Scaling Givz: How They Built a Multi-Vertical Platform from a Single Use Case

Starting with retail discounts, Givz discovered a powerful truth: charitable giving can drive behavior change across industries. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Andrew Forman shared how they expanded from ecommerce to become a broader behavioral incentives platform.

Proving the Model in Retail The journey began with a simple hypothesis: donation incentives could outperform traditional discounts. “What you can do instead is you could do something like 20% off plus 20% to give to charity during Black Friday Cyber Monday,” Andrew explains. When tested, this approach consistently drove better results.

Expanding Beyond Discounts Success in retail revealed a broader opportunity. Andrew notes, “We really haven’t found a sector that doesn’t work yet.” From pet supplies to CBD brands to luxury goods, the model proved effective across retail verticals, consistently lifting average order values from “$67 to 84 within a couple of weeks.”

Moving into Financial Services The breakthrough into fintech came through Betterment. Rather than replacing discounts, they used donation incentives to encourage recurring deposits. This expansion proved that the model could drive any desired customer behavior, not just purchases.

Building for Multiple Verticals Givz’s expansion strategy centered on their API-first approach. “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 explains.

Entering Physical Retail The platform’s flexibility enabled expansion into brick-and-mortar. Andrew shares how they’re “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.”

Technical Infrastructure Key to this expansion was building robust backend systems. “The message is delivered in every way just like a discount code would be delivered,” Andrew notes. This seamless integration approach made adoption easy across verticals.

The Platform Vision Looking ahead, Givz aims to power the broader “giving economy.” Their infrastructure handles both technical integration and regulatory compliance, making it easier for any business to experiment with donation-based incentives.

For B2B founders, Givz’s expansion strategy offers valuable lessons in platform thinking. By building flexible infrastructure around a proven use case, they’ve created opportunities far beyond their initial market. The key was recognizing that their core innovation – using charitable choice to drive behavior – could apply across any customer action.