Daniel Maghini built The Gift Whisperer around specific gift questions
Daniel Maghini is the founder of The Gift Whisperer, a gift recommendation site that suggests ideas based on answers about the recipient and occasion, and reminds users about upcoming holidays and occasions. The conversation covers early customer acquisition through Pinterest, what experiments taught him, and why he now builds guides around questions people already search for.
Start with a narrow audience and a question people already ask, then examine the existing search results before creating content. Maghini’s experience also shows why impressions alone are a weak measure unless they lead to meaningful next actions.
What’s the short story of how your business started, and what makes it genuinely different from the other options your customers have?
I’ve always loved giving gifts. I really enjoy finding something that fits a person, quirks and all, and I know a lot of people don’t have the time or patience for that so it turns into a chore they dread. I came up with the idea for The Gift Whisperer about 6 years ago and finally built it this year. You answer a few questions about the person and the occasion and it gives you a short list of specific ideas along with why each one fits them. I think that’s the difference. Most gift sites just hand you a bestseller list and you’re left guessing. It’s also just me, no team, and no signup needed.
How did you win your first customers, and where does most of your new business come from today?
Honestly it’s still early so I don’t have a big customer story yet. The first people to find it came through Pinterest, where I was posting pins for specific gift ideas, and Pinterest is still where most of my visitors come from. Google sends a lot fewer people but a bigger share of them click through to a store, though the numbers are small enough that I wouldn’t read too much into it yet. I did try paid ads for a bit but stopped. It’s a slow build for now.
What’s one decision that changed the direction of your business, and one mistake that taught you the most?
The decision was killing the paid Pinterest test. I spent about $38, got real clicks and no conversions, and decided to stop and put that time into guides instead. The mistake was the twelve quiz style pins I built. I was sure they’d work and each one got somewhere between 5 and 28 impressions. Meanwhile two simple question pins, like gifts for a man who has everything, got about 8,000 and 4,300. I think I was building what I thought was clever instead of what people were already searching for.
What has changed in your industry or in what your customers expect over the last couple of years, and how have you adapted?
The big change is how people search. Google puts answers and shopping boxes above the results now and a lot of people just ask a chatbot for gift ideas. A few of my pages do get cited in ChatGPT answers, but so far that’s sent me one visitor. To adapt I write each guide around one specific question, like gifts for a golfer instead of just gifts, and I keep the pages simple so they’re easy for a machine to read. I also couldn’t have built this by myself 5 years ago without a technical co-founder, so the tools changing is a big part of why I’m able to do this at all.
If you were advising someone starting out in your industry today, what would you tell them to do first, and what would you tell them to ignore?
I think the first thing is to pick one narrow group of people and a question they’re already asking, then look at who ranks for it before you write anything. I wrote a gifts for book lovers guide because the difficulty score said it was easy and it got 47 impressions and no clicks in 90 days. Bigger sites with longer pages already own that result. What I’d ignore are the SEO and backlink people who email you, and any visitor number that doesn’t tell you what those people did next.
Thank you to Daniel Maghini and the team at The Gift Whisperer for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
Want to tell the story behind your business?
Leaders Perception publishes interviews with business owners and leaders every week. Five questions, about ten minutes, no calls. It is free and every completed interview gets published.