Why We Built ShopGiv
I've told this story in pieces before, but I want to lay it out fully. ShopGiv didn't start with a pitch deck or a whiteboard session. It started with me standing in the bay at Adam & Son, watching a family pay for an oil change, and wondering why that transaction couldn't do more.
The moment it clicked
We see dozens of customers a day. Oil changes, brake jobs, timing belts, the usual. One afternoon I was watching our team close out tickets, and it hit me — every single one of those transactions was a missed opportunity. Not for us to make more money, but for the money already changing hands to do something meaningful on its way through.
What if every oil change funded a family's emergency repair? What if every brake job put a few dollars toward a community program? Not as a tax on the customer. Not as a marketing gimmick. As a built-in part of how the business works.
That was the seed.
Making it real
I started simple. Adam & Son became the first ShopGiv vendor because, well, I owned the shop. We committed a portion of every transaction to charitable programs. No price increases. No tip jars. The customer pays the same price they always would have. The difference comes from how we structure the business.
The model is straightforward, and the ShopGiv team wrote a great explanation of it: You Don't Pay More. Vendors Give More. That single idea — that giving can be embedded in commerce without burdening the consumer — is the foundation everything else is built on.
From one shop to a platform
Once we proved it worked at Adam & Son, the obvious question was: what if other businesses did this too? What if the coffee shop down the street, the dentist's office, the gym — what if every local business in Colorado Springs contributed a small piece of every transaction to community programs?
The math gets powerful fast. Colorado Springs has thousands of small businesses. If even a fraction of them adopted this model, the cumulative impact would be enormous. And that's not hypothetical — the nonprofit funding gap in communities like ours is real and well-documented. The $31M Problem lays out how much charitable funding communities are leaving on the table.
That realization pushed us to build ShopGiv into a platform that any business can join, not just ours.
The bigger picture
ShopGiv is now one piece of a larger ecosystem we call AiN Collective. It connects local businesses, community programs, and consumers in a loop where spending locally automatically generates charitable impact. The Stranded Motorist Fund, corporate giving programs, employee hardship funds — they all plug into the same infrastructure.
But it all started with an oil change. It started with a mechanic wondering if a transaction could be worth more than the sum of its parts.
Why I'm telling you this
I'm not a tech founder. I'm a Navy veteran who owns an auto repair shop. I built ShopGiv because I saw a problem from the shop floor that nobody in a boardroom was going to notice. Small businesses move billions of dollars through their communities every year. Most of that money just passes through. ShopGiv catches a piece of it and puts it to work.
If you run a local business and you've ever wanted your work to mean more than the bottom line, that's exactly what this is for. We built it because we needed it. And we think you might need it too.