takes a lot is when you have to fire everyone because that vision hasn’t worked out yet. Something along lines which always resonate with me a lot. Now let’s talk about Givz. So what’s the origin story behind the company? And then what’s the pitch that you’re making to customers? What are they paying you to solve for them? 

Andrew Forman
Yeah, so I’ll start with that piece of it. So we help brands run donation incentives. So what that is basically replacing their discounts or enhancing their discounts with a donation incentive. So Black Friday, cyber Monday giving Tuesday just happened. Right. And so what inevitably what people do on Black Friday and Cyber Monday is like, here’s a 50% off coupon. And then when somebody first hears about your brand, they buy at 50% off. I can guarantee one thing, they’re never coming back to buy at full price again. Maybe next year at 50% off again, they’ll buy, but they think of you already as a discount brand and they’re never coming back to buy at full price. So what you can do instead is you could do something like 20% off plus 20% to give to charity during Black Friday Cyber Monday. And now they paid $0.80 on the dollar. 

Andrew Forman
They feel a little bit like, okay, this is still a high quality product and they got 20% to give to a charity of their choice. Whoa, that’s super interesting. Now all of a sudden and differentiated. And so that’s what we help brands do. A lot of brands throughout the year, they’ll do something like, hey, when you spend over a certain amount which is higher than their average order value, so let’s say average order value is $67, you say, spend $100 or more with us and you’ll get 5% of your purchase back to give to a charity of your choice. Average order value goes from 67 to 84 within a couple of weeks and it stays there for the rest of here. And therefore you end up increasing your sales across the board, 20 30%. So that’s what we do for brands. That’s the current pitch right now. 

Andrew Forman
And as for what drove me to do this, as the treasurer of a nonprofit, I saw firsthand how hard it was to get brands and nonprofits to work together and I wanted to bridge that gap. Nice. I love it. 

Brett
And is there a specific segment of the ecommerce market that’s adopting this the most right now? 

Andrew Forman
So we’re really heavily already into pet, health and wellness luxury brands, as well as anything that we actually have not found a sector that doesn’t work yet. These are just the ones that have already come out of the woodwork. A lot of CBD as well. Interestingly. But initially my thought was, my hypothesis zero was that luxury brands, this would be perfect for, because they can’t discount anyway. They need a reason for people to drive sales so they can do this. And that has held true. But then when we tested with our first Big Break client, which was H and M, not necessarily a luxury brand, do discounts all the time. Will an email that goes out to their X million loyalty members that doesn’t have a discount code in it that says, hey, if you spend $60 or more, you’re going to get $10 to give to charity over the next seven days, will that work? 

Andrew Forman
And to the tune of H and M donating $150,000. Yeah, it worked. And then in six days it was exciting. It was exciting to see that email converted as if it had a discount code in it, even though it didn’t. And so we really haven’t found apparel is a good one, but we really haven’t found an industry yet where it doesn’t work. 

Brett
And how is that discount typically delivered? Is that like in checkout typically? Or is it always via email? 

Andrew Forman
So the message is delivered in every way just like a discount code would be delivered. You’re putting that on your site, you’re putting in an email, you’re making social posts about it. You’re marketing it as you totally would normally. No extra. You don’t need to buy any sort of extra marketing pieces. This just goes straight into your marketing campaigns, whether it’s ads, whether it’s owned, or whether it’s earned media. You just market it as totally normal. And then after purchase is when the people actually get to make their charitable selection. So you don’t want to make them choose what charity they want to support before they check out. You want them to check out, you can check. Okay. Did this person qualify? Yes, they qualify by great. Here’s their option to donate. And that option to donate can show up right on the thank you confirmation page. 

Andrew Forman
So right after somebody hits donate, boom, the next thing they see is, you’ve earned $5 to give to a charity. Here it is. Or you could send that to them in an email. It just depends on how technical you want to be about it. Got it. 

Brett
So that’s pretty impressive because your time to value for customers is super short then, right? This isn’t something they have to experiment with and really try for a year before they know if it works. It’s really just a one time campaign to see if it works, is that correct? 

Andrew Forman
Yes. So, yes, there’s the one time campaign. So I’d say one time campaign where you can send one email, right, and AB test that email. Use a coupon code for 20% off. Use a different coupon code for 15% off plus 15% to give to charity. See which one wins. Spoiler alert, 15 plus 15 is going to crush 20. And you can just try it out. And so you can try that out, and that’s a one time see the value overnight, you’ll see the conversion rate just be much higher on the 15 plus 15. The other thing that you can do is put a banner on top of your site that says, spend over X amount and get Y to give to a charity of your choice. You leave that up there for three, four, five weeks, and you already have your answer. Hey, does this increase our average order value or not? 

Brett
And how were you able to land such a big company like H and M? 

Andrew Forman
Great question. So, I mean, luck obviously plays a lot of factor into that. You can’t go through startup World without giving a nod to luck in some way, shape, or form. But, yeah, I got introduced to a friend of a friend to somebody over in the marketing department at H and M. You need that internal champion to really push it through. But I think H and M had an acute pain, right? Like, they had done a Pride Month initiative the year before where they donated $3 million, a million dollars to three different charities. And they were like and they got a ton of pushback from the LGBTQ community saying, why did you choose these three charities? Why don’t you choose our charity? So they were looking for more personalization, and we really solved that for them. So people that made qualifying purchases now were able to give $10 to whatever LGBTQ charity they cared about most, and they did it for Earth Day, then they did it for LGBTQ, for Pride Month. 

Andrew Forman
And so I think we solved an acute pain of theirs and we got introduced to the right person at the right time. 

Brett
And this seems like a no brainer. They get customer sales, they get to make the world better, and then I’m sure they get some type of engagement and loyalty with their customers for doing good together. What are the objectives to it? Why would someone say no to this? Or why do they sometimes say no?

Andrew Forman
That is a great question. So on our side, why do they say no? The number one reason they say no is they just don’t quite understand exactly how it’s working and they have other priorities or perceived other priorities. Right. So my nightmare scenario is, hey, I don’t have time to deal with charity stuff. I need to lift my average order value. I’m like, this is the best way to lift your average order value. It just happens to do some good in the world, but people have a hard time separating that out and being like, no, if it’s charitable, it’s not going to have an ROI. And that’s the number one hurdle we face right now. 

Brett
And is there anyone doing something similar or are you guys unique in this approach offering discounts in this way? 

Andrew Forman
Yeah, we’re pretty unique in this approach. I have no doubt that as we get more popular, there will be some fast followers. I’d say the majority of cause marketing. If you put that as like a broad category, again, I don’t even think we necessarily fall in that category or we’re defining a new way of doing this whole thing. But previously it had been like, okay, 10% of sales goes to this one charity that the brand chose that the customer could, may or may not care about, and in all likelihood does not care about. 99% of the time does not care about that cause enough to really make them move or make a decision. And then you start to see these roundup things really start to become popular, even today, where it’s like, hey, I walked into CBS and I was there to buy toilet paper and I was going to spend, I was going to buy, whatever, $12.37 worth of toilet paper. 

Andrew Forman
And they’re like, hey, do you want to donate an extra sixty three cents to and you can never remember the name of the charity, but maybe it’s the American Cancer Society or something that you don’t, of course you like, you want to support, but at the same time you’re not going to remember this. If you hit yes, great, but at the same time you feel like, is somebody watching me here? I don’t know. It’s not a great experience. You’re not like, oh, I really need to go back to CVS. If anything, you’re like, I should have just bought this on Amazon and avoid this whole thing and I can do Amazon smile and then somebody will go to the charity that I care about. Right. And so that is not the experience that I think brands ultimately want. And that’s why I think Roundup is not necessarily going to be something that really is here to stay. 

Andrew Forman
At the end of the day, if you walked into CVS and they said, hey, if you spend $50 or more in CVS, we’ll give you $5 to give to whatever charity you want, now that’s something that’s a whole lot more interesting. I was there to buy toilet paper. I’m now like, oh, I can easily spend $50 in CVS. Let me think about all the other things I need, okay? I’m going to buy them right now. Now I spend $75 in VBS, I get $5 to get to a charity that I care about. I give it to my friend’s charity and then I’m like, hey, did you know the TBS is running this thing? Like, you guys should go in, spend over $50, get the $5 and give it to your own charity. And now there’s some word of mouth. And this is something that we want to create. 

 

Andrew Forman
Makes a lot of sense. 

Brett
I know you touched on it there, but let’s dive a bit deeper. So you mentioned market category. It’s not part of cause marketing and you’re defining a new one. What is that new category? Have you come up with a name and a way to articulate what that category really stands for? 

Andrew Forman
Yeah, I mean, any and all suggestions are still welcome. Purpose driven marketing is something that we’re toying with. Donation incentives is really the best term. I think that kind of encapsulates everything, which is really this is a marketing platform, right. And we’re powering we’re going to be the fabric that basically powers the future of this giving economy. Nice. 

Brett
Makes a lot of sense. And what have you done to really rise above the noise and capture the attention of your customers? Obviously there’s a lot of tools out there right now. There’s a lot of software that’s out there right now. How have you been able to rise above the noise? 

Andrew Forman
It’s the classic yin and yang, right? So the charity angle gets people’s attention, but then ultimately it lowers you down on the totem pole. That is how much stuff that’s on people’s minds these days. And so it’s tough to rise above the noise out there. I think for us, it’s really been where we’ve seen the most success is having great customer testimonials and having our customers share the word of GIBS. Right. And that’s been the majority of our growth is coming from word of mouth, direct referrals from our customers.

Brett
And last question for you. If we zoom out into the future, what’s the three year vision look like for the company? Does this eventually go outside of ecommerce and into brick and mortar or what are your thoughts there? What’s that big vision? 

Andrew Forman
Yes. So we’re already extending outside of Ecommerce into brick and mortar, but also into incentivizing anybody to do anything, right. So we have betterment as a client. For example, they want people to make deposits into their betterment account. So they say, hey, set up a weekly recurring deposit. We’ll give you $10 to give to a charity of your choice. Right. So not necessarily Ecommerce, but that’s banking for in store. We’re starting to utilize just launching now with a jewelry company where if you spend over X amount of dollars in the jewelry store, you’re going to get a QR code that you can scan for $100 to give to a charity of your choice, that kind of stuff. And they’re featuring charities in the local community. That type of stuff is coming. But we’re ultimately making an API driven approach that allows anybody, if you wanted to get people to post more about this podcast, right, and say, hey, anybody who posts about this podcast tags us in it, I’ll send you $5 to get to a charity of your choice. 

Andrew Forman
We can make that happen, right? And you can make that happen just using our technology. So that’s where we want to go. 

Brett
And from a regulatory perspective, who’s filing the paperwork with the IRS? When you’re donating to nonprofits, isn’t there some type of paperwork that’s required or the donation amount so small that’s not necessary? 

Andrew Forman
Yeah. So the brand who’s actually making the donation is the one who gets the tax deductible receipt. So we’re able to issue that tax deductible receipt to anybody who’s actually making the donation. The end consumers don’t get to write this off on their taxes. This is just a gift that they’re getting that they’re able to allocate the money to whatever they want. And again, because the choice is the end customers, and it’s not like the brand saying, hey, 10% of profits go to or 10% of purchases go to the American Cancer Society. You’re saying, 10% of your purchase, we’re going to give it back to you. You get to give it to whoever you want. Because of that kind of wrinkle, you don’t have to actually file a commercial CoVenture agreement because you don’t even know where this money is going to go yet. You’re just telling them, hey, it’s going to go to charity. 

Andrew Forman
You tell me where you want it to go. 

Brett
Makes a lot of sense. Andrew unfortunately, that’s all we’re going to have time to cover for today before we wrap. People want to follow along with your journey as you build where’s the best place for them to go? 

Andrew Forman
So head over to givz.com You can chat with us there. You can also just schedule a time on my calendar at that point and just click the Get Started button, and we’ll route you in the right place. At the same time, we’re at getgibs G-E-T-G-I-V-Z on all social media, and you can find me Andrew Forman on LinkedIn, as well as Aforman 22 on Twitter. 

Brett
Amazing. Well, thanks so much for taking the time to chat and share your vision. I really love what you guys are building and look forward to seeing you execute on this vision. 

Andrew Forman
Thanks for having me. 

Brett
All right, keep in touch. 

Andrew Forman
Our channel.