MGMT Boston - W9, Q1 24 - Duckbill // Kelly Peters, Tomorrow.io
Duckbill // Kelly Peters, Tomorrow.io
Welcome to MGMT Boston where we try to help 795+ of you manage your awareness of top Boston startups and local up & coming operators putting in the work. Glad to have you here!
TLDR:
Duckbill - a personal assistant for everyone, combining a consumer AI driven software platform with real life expert humans in the loop, delivering a direct to consumer execution engine to help manage your daily life
Thanks to Meghan J. for the intro to Duckbill
Kelly Peters, Director of Marketing @ Tomorrow.io - a storyteller, communicator, and marketing powerhouse who is helping tell the stories of tomorrow, today, as the Director of Marketing at Boston-based, late-stage weather intelligence company Tomorrow.io
Thanks to Dan S. for the intro to Kelly
Other Resources:
MGMT Boston Operators Club - helping up & coming operators grow beyond their day to day
Underscore Core Coffee Shop - more than 100 leaders from the Boston startup ecosystem came to make connections, share learnings, and discuss the current landscape
Sean Smith, VP Product @ Denim - lessons from a product guy who spent time moonlighting in revenue
Dillon McDermott, Head of Sales @ Zowie - this one’s for the job hunters out there. A report from the front
186 Ventures 2024 Kickoff - assembled 60+ operators for some great discussion on 2024 trends
2024 Boston Tech Big Board - updated snapshot of 2024 companies to watch. The comprehensive funding list needs work. If anyone knows an easy way to capture this holistic view (ex-biotech), reach out!
The Endeca Effect: Overview / Markets / People / Products / Conclusion / Bonus - Steve Papa Alumni Learnings
Q1 Startups Highlighted: Merlin, BlueTrace, Osmo, Boswell, Tomorrow.io, Vizit, Centaur Labs, Verve Motion
Q1 Operators Highlighted: Parker Lawrence / Herald, Aaron Whittemore / Humatics, Lauren Viscariello / Candex, Joe Kiernan / Perch, Micah Lanier / Jump, Craig Minoff / Kasa, Dean Walsh / TiE Boston
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Tech Superpowers. They have operated in Boston as an IT provider on behalf of startups for the past 30 years for rapidly growing companies & premier clients like the Celtics, Accel, Matrix Partners, etc.
Duckbill
Founders: Emi Gonzalez & Meghan Joyce
Founding: 2022
Mission: Help the Overburdened Working Adult
Employees: 70 & ~25% Local
Workplace: Hybrid + In Person (Boston & LA)
Stage & Capital Raised: Series A & $33M raised
Investors: Forerunner Ventures, Inspired Capital, General Catalyst, Greycroft, G9 Ventures, Offline Ventures, Future Back Ventures by Bain & Company, Red Antler
Key Customers: Busy Overburdened Adults
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): $50M+ (assuming they sold ~10-20% of the company in the $25M Series A fundraise)
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
Duckbill is a personal assistant for everyone, combining our consumer AI driven software platform with real life expert humans in the loop, delivering a direct to consumer execution engine to help manage your daily life. This team is leveraging AI to bring personal assistants to working adults and alleviate some of the stress that comes with balancing a busy career and life.
Founder & CEO Meghan Joyce was the GM of US & Canada at Uber. After helping Uber scale to millions of customers and billions of rides, she became the COO of Oscar Health. She took board seats at Boston Beer Company and Guardant Health. Professionally, Meghan was flying.
But, she’s human, too. She walks among us with all the same complications life throws our way. Married with kids, Meghan balances personal errands, childcare, scheduling doctors appointments, getting a new Real ID, kitchen leaks, birthday gifts for that family member, and an endless list of dreaded tasks. Is your blood pressure spiking too?
Meghan & Emi Gonzalez founded Duckbill in 2022 to help overburdened adults find a better way to handle personal challenges, at scale. We all spend too much time and energy on endless to-do lists. A recent poll says that the average American needs 4 extra hours in the day to finish their daily tasks and burnout is on the rise, particularly among women (src).
For a small percentage of people, there are personal assistants. But, it’s a luxury largely out of reach. Search engines and digital information help narrow down results but can’t execute for you. Uber revolutionized transportation and democratized access to a personal driver. Duckbill aims to democratize access to personal assistants, leveraging the transformative power of Generative AI perfected by humans. In fact, here is a link for 50% off for 2 months of a Duckbill subscription so you can try it yourself. The code is DBMGMT50.
It’s not an exact comparison, as it encompasses professional use cases, but the smart virtual assistant market is exploding - $2.3B+ growing to $30B by 2030 (src). Coupled with changing habits after Covid and shifting workplace dynamics, we need more help than ever before to find balance.
Duckbill gives their customers the nuance and personal touch of someone assigned to tackle their tasks - a “copilot”- and the efficiency and breadth of AI tools underpinning the legwork. It’s simple to use. You can submit a task via their app by taking a picture, forwarding an email, or typing instructions. You might write “I’m looking for help repairing my microwave that hasn’t been working for four days” (true story, help!) by submitting the request into Duckbill’s system.
On the backend, they’ve built extensive tooling using vast swaths of data to route requests internally. Their “Duckbot” might ask clarifying questions to gather more information. As unique as we are as individuals, there are personal swim lanes we tend to have in common. Almost everything Duckbill helps their clients with fits into ~70 categories across restaurant reservations, finding a primary care physician that takes insurance, support for car repair, home maintenance, gifting, etc.
Duckbill makes sure all tasks are touched by humans but they’re able to scale at an efficiency far beyond an individual person leveraging proprietary technology and collective knowledge. They build profiles of their members and their preferences, leveraging information as it’s collected.
Duckbill came out of stealth this past September (2023) and has already grown to handle hundreds, then thousands, and now tens of thousands of tasks. Over time, all tasks will be routed using AI, and then humans will tie them off with a personal touch. They’ll also be able to better categorize & approximate which tasks are more expensive to handle and break out the service to better match the value provided. Their goal is to level the playing field and help people across the income spectrum experience more joyful lives by outsourcing “life admin”.
The Duckbill team is an experienced flock and have all worked together in some way at Uber, Oscar Health & beyond. Their technical leaders Matt Leggett & Andrew Schults both worked with Meghan at Oscar Health and are based out in LA. Here in Boston, co-founders Meghan & Emi recruited fellow Uber colleagues Richard Smith & Leslie Bateman. Leslie even moonlights as the co-founder of Coblrshop, a tech enabled solution reimagining shoe repair and helping pair consumers with cobblers.
Their current growth model is product-led growth and word of mouth recommendations. Subscriptions, including unlimited tasks, start at $99/month and their most popular plan is the $149/month household plan. Their user base is 60% female / 40% male and their ideal customer is a busy working person with a rich personal life - kids, friends, aging parents, fur babies, etc! - but Duckbill is useful for all different types of people! They also offer a $449/month VIP plan for priority power users.
Duckbill is serving customers across the U.S. with a large presence in metro hubs like Boston, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Austin & Chicago. They have grown to 100+ copilots after the big fall launch and continue to work via word of mouth without leaning on paid advertising, prioritizing building technology that is functionally that much better. Their existing members tell their friends, building a powerful flywheel of brand building and usage.
The team has grown to 70+ employees and they recently announced a $25M Series A led by Forerunner Ventures with participation from Greycroft Partners, Inspired Capital, General Catalyst, G9 Ventures, Red Antler, Future Back Ventures by Bain & Company and Offline Ventures to make their vision a reality. They’re heads down making their product stickier and ever more useful for their direct customers, refining the individual “wow” experience before they plan to experiment with corporate partnerships later in 2024.
Operators to Know:
Shalyn Bond, Operations Manager
Leslie Bateman, Head of Business Development
Kellyann Caccavele, Head of Operations Design
Brian Ge, Senior Software Engineer, Founding Engineer
Joon Hwang, Senior IT Manager
Matt Leggett, Head of Product
Elysia Mann, Senior Marketing Manager
Ernest Mishkin, Principal Engineer
Ethan Naluz, Senior Software Engineer
Mary Photiades, Marketing Manager
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Duckbill team if I missed any up & coming operators internally
Key Roles To Be Hired:
Senior Product Designer - Submit your resume, cover letter, and portfolio to matt@getduckbill.com
If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
Who are the biggest competitors in the consumer AI space?
What are the biggest challenges as you pursue broader distribution to acquire more customers?
What is the long term vision for the company?
What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2024?
We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Duckbill you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team help more overburdened adults (like me!) in the years ahead. All of us applaud your efforts. See you around town!
Kelly Peters, Director of Marketing @ Tomorrow.io
Kelly Peters is a storyteller, communicator, and marketing powerhouse who is helping tell the stories of tomorrow, today, as the Director of Marketing at Boston-based, late-stage weather intelligence company Tomorrow.io.
Kelly grew up in Pittsburgh surrounded by a great community, her parents, and an older brother. Her dad was a collaborative & analytical thinker who worked in IT, traveling the world for PPG Industries to help their factories update to new systems. He was an intelligent people person who was able to communicate data & systems well. Kelly’s mom was an artist, an incredibly creative painter, who taught her about problem solving and thinking outside the box. They met at Pittsburgh’s flagship academic institution, Carnegie Mellon.
Both were really supportive of Kelly’s creative ventures, encouraging her to find joy and be the best in whatever she tried to pursue. As a kid, Kelly created imaginary businesses like a candy store called “Quoms”. She was always making videos or building imaginary universes to market her creations.
She went off to Syracuse where she studied Broadcast Journalism, interning at a local TV station. Kelly even had the opportunity to travel to Singapore to intern at CNBC Asia where she developed a more informed view of international media & the world. At Syracuse, she furthered her love of learning and writing but didn’t see herself in front of the camera.
After graduation she landed at NBCUniversal as part of the prestigious Page program. She rotated around 30 Rock with stints at SNL, Syfy Network, and CNBC’s Mad Money. She loved being surrounded by a community of communicators. Everyone had talent, ideas, jokes, and energy. Kelly was drawn to all of it.
As her rotational program neared its end, she met an MSNBC executive who offered her a role supporting the network’s long-form documentary unit, including former shows like Lock Up. At MSNBC, she learned the importance of storytelling and how to understand story arcs as well as the details that will drive a good story. There was pressure to make critical story decisions to fit their long-form content into a 20-minute segment. It was difficult to leave so much good stuff on the cutting room floor, but brevity is the key to telling an effective story. She took that lesson to heart.
After some great experience in NYC, Kelly returned to her hometown of Pittsburgh to attempt to break into technology. A friend of hers introduced her to local SaaS company Industry Weapon with an opportunity to manage their partner program as a Channel Executive. It was a great first job in tech but another opportunity soon came that she couldn’t pass up.
Kelly is drawn to the energy of a high-performance community and taking advantage of opportunities as they come. When Pittsburgh anchor company Dick’s Sporting Goods came calling to join their website team doing content marketing, she couldn’t say no! She managed all of Dick’s Nike site content as they ramped up their investment in e-commerce, with free reign to position Nike styles across the website. She optimized copy, search rankings & product positioning. She even leveraged Dick’s studio to arrange photoshoots.
After a couple years of high-impact work, she wanted to return to a smaller team where she could make a bigger impact and found JazzHR, formerly “The Resumator” and now part of Employ. In a Customer Success role, she got her hands dirty crafting content for the company’s Help Center. With her rebranding help, leveraging subject matter experts from across the company, the Help Center helped the organization attain a 98% CSAT.
Kelly’s success in the role allowed her to join JazzHR’s Marketing team in a content & communications role in Boston. Moving to work alongside a fast-paced, high-performing team, led by Allie Kelly, she built out their whole content program and handled their comms strategy. She did strategic planning, wrote copy, and owned their agency relationships with media & analysts as the team grew to six team members.
Her work at JazzHR got her noticed by Tomorrow.io’s CMO Dan Slagen who was looking for a Head of Content. Knowing the type of team, energy, and opportunities she was looking for next, it was the perfect fit. Her whole interview with Dan centered around brainstorming ideas and she decided to continue the conversation full time!
At Tomorrow.io, she got to dig her teeth into industries she’d never touched - aviation, energy, logistics, trucking, etc. She learned about the impact weather had on those industries, talked to subject matter experts, and developed a content strategy that supported each unique vertical and its pain points. It was exciting and challenging to learn how to leverage content to fit into their bigger marketing engine under Dan’s tutelage. From Dan, she learned not to stay restricted to her job title and to think boldly.
When it came time to announce the company’s satellite launch, they knew they would have to be bold. First, they had to get their branding aligned as they prepared to launch a literal rocket into the atmosphere. Knowing video would be a part of it, the team thought, “what if we made a documentary?”
They kicked the idea around and tapped their long-time video producer extraordinaire Travis Wilber to help. The benefit of their small and nimble team meant they’d have great internal access to scientific experts to help tell the story. Externally, Kelly talked to her media contacts, friends, and her brother Scott Peters, who is also in video production, to brush up on her long-form storytelling chops.
In the ultimate test of her passion for storytelling and evolution of skills, Kelly authored the script, project managed the interviews, and helped pull the project together alongside Travis and the help of an amazing team to produce 6 Years to Launch. This awesome ~25-minute documentary tells the story of Tomorrow.io’s first satellite launch into space on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. And spoiler alert, they’re considering a sequel…
As Tomorrow.io’s Director of Marketing, Kelly makes sure their Enterprise & Government business units have the strategy, positioning, and materials in place to make their GTM strategy successful. She oversees 2 full-time team members, along with a group of close freelance partners, on a Marketing team of 5. She even manages a recently hired AI Marketer, Ruth Favela, who helps the team proactively manage their awareness and understanding of all the latest AI tools so the team can save time and better allocate resources, staying on the cutting edge. For example, Ruth has helped the team uncover new tools, like Claude, along with embracing enhancements to existing ones like Gong’s AI Insights to pull out customer learnings the Marketing team can translate into new campaigns.
Marketing is Storytelling
Kelly had the benefit of starting her career in Media, telling stories. She sees everything through the eyes of a storyteller.
When it comes to Marketing, Kelly pictures a story arc and takes potential customers on a hero's journey. She thinks of the pain first, always. Consider that in aviation, for example, the pain may be lost time & people getting delayed. Connecting with people through whatever medium it is, not just sticking to typical B2B campaigns, Kelly puts herself in the prospect’s shoes to say something that really hits them.
The “secret sauce” is considering what is between the pain and the solution. Kelly considers whether someone has ever heard of Tomorrow.io and all the distractions they might get while the message is being delivered via e-mail, social, or video.
Using emotive language to tell a story in a way they wouldn’t expect, pulling a detail from a case study, she’ll craft the message to be more human and considerate of a real-life use case with the ROI attached.
Recently, the Tomorrow team launched an e-mail campaign following the flooding in Southern California. Rather than detailing the typical forecast and what “should be done”, Kelly and in-house meteorologist Ed Carroll collaborated to inject more personality and empathy after the difficult events. Telling the story of how technology can help in a way that speaks to an audience’s emotions made the campaign resonate. A prospect responded with an opportunity because the message connected with them. That’s the whole point of going the extra mile to make sure you’re understanding your audience.
Kelly positions Tomorrow.io and their products as the cutting-edge friend who can show you the solution (and change the world in the process). “What if you stopped assuming the chaos around you was unavoidable and started taking a proactive approach? We can help. Trust me, we’re already doing it for other big names like JetBlue.”
3 Career Insights / Learnings
How You Work Matters - “How you are to work with matters just as much as the work itself. If you are someone who people want to collaborate with and are open, kind, and genuinely invested & engaged in projects, more people will want to work with you. The results will be better too”
Don’t Let Job Titles Restrict You - “Your role or job title should push you forward and think big, not just make you feel like you are limited to certain things. I’ve been encouraged and now encourage my team to think boldly, beyond the typical expectations for a B2B Marketing Director.”
Execution Always Trumps Ideas Alone - “Early in my career, I was intimidated by coworkers who were really good at articulating strategy. I couldn’t understand how they were seemingly single-handedly executing on such grand plans. I realized as I advanced that sometimes, ideas are just ideas—and that’s great. Not everything has to be a new to-do list item. But the holy grail is being capable and willing to do it all. If you have ideas & vision AND can also execute, you’re ahead of 95% of people. Following through will carry you through”
Kelly aspires to continue to lead teams that are mission-focused like her team at Tomorrow.io. She feels passionate about marketing something she believes can make an impact in the world, working alongside talented people, and building teams. One day perhaps she’ll grow to become a CMO on a team building toward an impactful mission working on cool, big ideas with her hands in a bit of everything.
If you’d like to learn more about Kelly, you can find her creating compelling stories at Tomorrow.io, in the North End for a meal on her trips back to Boston to visit her team, or on LinkedIn. Thanks for sharing. We’re excited to see the stories you tell and missions you back in the years ahead!
Any feedback for me? One thing you liked? One thing you didn’t? Local startups or operators to highlight? Just reply to this e-mail!
See you next week!
-Matt