It certainly wasn’t a lost weekend for Son Ca Vu.
The 25-year-old took her idea for a new Web business to Startup Weekend in Midtown last month, where 150 aspiring entrepreneurs came together to pitch ideas, vote on the best ones and form teams to launch prototypes by the weekend’s end.
Participants whose ideas passed muster got 54 hours of intense scrutiny at the event. Marketing pros, product managers and designers helped mold ideas into working business plans with goal-setting to get the product off the ground.
Son’s business plan came from her life experience receiving bad gifts from boyfriends over the years.
And so was born Girlfriend Box (GiftBo for short), which allows guys to subscribe to a service that picks presents for their girlfriends for birthdays, anniversaries and holidays.
“A lot of times, you can tell if a gift is last-minute, like something you saw at Duane Reade, a teddy bear from two blocks away, and you say, ‘Oh, he picked this up on the way to dinner,’ ” she recalls. One Valentine’s Day, she says, “I ended up crying on that special occasion.”
Her team consists of five part-time counterparts in their mid- to late 20s, most of whom she met at the weekend event.
Son, one of Startup Weekend’s top 15 finalists, who get to present to a panel of influential leaders, is launching her business at a time when monthly delivery subscription services are becoming a hot trend.
From Birchox, which specializes in health and beauty products, to MistoBox Coffee, and even BarkBox for your pup, these online services are making malls nervous.
She plans to be fully launched before the holiday season. “I think it’s the right time,” says Son. “Customers have been trained through this, and … [investors] are much more willing to invest in this than they were two years ago.”