The App That's Revolutionizing the Gift Exchange: Meet dearduck

Gifting is often arbitrary and daunting. Finding the perfect present is almost impossible. We usually pick something small and random like a gift card or money to give to our friends and family because we don’t know what they like.

To solve this problem, future-minded entrepreneur, Katy Aucoin has launched dearduck, an innovative app she says can turn the gift-exchange process into something easy and enjoyable for all parties. Designed as an information aggregator and disseminator, the app lets users check off what they like, or are in the market for, then suggests gifts to those in search off what to buy fellow app users. Auction's goal is to ultimately help people pick out something they will love without a hassle or worry.

In a digital age where we live most of our lives online, roaming aisles of bookstores and department stores is a thing of the past. Although we love Amazon, browsing it's disorganized and massive merchandise assortment, rarely help in the quest to find the perfect item. This is why Aucoin believes the future of gift-giving lies in dear duck, her tech offering that blends high-tech data analysis with human psychology, two of her passions.

Katy Aucoin

I went to LSU, studied accounting and my hometown is Baton Rouge Louisiana. I started as an IT consultant at EY specializing in data analytics right out of college.

It seemed like almost everyday I had to make decisions for other people that left me feeling like I was shooting in the dark. Which wine do they prefer? Are they gluten free? What scent makes them sneeze? What should I give them for their birthday? In 2015, I realized that I could combine my background in data analytics with this lifelong passion for the psychology behind gifting to revolutionize gifting. Essentially, I have combined my personal pain point, passion and profession into a solution that benefits many.

Today, dearduck makes it easier to make the right choices for others – every person in your life, for any reason and every budget — every, single, time.

Take the holidays for example, if your clients are in your dearduck flock & you want to give them a bottle of wine - we send the right wine recommendations directly to your inbox 30/14/7 days in advance so you never have to guess again– we even let you know if you should say Happy Hanukah or Merry Christmas!

We allow retailers to send the right recommendations for your flock. Before dearduck, their only option was to send generalized gift guides around the holiday calendar - such as the gift guide for her on Mother’s Day. It should be the gift guide for your mom at any given point throughout the year.

dearduck's Gifting Lens platform captures discreet user preferences across myriad categories delivering highly personalized gifting-focused user experiences, via a proprietary algorithm, to the user's network based on key dates or just because.

dearduck currently includes a rest API, a backend Admin panel for programming the user experiences and an MVP consumer facing IOS app where user experiences such as preference capturing techniques, and algorithm evolutions are tested. In the near future the Gifting Lens platform will power a series of responsive B2B2C pilot experiences.

Our goal is to facilitate successful gift exchanges for any relationship, personal or professional, and for any occasion or just because. Successful exchanges say, "I know you", "I understand you", "I appreciate you" resulting in strengthened relationships - our mission.

The API allows us to create new front ends using the existing platform and features relatively easily. The admin panel allows our editorial and curation team to modify significant areas of the live app such as creating and modifying categories and preference tags, adding curated products, creating featured collections and alerting users of key features. Publishing a change in the admin updates the app almost immediately.

Our staging environments make it quick and easy for the team to experiment with programming via the staging admin and perform quality control before taking a feature or experience live.

We launched the dearduck MVP in app stores this summer and have seen crazy success. Our goal for the MVP was to test and iterate our preference collection, gift recommendation algorithm, and our gift recommendation delivery experience, on a consumer target of women between the ages of 21-45; essentially building the foundations of our platform. The initial user based found us primarily through word-of-mouth and social media and through this pool of users, we have made thousands of gift recommendations and have gotten excellent feedback. What we did not expect, frankly, was how quickly we would receive Interest from brands. This interest has propelled the prioritization of further development of our Gifting Lens platform in order to power B2B2C features and experiences in addition to B2C. We will be launching our pilot in Q4.

The MVP version of dearduck can be found in the app store. Users select their preferences across various categories, such as gluten-free/sour/fruity/candy and invite their friends to do the same. We alert users when birthdays and important holidays are coming up so they never miss an opportunity to be thoughtful. Users can browse our curated catalog of thousands of products or easily filter the catalog by a contact's name to see highly personalized recommendations for each member of their Circle. The user can feel confident about their choice because we never return a recommendation that does not match the user's preferences. Additionally, users can filter by budget, categories or featured collections if desired. Universal, secure checkout is available in the app so that our users can easily purchase across retailers but only have to check out once.

This fall, we are releasing a web and e-mail based version of our app. Users will be invited to take a quick preference quiz from their favorite retailers and influencers – they can easily share with friends to do the same. We will send recommendations for their flock right to their inbox.

Also, our app is free for users!

Gifting is hard to get right yet the goal for gifting is vitally important to building and strengthening key relationships. And it is not just hard for families and friends, It is hard for corporations, it is hard for employers, it is hard for brands. Yet, gifting is not something people do once or twice a year, it is constant. Whether it is a bottle of wine for a host, an incentive gift from a company to a recruit, a thank you from a corporation to a client, or a thinking of you gesture for a friend or contact, gifting is a constant part of our lives and it carries huge meaning. Because of this it currently is a constant source of stress. We intend to revolutionize gifting and help strengthen all types of relationships by powering experiences that offer the right choices for the right person at the right time.

People lack the information they need to make the right choice for each person in their lives at the right time. So they project their own desires when selecting a gift. It is human nature!

When you lack the information you make an educated guess and you cannot help but apply your own preferences in the process. When picking out a candle for someone else what do you do? You smell it and you say, "that smells pretty good!" But what if the receiver is allergic to floral scents or hates the smell of vanilla candles (even if she loves vanilla ice cream)? A lot of time and a lot of money is wasted today. We intend to make people's lives easier and their relationships stronger by making the needed information readily accessible. With our platform, ideally, gifters can access the information they need at anytime and anywhere in order to make the right choice.

I didn’t realize that I had been treated differently until I read Aileen Lee’s Tech Crunch article and realized that I had been been asked every single one of these questions in almost every investment meeting.

I have surrounded myself with support from people like Carolyn Rodz, Elizabeth Gore & Jesse Draper who are committed to closing the gender gap. I also have a lot of incredible male as advisors who are committed to supporting women in tech.

For the last 1.5 years, dearduck's operations and product development have been funded by angel investors and good, old-fashioned bootstrapping. We are in the process of closing out a seed round that will enable us to launch our b2b efforts & major retail partnerships. Our seed round includes Halogen Ventures, Circular Board & Angel Investors.

Think about what change you want to see in the world – the product that gets you there may be far from what you originally thought. As you go, look at the data and if it's not telling you want you want it to tell you, figure out what will. Don’t be afraid to pivot… find out who needs your product the most and how to make it even better for them. The rest will follow.