Help a Local Startup by Staring in a Commercial and Loaning us Bad Gifts

[mica.cardillo]

Friends of the Rogue Hack Lab,

We have a local startup called PickUrGift that Leland, myself, and a few others are helping with.  It is just one of at least four different startups that Rogue Hack Lab members are currently involved with.

What is PickUrGift?  It's a twist on the long established tradition of gift giving.  It allows you to easily save gift ideas from nearly any website and turn them into Gift Pages for specific people in your life.  You can then share those Gift Pages to get feedback from friends and family on those gift ideas.  And finally, you can even send the Gift Page to the giftee and let them mark the gift ideas they would actually want.  It turns out that people love giving and receiving gifts this way.

We are gearing up for the holiday season to see if we can attract people in our own community to help test out this new service.  We're implementing a re-branding and slowly improving a codebase we inherited from an outside development team.  We'll also be releasing a Firefox and Chrome browser extensions in time for the holidays, and we're working on a mobile app to hopefully release before Black Friday. 

Most importantly, we need to establish the our user acquisition strategy in a well-defined area, so that we can go forward with some strong data and scale the most effective strategies out to the entire US market. And that's where you can help.  Part of our user acquisition strategy is to build up some brand recognition in our local markets in a way that we could later reproduce nationally.   To do that, we are going to implement a multi-faceted marketing campaign that includes local TV commercials.

We want to make these TV commercials to be funny and entertaining.  And we would enjoy featuring a cross section of different people in our commercials.   One of the scripts is basically a support group for people who've given terrible gifts, and another for people who've received gifts they didn't want.

At risk of embarssing anyone, we would also like to have some examples of bad gifts to use as props in the commercial.  If you have ever received a gift that you put in the garage and never ever used, we'd love it if you brought it to the shoot.

The first commercial shoot is this Sunday at KOBI 5 studios beginning at NOON.  We'd love to have you and/or friends and/or family members join us for the afternoon and volunteer your most video/photogenic of your bunch.  We'll even take you out to dinner afterwards, and we promise a good time for all.

If this sounds like a fun afternoon outing and you want to participate, please let me know you're interested.  Thanks for your support.

[John Armstrong]

The grammar police have just arrived...
In the title of this thread, I think you meant "starring" ( in a commercial ), not "staring".
Just a detail that you don't want to propagate before correcting.
Now, on to reading the post and looking for the perfect gift...
Regards,
John