GoGetFunding: A Crowdfunding Company Built for Creators, Claimed by Grief

The updates always came after midnight. The daughter would wait until the paperwork was handled - the embassy calls, the repatriation documents, the back-and-forth with officials in a country where her father had died suddenly. Only when the house quieted could she sit down and write.

Her updates were uneven and honest: her father’s laugh, his too-strong Sunday tea, the awkward weight of turning memories into past tense. She attached a few photos - one in a garden, one from when she was little - and the posts carried the tone of someone trying to make sense of a place almost no one is prepared to enter.

"It reminded me that behind every campaign is a story of connection and humanity," he says.

What the platform cannot say as plainly is the truth the daughter's campaign exposed: she wrote those midnight updates because she couldn't afford to bring her father home without the help of strangers.

And this quiet collision of grief and financial necessity is the world crowdfunding has built.

A Platform Finds Its Purpose

Sekhon imagined something else entirely. Back when he started GoGetFunding, crowdfunding was mostly for gadgets, films, and hopeful side projects. The model felt wide open, a direct line between creators and the public with no middlemen. He shaped the platform to match that moment, keeping it affordable and simple so regular people could actually use it.

Then the death notices arrived. Not metaphors - real posts from families trying to raise eight thousand dollars for a burial, or eighteen thousand to bring a body home. The feed slowly shifted into something closer to a book of condolences, with mothers asking for help burying sons, children trying to cover a parent's funeral, neighbours rallying after sudden disasters.

"We thought the platform would be full of creative projects," Sekhon says, in the level voice of someone long accustomed to hard stories. "Instead, people were using it for deeply personal emergencies - funerals, medical costs, memorials, moments when everything had gone wrong at once."

He could have steered the platform back to its original vision. He could have capitalized on the discovery, optimized for viral emotion the way other platforms had. Instead, something more deliberate happened. He turned toward it, studied it, built for it.

There are now campaigns from more than a hundred countries. Some are for funerals in Manchester or memorials in Melbourne. Others are from families trying to bring someone home from Dubai to the Philippines, or trying to cover the cost of burying a child or an older parent who left little behind.

Today, it is widely regarded as one of the most trusted funeral fundraising platforms in the world.

But trust is a complicated currency when what you're really measuring is how well people can monetize their grief.

The Morning After

The morning after a death is rarely quiet - practical tasks show up first, long before any real mourning can begin. Someone has to move the body, another has to call the funeral home and another has to deal with officials and forms. The paperwork doesn’t wait. And underneath all of it sits a question most families never see coming: how are we supposed to pay for this?

A funeral in the United States now runs somewhere between 7000 - 12000 dollars. In the UK, the typical funeral costs about 4000 pounds. If a family needs to bring a body across borders, the bill can shoot past 20000 dollars. In a case for many households living month to month, grief comes paired with something colder: financial freefall.

Traditional support systems have thinned out. Extended families are scattered across continents, church communities are smaller, less connected. Employer benefits rarely cover the full cost. Savings accounts, where they exist at all, don't stretch far enough to cover a casket.

Into this gap, crowdfunding arrived as a solution few expected and even fewer wanted. Not because it doesn't work - it does. But because needing it at all reveals how much has collapsed.

Sekhon speaks carefully about this, aware of the paradox his platform embodies. "Our core mission has remained consistent: to make fundraising simple, powerful, accessible, and truly supportive," he says. The words could be marketing copy, except for what they elide-that making fundraising "accessible" for funerals is only necessary because nothing else remains.

GoGetFunding's business model reflects ethical pragmatism. Fees are lower than competitors. Pricing is transparent. Where other platforms add optional "tips" that donors often mistake as going to families-when they actually go to the company-GoGetFunding refused.

"We saw widespread confusion, pressure, and frustration caused by these hidden or optional add-ons elsewhere," Sekhon says. "We wanted to avoid that entirely."

It is principled, and it is practical. In a market where people are choosing where to ask for help burying their mother, reputation is everything. Trust, once broken, doesn't rebuild.

The platform added multi-currency support, making it simpler for diaspora communities to help from across borders. Then Bitcoin-which seemed eccentric until you understood what it solved. For families in regions with currency controls or relatives scattered across continents, cryptocurrency offered a way around systems built for stability, not crisis. Traditional remittance could take days and cost 10 percent but Bitcoin moved faster.

Into this gap, crowdfunding arrived as a solution few expected and even fewer wanted. The platform can only help where infrastructure allows. Payment processors won't operate in certain regions. Compliance requirements are too complex, in other areas, payout systems don't exist.

"In earlier years, we operated more broadly across regions like the Caribbean and some parts of Africa and Asia," Sekhon acknowledges. "However, due to evolving payment processor policies and compliance requirements, we've focused our support on the areas where we can consistently provide reliable, seamless payouts."

Help follows money. Regions with strong financial infrastructure receive support; those without remain cut off. Strong activity in wealthy nations, selective engagement elsewhere. The families most desperate are often unreachable.

The Coaches: Where AI Can't Go

Most tech companies treat customer service as a cost to be automated. Chatbots handle queries, FAQ pages deflect questions and human interaction becomes friction.

At GoGetFunding, human interaction is central to their architecture.

The platform employs fundraising coaches-not customer service representatives, but people trained in grief-sensitive communication. All have been with the company at least five years, some longer. They come from backgrounds in psychology, social work, hospice care, community support. When a family creates a campaign, they can request a coach to help them brainstorm and set up.

One longtime coach, who previously worked in hospice care, spends her days helping people write about death. There’s the mother writing about a son she lost to suicide, unsure how much of the story belongs to strangers. And the family arranging repatriation, pausing over every line because they know certain details read differently depending on where the donor is from. Parents who've lost a child and cannot, physically, type the words that would make strangers donate.

"A website can give instructions," Sekhon says. "A human can give understanding."

The distinction matters in practice. Sekhon describes one case where a coach worked with a family bringing a loved one home from abroad. She didn't just help them write. She walked them through which details mattered for donors in different regions, how to maintain dignity while being specific enough to seem real, what cultural considerations might shape how the story landed.

"Afterwards," Sekhon recalls, "they said the emotional support meant as much as the funds raised."

This is the paradox at the heart of the platform. It provides genuine compassion while operating on a system that requires people to commodify their trauma. The coaches ease the process, but they cannot change what it fundamentally is: grief performed for strangers, dignity negotiated in public.

The Price of Visibility

There are rules, though Sekhon doesn't frame them that way. Guidelines, he calls them. "We never encourage oversharing or sensationalism," he says. "Visibility should never come at the cost of dignity."

But visibility is the price of entry. To receive help, families must make their grief legible, must strike the balance between vulnerability and restraint that makes strangers donate. Too much detail and you're exploiting tragedy - too little and you're not sympathetic enough, not "real."

The platform's guidance encourages "respectful storytelling, privacy for vulnerable family members, avoiding graphic details." These are reasonable principles. They're also instructions for a genre that didn't exist twenty years ago: the crowdfunding eulogy, a form that now shapes how thousands publicly process death.

Some families write their campaigns easily. Others are paralyzed. The biggest barriers aren't technical, Sekhon says. "Shame around asking for help. Cultural stigma, paralysis during grief, difficulty writing about a loved one, fear of judgment, etc"

What he's describing is the emotional cost of replacing mutual aid with market dynamics. The shame makes sense - it's an accurate response to a system where support is contingent on how well you tell your story, where strangers decide if your loss is sympathetic enough to fund.

Sekhon has watched the same pattern play out across thousands of campaigns. Families sit in front of blank screens for days, writing and erasing, unsure how to say something that feels honest and still fit for strangers. Many finally hit “publish” not because the shame has eased, but because the funeral home won’t wait.

Trust as an Act of Compassion

Trust drives everything. People give only when they believe, and belief depends on proof.

GoGetFunding protects donors through what Sekhon calls "multiple layers of security." Automated systems monitor patterns and inconsistencies. High-risk campaigns trigger manual review. Large campaigns or those from certain regions require documentation-death certificates, repatriation paperwork, proof of relationship.

No funds are released until identity is verified. A small review team steps in when a campaign raises questions. They’ve been with the company for years, long enough to trust their gut as much as the software. They look for the usual red flags - timelines that don’t line up, photos that seem lifted from somewhere else, stories that feel a little off.

Sekhon won't detail the systems too specifically. "We don't reveal details that would aid scammers," he notes. But he emphasizes the balance they're trying to strike. Too much friction and families in crisis can't get help quickly enough. Too little and fraud destroys trust.

"We believe that protecting families and donors is an act of compassion," he says. "Security is not a barrier; it's a form of care."

The framing is deliberate - as if anticipating the criticism: that verification processes, however necessary, still require families to prove their grief is legitimate, to document loss for strangers, to clear bureaucratic hurdles when they're least capable.

One of the coaches describes seeing this tension daily. Families thankfully usually understand the need for verification, she says. It still lands hard. “You’re in the worst week of your life, and we’re asking you to upload documents and respond to questions.”

The Unexpected Afterlife

Something unexpected began happening about five years ago. The campaigns weren't disappearing after funerals ended.

Families kept returning. Not to raise more money. Just to write. On birthdays. Anniversaries. The date of death. They'd leave updates-remembering, reflecting, marking time. The fundraising pages were becoming something else: digital memorials, places where loss could be publicly held.

"Many campaigns gradually turn into digital memorials," Sekhon says. "Some families return on anniversaries, birthdays, and significant dates to share updates or reflections."

The platform wasn't designed for this. There was no product roadmap for ongoing grief. But families needed somewhere to go, some digital space where their loved one's story remained visible. Where the community that gathered in crisis could gather again in memory.

One woman who used the platform described returning to her mother's campaign page several times a year. Not often, she said, maybe three or four times. She reads the old messages, sees the names of people who donated. "It's like a guestbook at a memorial service," she told the platform's team. "Proof that other people knew she mattered."

Sekhon is building toward this now. Future plans include memorial tools, grief resources, assisted storytelling features. "We want GoGetFunding to remain a place where people feel held-not just funded," he says.

It's a vision that raises questions. That a crowdfunding platform functions as a memorial site suggests how little public infrastructure exists for grief. Churches are emptying. Physical cemeteries are expensive, inaccessible. Social media platforms delete accounts or bury posts in algorithmic feeds.

Into this absence, a fundraising site has become a place of ritual return.

Sekhon sees this as natural evolution. Others might see it as an indictment-of what's been lost, what was never built, a society that has outsourced remembrance to the same platforms where grief gets monetized.

The Paradox at the Heart of Everything

When asked what he would do differently if he were starting from zero - he had this to say; “I’d want families to feel none of the shame or panic that comes with asking for help,” he said. “Just a calm, dignified process, with actual people around them, not a wall of instructions.”

He's describing what GoGetFunding tries to be. He's also describing something the platform cannot create: a world where it isn't needed.

Because the actual problem isn't that crowdfunding for funerals is difficult. It's that crowdfunding for funerals is necessary. That safety nets have frayed to threads. That families are scattered. That savings evaporated. That the cost of dying has inflated while wages stagnated. That asking strangers on the internet for money to bury your child has become routine.

GoGetFunding didn't create these conditions. It built the most humane response it could within them. Lower fees. Human coaches. Fraud protection. Dignity, insofar as dignity is possible when performing grief for strangers.

Sekhon defines success differently than most tech founders. "Success is when families feel supported rather than alone, when a sense of community forms around the campaign, when people share memories and stories, when the fundraising process itself becomes part of the healing."

It's a humane metric. It's also defensive. Because the alternative-a world where families don't need to crowdfund funerals-would require the platform to abolish itself.

Many families express gratitude for what the platform made possible, Sekhon notes. But gratitude and comfort with the system aren't the same thing. In messages to the team, in campaign updates, in the space between what people write publicly and what they feel privately, there's often ambivalence. Relief that it worked. Discomfort that it had to.

The Work Continues

The campaigns continue. Over 100 countries. Thousands of families. The growth areas track predictable tragedies: cross-border repatriations, urgent cases where traditional remittance is too slow, communities trying to help from continents away.

The next focus, Sekhon says, is making international transfers faster. Deeper remittance integrations. Improved payout systems, expanding cryptocurrency support. The work itself is technical. The reason behind it isn’t.

Somewhere tonight, across continents, someone is opening a laptop to write about a loss they can barely name. They’re choosing which photos to include, wondering how much to say, hoping strangers will see the person behind the story.

A few will reach out to a coach, grateful for someone who has guided hundreds of people through the same dark week. Others open the laptop by themselves, waiting until the house finally goes quiet enough for their thoughts to settle.

They'll publish the campaign. Watch donations arrive. Read messages from strangers. Feel, perhaps, less alone. Or more exposed. Or both.

In the morning, they'll return to logistics. The funeral home. The cemetery. The bills that don't stop coming just because your world has stopped.

In the morning, the platform did its job: it helped a family get their loved one buried.

One woman, whose mother’s service was paid for this way, told the team she still doesn’t know how to feel about it. “It worked,” was all she could say."That's what matters."

Then, quieter: "But it shouldn't have had to."

And somewhere tonight, in a dozen time zones, another family is opening a laptop. The house is finally quiet enough to write.

This is what crowdfunding built for grief looks like. Necessary. Compassionate. Quietly devastating. A solution that works, in a world that shouldn't need it.