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November 4, 2010 by Angela Shupe | 1 Comment

Getting laid off from a job is never easy, however Dana Ostomel was able to take that experience and turn it into a positive reports The Huffington Post.

In her bright Midtown Manhattan apartment, Ostomel started Deposit a Gift, an online cash gift registry service that lets friends and family contribute cash toward honeymoons, home down payments, cribs, college funds, and anything in between.

“The idea had been percolating for a while,” said 33-year-old Ostomel, who has a background in advertising. “But my own experience getting married informed my decision.”

As with most start-ups, the beginning was exciting but rough. For the first time Ostomel didn’t have anyone giving her feedback or complimenting her when she did something good. She also no longer had a title, something with which she identified
herself for so long. Sometimes, while sitting at her living room desk, building her own website from scratch with no previous programming knowledge, she wondered whether she would actually pull it off.

“One of my biggest concerns was, ‘Am I going to finish? Is this a reality? Can I actually take this idea in my mind and make it into a website that actually works?’” she wondered. “You have to get up in the morning and make your own to-do list, and you have to make yourself do those things thinking that it’s actually going to result in something.”