Katy Aucoin’s original plan when she founded Dearduck in 2015 seems exciting and profitable, to my untrained eyes. Three years later, following an investment by startup accelerator RealCo and a move from the City of Houston to San Antonio’s tech hub on Houston Street, Dearduck plans to make money in a very different way than when Aucoin started.Shifting away from an original business plan isn’t unusual. It’s the norm. Venture capitalist Randy Komisar and business professor John Mullins wrote the now-classic Getting To Plan B: Breaking Through To A Better Business Model because entrepreneurs almost never succeed based on their first business plan.
As Komisar and Mullins describe it, a startup founder sets out with the first version of her business to test her business hypothesis. As data from those tests comes back, she hopefully figures out in time the need to develop a Plan B. Customers might not respond the way you expect. Your pricing model could be off. Any number of startup assumptions could turn out to be wrong and the data will let you know.
With Dearduck, Aucoin began with a passionate idea, and an assumption. Gift-buying for other people – a friend, a co-worker, a lover – is an opportunity to strengthen a relationship, or not. She set out to build a better way to buy gifts for other people, using easy and fun surveys and data analytics to aid in gift curation.
Before calling Aucoin, I took some online Dearduck surveys, which walked me through series of picture-based choices: one survey regarding pets, another regarding booze. With this data, Aucoin says, Dearduck begins to identify my “consumer DNA,” unique to me. Through the first Dearduck app, she has the consumer DNA of up to 50,000 unique buyers. It indicates what things I like and allows a gift-purchaser to select something that matches my preferences.
In her original business launched in 2017, Dearduck sought to make money by sharing in “affiliate commissions.” In other words, when her data targeting drove a successful online sale, the retailer would pay Dearduck a percentage of that sale.
