AMA: I'm building Giveku, a crowdfunding site that helps students who live in developing countries.

Hi @elenat. Thank you for your question. On the student side, right now it is limited to a select group of verified students in Indonesia. On the giver side, because we use Stripe, anyone with a credit card should be able to support these students.

Hi @chary_cox15 thank you for the kind words. You brought up a good point: verification. I think it will be crucial with regards to how fast I can grow Giveku. One idea is for Giveku to partner with each school. Only students who go to partner schools can create a Giveku profile. This allows my team to verify the student’s information and authenticity with the school that they go to. Another alternative is to open the faucet and allow any student to create an account and require them to upload certain verification documents. Once that’s done, perhaps someone from Giveku can review them remotely. Those are just some ideas. However, as of the coming launch, the students that have profiles on there will be students that I have personally verified. Fun fact, I actually started a scholarship last year. As of today, most of the students profiles on Giveku were either former scholarship recipients of mine (who have completed their 1-year scholarship program last month), students that received scholarships from people that I know (but have since completed their program as well), or students that didn’t receive a scholarship but I had the chance to interview. So it’s still a closed but verified recipients list for now. But if this is successful, my goal is to open it up to more people. Once the funds are received by Giveku, they will be wired to the student’s parents or legal guardian. All of whom I’ve verified. And to limit overfunding, I’m thinking of limiting the pool to 1 year of academic tuition. Once that limit is reached, the student will have to wait until the next academic year to seek funding for the upcoming year. Thanks again for the amazing questions @chary_cox15. Best of luck with your own products!