The Inside Story Of SwiftGift – With Founder Kirill Chliaifchtein

In this day and age, people are more passionate about technology, apps and being online than sharing moments with loved ones and showing them they care. Even the good old fashioned practice of giving gifts started being limited to just the holiday season and a special birthday. And everybody loves gifts-they’re probably the one thing everyone can agree with. So why are we neglecting them, and the wonderful practice of making someone happy? Well, to be honest, there’s an app that can change all that. Combining technology with giving gifts, a team led by Kirill Chliaifchtein has managed to create the world’s first instant gift messenger – SwiftGift.Me!

We’ve already introduced you to the great idea that is SwiftGift.Me, but, of course, all great ideas deserve to be presented numerous times. SwiftGift.Me is the first instant gift messenger in the world. What that means is that you can use it to send real, tangible gifts to people from your phonebook. Its premise is simple – you type in a phone number, pick a gift, and the number receives a text message with the information on when to receive the gift. Being such a revolutionary idea, we were more than pleased to be able to interview the CEO and founder of SwiftGift.Me, Kirill Chliaifchtein. He told us everything we need to know about SwiftGift, and even gave us some inside information about the plans of the company.

SwiftGift.Me is in its essence, a gift app. Of course, there’s a lot more to it than that, but it’s the main idea behind the app. Allowing users to send physical gifts to people by using their phones sounds extremely complicated, but it isn’t.

Kirill helped us understand SwiftGift.Me by explaining that it allows users to send effortlessly awesome gifts to literally anyone in their phone’s contact book. The great thing is that you don’t need to know the address of the person you’re sending the gift to, just send them something and they get to choose where they want it delivered! That can be convenient when sending gifts to your colleagues or friends, or even sending flowers to your crush!

How Does SwiftGift.Me Work?

The team behind SwiftGift.Me wanted to revolutionize the gifting process. When you want to give a great gift, it requires time and effort. You need to go through the process of finding the right gift, purchasing it, getting a card, getting it wrapped up, etc. There’s also the problem of actually getting that gift to the recipient, which can get rather tricky:

Getting a great gift requires a lot of time and effort. There are traditional frictions such as finding the perfect gift, actually purchasing it, getting it wrapped, buying a card… And there are the less obvious problems: such as “how do I now get the gift to my Recipient” (the answer is usually to see them in person).

We’ve built SwiftGift to remove all these frictions and to revolutionize the gifting process.

The personal touch – just like being there!

Of course, people don’t just send a pair of shoes, for example. You need to add a note or something, right? Well SwiftGift.Me has you covered: you can send both a personalized note and a selfie, or if you are not the selfie-sending type, any photo will be just great. That way you can insert that personal touch you need to make your gifts great, and Kirill also says that they provide a Gift Concierge feature which empowers users to find and send any gift in the world.

Spam? Noup – Gifts!

Kirill told us that in the beginning, some said that the service would not work because it would be perceived as spam. They solved the issue in a very innovative way, by just sending the gift message from the sender’s phone number. That way, the recipient is notified of their gift by a message directly from a friend, which makes all the difference:

Before we launched, some people said that the service would not work because it would be perceived as “spammy”. They reasoned that Recipients would not trust the text messages notifying them of their gifts, and hence would not accept gifts.

We solved this issue in a very innovative way: SwiftGift sends the gift SMS from the Recipient’s phone number, meaning that the Recipient is notified of their gift by a message directly from a friend (as opposed to a message from a company). This makes all the difference.

 Our gift acceptance rate stands at over 90%!

Kirill informed us that most gifts that SwiftGift delivers are available with “next-day” delivery and that those deliveries are indeed the ones people choose the most. That seems pretty logical to us at .ME, after all, when we send gifts we want them to be delivered as soon as possible, because the excitement of waiting for someone to open the gift is often extremely high, and the option of getting something delivered the very next day should be available in all things if you ask us.

Getting Back To The Offline World…

We talked with Kirill about the current state the market is in and asked him where does he think SwiftGift.Me fits in with the newest trends in online matchmaking, and sites like Tinder, etc. We wanted to know did the huge popularity of those apps help people perceive SwiftGift.Me as an app that brings people closer? He said that SwiftGift.me tries to bring the physical back into a world of virtual interaction:

SwiftGift is bringing the physical back into a world of virtual interaction. In a universe where most of our communication is now online – through social networks and messengers – SwiftGift allows people to send physical, tangible gifts to display emotion. In fact, we are a fantastic fit with dating apps, and this is certainly something that is already on our radar. But no secret password – no more information from us!

Future Plans? The US Market

SwiftGift also has great plans for spreading into the USA market, and Kirill informed us that they already have a “huge partnership” signed in the United States. So there you have it, exclusive information for our American readers, straight from the CEO of SwiftGift! Also, great people are what fuels great companies so  there is no infrastructure that is more important than people. He says that the real strength of any business is an amazing team, something SwiftGift.Me surely has.

Absolutely. The USA is our next target, and we already have a huge partnership signed on that side of the pond (we will give you that information without the password). We will be coming to other countries soon too!

Infrastructure is secondary to people. To scale any business, the key is great people. And these are harder to find that building any infrastructure! We are very lucky to have built an amazing team. That’s the real strength of any business. We have lots of cool features on the way in the coming months (ranging from wishlists and birthday calendars to “secret admirer” style gifting). We are also building an Android version and will be expanding to markets outside of UK.

As a special launch feature, we are giving away a free gift to anyone who downloads the app and spreads the word! Just download the app today – your gift is already waiting for you 🙂

We asked Kiril what drew him to the best of domains, and he simply said that .ME feels personal and emotional, and that’s precisely what SwiftGift seeks, because gifting is emotional, and sometimes intimate.

So there you have it, Kirill was really on point with describing what .ME is all about, and we can’t wait to see what will the future bring to our favorite gifting app. We would like to thank Kirill and SwiftGift for giving us an inside scoop on the company and its plans, and we will continue to bring you the best information about SwiftGift and the best .ME sites!