At Send My Kid, we are changing the way you plan and pay for education – by combining social fundraising, rewards spending with gamification. I like to think of it as “Personal crowdfunding for education, from crib-through-college”.
There isn’t one website out there that focuses on the management of tuition funds from “crib-through-college”. Education is so important to us, it’s amazing there is a huge void here. There are separate crowdfunding platforms and 529 account programs, but none that focus entirely on education from “crib-through-college”. Upromise comes close, but it isn’t enough as it doesn’t have fundraising built in. None of them offer aggressive fundraising tools.Givezooks, IndieGoGo, Kiva.org – all have nice user interfaces, which SMK needs to be successful for user registration and retention. SMK user interface isn’t bad, but it needs to be perfect.Scholarshare only focuses on 529 accounts for California. Fidelity Ufund only focuses on 529 accounts for Massachusetts. The only service that focuses on educational funding for individuals is Upromise.SMK uses PayPal – so the individual has freedom of choosing where to put the money. The only other type of service that does this well are the crowdfunding platforms – but they don’t focus on education.Rewards – Upromise provides rewards kickbacks for education. eScrip provides rewards kickbacks for schools and groups, but not individuals.There isn’t a site out there that integrates with schools.There isn’t a site out there that integrates with several different investment firms. (more than one).There isn’t a site out there that integrates with idle Grant money.There isn’t a site out there that integrates with available student loans.
What we have here are the “spends” to get to the next “value inflection points”.