In 2005 when the founders were paying for their own wedding, they didn’t have the budget left over for the once-in-a-lifetime honeymoon, and going into debt wasn’t an option. So they created a makeshift honeymoon registry, and their wedding guests loved it, giving more than $5,000 and begging for a similar solution for other weddings. With that, Honeyfund was born.

Like the founders, today couples are paying for their own weddings with little budget left over for the honeymoon or life beyond. They care about starting life together without debt, and they simply don’t need nor value the material items on a typical wedding registry. In other words, they crave experiences over things.

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With these two universal shifts that we observed in consumer behavior -- couples paying for their own weddings and wishing for experience-based or cash-based gifts more than things --  Honeyfund transformed the wedding gift industry. Now the company sees an opportunity to lead the same shift in life events beyond the wedding. 

Let’s face it: Life for a married couple is costly and unpredictable. There are countless life events to plan for -- baby showers, anniversaries, home purchases, graduations, retirements, and deaths in the family to name a few. Close friends and family members want to be there to help with these monumental moments.

And now, the COVID-19 has placed further financial burden on us all, making it clear that anything can happen when we least expect it. What people care about now isn’t the hustle, bustle and stress of daily life. It’s the people we love. Now more than ever, we all need a place like Honeyfund to stay connected and support each other financially. 

We created Honeyfund for everyone who longs for that dream honeymoon experience but doesn’t have the budget and doesn’t want to go into debt. After funding more than a million couples’ honeymoons with the support of 6 million givers, Honeyfund has established itself as a trusted brand in experience and cash-based gifts. And we learned a lot along the way. 

Shortly after starting Honeyfund, couples started asking us if they could have a similar service for other life events. As a result, we’ve funded more than 13,000 baby showers, anniversaries, retirement parties, graduations, hardships and more.

What we learned by hosting these individual events is that the same friends and family came out to support each one. That’s why we’re building a permanent life-long funding platform that doesn’t require separate accounts and campaigns pages, unlike other crowdfunding competitors such as GoFundMe and IndieGoGo. Each personalized honeyfund account can be tailored and transformed to handle any life event, for example what was a wedding gift site can become a baby gift site. 

All the friends and family that contributed to your previous events will be notified if you make a change or post an update to your honeyfund, prompting them to support you again. 

One thing we’ve always heard since launching Honeyfund is, “What a cool idea! I wish I had that when I got married.” With our new life-long funding page, you can have it for anything in your life. If you didn’t use Honeyfund for your wedding -- you can sign up for a baby on the way, a milestone anniversary or birthday, even an unexpected hardship.  Just invite your friends and family to visit, follow your honeyfund site and make a contribution. Your honeyfund account and all your friends and family stay with you through that event and all the others that will inevitably come your way. They’ll never have to worry about missing an important milestone in your life.

Finally, every Honeyfund gift you give or receive will earn a cash-back reward, increasing your budget for whatever life throws your way. 

We have already made our mark in the evolving wedding gift market, which is valued at $19 billion annually (source). Now we are expanding into all-occasion gifting, with a market size approximately seven times larger at $130 billion year-round (source).

We have also capitalized on the fact that the gifting market is essentially a self-powered marketing engine. Everyone that signs up for a Honeyfund wedding registry invites, on average, 150 of their closest friends and family to their page. Each of those relationships potentially leads to additional platform users, contributing to our super low customer acquisition cost. 

Further, donation-based crowdfunding has become more popular with a 2016 report from the Pew Research Center finding that 22% of American adults had contributed to a crowdsourced fundraising project, and most donors (68%) contributed to help someone in need. (source) The fact is, giving feels good. Especially when someone we love is hurting.

Since our 2006 launch, we have played host to over a million couples receiving $640 million in gifts given, from 6 million givers. Honeyfund’s innovation in crowdfunding has also been recognized by prominent media outlets and partners. In 2012, Honeyfund was named one of TIME.com’s Top 50 websites.

In 2014, we made an appearance on Shark Tank and ended up with an investor and advisor in Kevin O’ Leary, aka ‘Mr. Wonderful.’

In 2018, Honeyfund launched an exclusive partnership with Target to power honeymoon gifting on Target’s online wedding registry.

And in response to COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, we partnered with Kevin and the Jamaica Tourist Board to provide relief to wedding couples impacted by the global pandemic.

Honeyfund truly is remarkable when it comes to its business model. Unlike other crowdfunding sites, we do not charge platform fees, which is great for our customers and their friends and family. There’s just a simple processing fee of less than 3%, deducted from the amount received. There is never any fee to the giver.

Honeyfund earns revenue from the partners that help us facilitate gift payments and gift card fulfillment. For example, the average eGift Card gift of $120 results in about $10 in commissions paid by the gift card brand. And the recipient receives the full amount!

We also work closely with our gift card partners in retail, travel, and other industries. These partnerships drive advertising revenue to the company without resulting in unwanted or disruptive ads on the platform. We simply add value to customers in the form of travel deals, gift card bonuses and more.  We will expand these partnerships with our planned rewards program to grow customer lifetime value while providing savings to our customers.

Finally, even though our core customer acquisition strategy happens at the wedding planning stage, our expanded capabilities will enable acquisition during any life event at the same low customer acquisition cost of about $1 on average.

After a winning appearance on Shark Tank, our CEO and co-founder Sara Margulis was propelled into several media and speaking engagements. Her thought leadership in entrepreneurship, women in business and work/life balance has been shared at SXSW, Aspen Ideas and the Inc. Womens’ Summit. After fully acquiring the company from her co-founder in 2019, Sara overhauled the product with a fresh site design and improved payment methods, doubling customer engagement in just one year.

Sara is supported by a 23-member team. This includes an agile and extensible technology team, a 5-star customer service team, and an 8-person marketing team.

Finally, Sara’s key advisors include Kevin O’Leary of Shark Tank, David Jakubowski, founder of Ureeka and former head of data at Facebook and former GM of search monetization at Microsoft, and Rebecca Messina, senior advisor at McKinsey & Co. and former CMO of Uber and Beam Suntory.

Our vision for Honeyfund: a closed social network for gifting -- where friends and family support each other through all of life’s milestones, mishaps and monumental moments -- gifts that last a lifetime.

This model is better than a one-off “fund me” type campaign because everyone we know and love is already connected to us on our Honeyfund gifting site. When life happens, simply post an update and Honeyfund notifies your support network. 

Your investment in Honeyfund will power 1) 6-9 months of feature and app development to expand the popular gifting platform’s capabilities from a wedding focus to the gift occasions beyond, 2) the development of a cash-back rewards system that will keep customers and their friends and family coming back again and again, and 3) marketing to attract customers at all stages of life, as well as re-engage our database of 7 million past couples and givers.

Honeyfund has established itself as a beloved brand in the wedding gifting space because it transformed wedding gifts from “things” to experiences. It has a substantial customer database, a finely-tuned product, and the customer engagement to become the de facto platform for online gift giving for any life event. Don't miss out on this unique opportunity as we expand into a $130 billion market.