Would people be willing to do this?

Hopefully you know what Secret Santa is, if not, it's a concept where you're randomly assigned (or you pick) someone and you buy them a gift without them knowing who is buying them a gift, they buy someone else a gift and so on and so forth.


My idea is simple, a website that is somewhat the same idea but online instead of real life (obviously). People will be required to pay $5 to join in and after they pay they'll be asked to provide a little bit of information about themselves, such as interests and hobbies, which will give the person who is selecting a gift for them a better idea of what you might like. After providing information about yourself, you'll be taken to a page where you'll select a gift for an anonymous person (the gift will be valued anywhere from $1-2) based off the interests and hobbies provided. Here's the kicker, of the $5 paid, $4 will be paid to charity (TBD which). Essentially, it's a win-win-win, you'll receive a small gift and the joy of knowing you did something good for charity, of course charity will receive a good 80% (4/5 = 8/10, for the slower ones) of the participation fee, and I'll be getting a nice 20% (a.k.a $1) profit.


I want to make this idea real, and have about 30 friends from across the states willing to participate, however I don't think that's quite enough and so I'm posting here wondering if any of you would be interested in participating?

We should do a blackhatworld secret santa... would be dope.

We could send each other scrapebox licenses, free private proxies, expired high-pr domain lists...

Or even bitcoin for the poor

TimpZy said:

I want to make this idea real, and have about 30 friends from across the states willing to participate, however I don't think that's quite enough and so I'm posting here wondering if any of you would be interested in participating?

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So you are marketing your website here, which is vs. the rules. However you sound young, female or both, so I will refrain from my usual bombast. After all, it's Christmas.

The problem with the model is that it's chump change. There's nothing that you can get for $4.00 online that anyone but the most simple-minded would want. Essentially it's a conversion factory, where you ask (hopefully) thousands of people to input $5.00 that they have full control over, in order to get $4.00 worth of "something" that someone else thought they should have.

Would you do that for $500? $50? If you think that at some point in the scale, people will change from no to yes, explain where you think that is, and why.

Essentially you are looking for a way to monetize Christmas and that's only about 2 months out of the year. So the idea needs to be pretty compelling to make it worthwhile. Your idea centers on the idea that people are both giving and getting. I think at that scale the idea of simply giving would be more effective. Maybe give $5.00 in order to build a pump in some African village. It is not unreasonable to keep 20% for administrative & overhead expenses. Get a contact in Africa to find a need, and use them to take photos, etc... start a blog and present the reality of the situation to your presumably american audience and then make your pitch. "80% of the money donated will be used to purchase and install a pump which will provide fresh water to a village of 150 people." Or whatever your objective is. A micro-charity.

People distrust Big Charity. They instinctively know that the Girl Scouts aren't getting any of that cookie money, and they resent it. If only those damn cookies weren't so damn GOOD. United Way is a scam, UNICEF, etc... they're all crooks. However, a single person in the US with a partner "far away" with a camera, a simple website and an effective social media campaign, and you might be able to do some genuine good, and make some money, both at the same time. One thing I'd like to see is an open accounting method, where your contributors can see every dollar that goes in, and where & how every dollar goes out. Give people a sense of ownership and they will invest themselves much deeper than they will on this fly-by-night, drive-by charities that beg for money constantly.

However in a larger sense I encourage you to continue to brainstorm and try to think of ways to make money. The more you learn, the more realistic your ideas become.

Great idea.But you will generate profit only around chritmas.Plus 1$ is way small money to even try something like this