Launching a new app is no easy task, so we spoke to co-founder Alex Kennedy to find out more about Givvit…

In one sentence, what is your product/service?

Givvit is an app that lets you send little treats such as coffees, drinks and snacks to friends, family and colleagues for them to pick up at our range of high street retail partners.

What problem(s) does it solve?

There is no effective method to digitally treat a friend, colleague, customer or employee to an everyday, low cost treat such as a coffee, cake or a beer.

Treating is a universal behaviour which can be effectively used to highlight and augment a particular thought or message to distinguish it from the crowd but there is currently no way to properly enable this.

Online communication has become increasingly impersonal, with email overload and over 5bn daily likes and 500m daily tweets; messages often get lost in the ’noise’.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was an easy, fun and good value method to reward customers, incentivise employees and help people show their loved ones they care?

What are your immediate goals?

To build an engaged user base, get more retail “treat” partners on board and generally spread the good word of Givvit!

What were the biggest challenges involved in building the tech or your team?

We have had a million challenges to get it from an idea to a live and functioning product.

The biggest one has been the tech as neither I, nor my co-founder James can write a line of code.

So our partnership with Shaping Cloud helped us surmount that challenge, it helped that I went to school with Carlos the founder.

We have worked very hard to ensure that anyone we have taken on has been of the same ethos and beliefs as James and I, and probably by luck more than design the guys working on Givvit now are all amazing.

How will the company make money?

We will make a very small margin on each treat bought. So we’ll only make money if we have real scale… the battle is on.

Who is in your team?

My co-founder James Cullen and I started Givvit, and we were joined last summer by our operations manager Diane Fawkes and creative director Dan Corbett.

Our tech partner Shaping Cloud has a team who make the whizzy tech magic happen; Carlos, James W, Anita, Cliff, Dave, John, Nick and Tom.

Where would you like to be in one, three and five years’ time?

One year: To be a fully established, recognised app in the UK market with a bigger range of retailers on and an active and engaged user base.

Three years: To be booming in the UK and have launched in the US and Europe.

Five years: To be in as many countries across the world as possible. Helping friends and family treat each other every day and enabling all manner of corporate and brand rewards and loyalty treating.

Other than your own, what are your favourite websites / apps / tools?

I am a music buff first and foremost and absolutely love Spotify and it basically soundtracks my life.

App-wise it has to be Instagram (obvious choice I know) and YPlan, and the best tool we use is Dropbox as it makes working disparately very easy.