TLDR:
Swapt - commerce software that helps increase brand awareness and help you track return on investment of your in-person campaigns and activations
Thanks to Kylie B. for the intro to Swapt!
Dan McCarthy, Senior Director of Product @ Kard - Consultant turned Product leader, Dan has been building bridges since undergrad
Thanks to Jenni G. for the intro to Dan!
Other Resources:
Boston Tech Big Board - building out data on every Boston area venture backed software company I can find
Q2 Startups Highlighted: Wonderment, EKOS, CloudZero, Basys, Mirakl, Black Kite, Herald & Elucid
Q2 Operators Highlighted: Dana Wensberg, Paperless Parts, Jasmine Pogue, Skilltype, Mark Hardy, Black Kite, Tony Iuliano, Recorded Future, Kelly Cheng, Goldcast, Ashlyn Donohue, LinkSquares, Jon Coombs, Flexcar & Michele Choi, Medley
Swapt
Founders: Trevor Brown & Andrew Smith
Founding: 2022
Mission: Website
Employees: 4 & 75% Local
Workplace: Remote
Stage & Capital Raised: Pre Seed & <$3M Raised
Investors: Asymmetric Capital, Perkins Cove Partners, Andrew Bialecki & Ed Hallen
Key Customers: DoorDash, OuterKnown
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): <$10M
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
Swapt is “software that helps increase brand awareness and help you track return on investment of your in-person campaigns and activations”. Founded in 2022 by former Klaviyo engineer Andrew Smith & Co-Founder Trevor Brown, Swapt is on a mission to help customers make sense of their offline data and make e-commerce into, well, commerce. They’re backed by Klaviyo founders Andrew Bialecki & Ed Hallen with additional seed capital from Asymmetric Partners & Perkins Cove Partners.
Andrew founded the Enterprise Solution Architecture Team at Klaviyo and through that experience got to work with brand name commerce partners like Lord & Taylor, Glossier, etc. providing solutions and doing deep consulting work focused on helping them grow their business.
He learned a few things. First and foremost, brands don’t really understand their offline data. Some retailers might put a QR code in their stores and get like 100 subscribers in a year. That doesn’t exactly move the needle. Then there’s the quality problem. Brands struggle with understanding which data is relevant and why. They grapple with integrating different datasets as well as assessing data quality. The appeal of third-party datasets is high, but the conversion rates are disappointingly low, causing potential damage to businesses.
Swapt is bridging the divide. They use onramps like QR Codes, NFC Tags, Apple Wallet (tap to pay), and games like spin the wheel to bridge the physical and digital world, helping brands acquire more customers and keep their datasets clean and centralized.
Let’s give a quick example of this in action. Swapt powers activations for Kelly Slater’s brand Outerknown. Outerknown sets up a booth because, why be at a store when you can sell merch at the beach? They put a surfboard front and center with a QR code taped to the front. The QR code captures e-mail & SMS data for users who want to enter a live giveaway for a Kelly Slater signed surfboard and 20% off of purchases made at the booth. 20%? Utah, get me two! These QR codes led to 500 new subscribers in 48 hours, with 52% of purchasers making a second purchase, and a material lift in average order value. And all I did was regurgitate their case study. Swapt helps Doordash leverage QR codes at all of their events like the St. Patricks Day Parade, Boston Calling, the Congressional Baseball Game, Philly's Italian Market, Eat LA, and more in order to increase brand awareness and help them track return on investment of their in person campaigns. This team gets it. The possibilities are endless!
Swapt codes are now in the hands of over 30 brands like Chomps, DoorDash, Wears Woody & Outerknown and recognizes repeat customers at the individual retailer level in order to better facilitate personal offers and instant gratification experiences, tightly integrated with Shopify & Klaviyo. They can offer custom offers, direct money, or anything personalized really.
Swapt’s current focus is to prove out their value proposition and build out their base technology platform before they go out to raise an additional capital later this year. Until then, they’ll stay lean & mean building better, faster, cleaner commerce experiences for brands over the summer ahead!
Operators to Know:
Trevor Brown, Co-Founder & COO
Nazir Dogan, Full Stack Developer
Alyssa Donovan, Product Designer
Archie O’Connell, Software Engineer Co-Op Intern
Andrew Smith, Co-Founder & CEO
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Swapt team if I missed any up & coming operators internally
Key Roles To Be Hired:
More roles coming later this year!
If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
What are the most important company goals for the rest of the year?
Could you share some details about how the technology works? Why is it important now?
What are the biggest challenges as you prove out the value proposition?
What is the long term vision for the company?
What are the most important company goals for the rest of the year?
We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Swapt you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bridge more commerce from the digital to physical world. All consumers applaud your efforts. See you in a QR code around town and beyond!
Dan McCarthy, Senior Director of Product @ Kard
Dan McCarthy has been building bridges since undergrad, only the context of what kind of bridges and how they are built has changed. A consultant turned Product leader, Dan serves as the Senior Director of Product at Kard, a remote fintech startup.
Dan grew up locally west of Boston with two younger sisters who also happen to both work in tech. One sister is at LinkSquares here in Boston and the other is down in New York at VMWare. Dan’s mom worked in real estate and his dad was an engineer who did some consulting before eventually transitioning over to a product career at an insurance company.
Dan went out to Chicago and studied civil engineering at Northwestern, an expert with soil mechanics. Northwestern helped him grow and understand how to both balance a workload and leverage numbers. Upon graduation, the classic civil engineering paths didn’t speak to him, so he decided to follow the typical path when you’re not sure what you want to do and became a consultant. He moved back to Boston to join Deloitte in their technology consulting group.
His mind was quickly opened up to a wider set of possibilities after previously breaking concrete as a civil engineer in a lab. Dan jokes that he was “tech illiterate” in college too. He never really got into social media and didn’t have Instagram or TikTok on his phone. Deloitte helped him get “business trained”, from writing e-mails to figuring out how to “go to work” each day. He made great friends at Deloitte and two are even going to be in his upcoming wedding. Good luck Dan!
Dan got a lot of valuable experience at Deloitte seeing different technologies & industries crunched together all at once. He helped implement technology solutions at various clients and work across a lot of different projects and managers. He got repetitions in seeing what works and doesn’t work so well. At Deloitte he first learned about SaaS through his work with major software vendors.
Most impactfully, he worked on healthcare implementations where he would sit with clients onsite doing requirements gathering. Plugging in insurance claims, he learned how to take in customer feedback and developed empathy for the end user.
Dan thought pretty clearly he was ready to go in-house to a smaller company and perhaps try a SaaS startup, although unsure what role within that ecosystem. Around the same time he was recruited over to Bulger Partners. Bulger had a former Deloitte colleague who pitched Dan on doing technical due diligence for PE firms acquiring Series B+ companies. If he wanted to work in SaaS, this was a great way to see inside those types of companies and what career best fit his skillset.
Bulger only had about 15 people and he got a lot more responsibility and exposure. Yes, there were some long hours churning out projects. But he got to see a ton working alongside former CTOs & CPOs who aided the firm in their technical due diligence. Each project introduced him to a new company where he worked up close and got to hear product leaders’ insights around how they were planning to pair technical solutions with strategic decision making, solidifying his interest in product.
Bulger was eventually acquired and Dan jumped at the opportunity to finally move to a software startup, joining SessionM as a Product Manager. He again found a former Deloitte alum who recognized the applicability of his skillset and how it would translate into their open PM role.
Dan shared that there is a balance in product where the soft skills are really important but you also need to be comfortable in the weeds. He thinks he was uniquely experienced in the way engineering prepared him for comfort with numbers and high-detail work, but balance working in teams. Being a jack of all trades, master of none, was a helpful transition into a Product role.
He really enjoyed his time at SessionM. They built loyalty products to help make connections between brands and consumers, providing the engine and logic largely in the quick serve restaurant and retail space to financial providers. It was a big enough company where there was structure & support and Dan got to learn from an awesome manager in Joe Bartell. It was also a small enough growth stage company where he could quickly take on new responsibilities. It was super helpful to understand what a Product Manager should do at an API first company.
Dan’s team led the launch for SessionM’s “Insights” product. It was a reporting tool and one of the first products he got to help manage all the way through. Dan eventually owned the Reporting & Loyalty products and the Loyalty product line was a big revenue generator for the company. SessionM was acquired by Mastercard in 2018 and, after another year, Dan began looking to join a small independent startup where he could find the same types of opportunities he found at SessionM taking on more responsibility, impacting culture, and finding that energy he gets from small startups & scrappy teams operating at a high level.
His goal for his next role was to be the first product hire at a startup. He had a lot of experience in the loyalty & API space when he first heard about Kard. Kard builds API products in the form of a marketplace that integrates with modern issuers on one side, typically Neobanks, and brands on the other side. They power their rewards experiences through “card linked offers”. For example, if you made a purchase at McDonalds with a bank card integrated with Kard you might get 10% cash back.
Kard came to him through Underscore VC’s Core Community from a former SessionM colleague. He had the loyalty experience but didn’t necessarily have as much fintech experience. Luckily he was able to land the job. Kard has about 50 people and is a distributed workforce. They have a cluster of employees in New York but are predominantly remote.
Dan recently moved back to the Boston area after spending some of the Covid years in San Diego. With he and his fiance remote and both with New England roots, it made sense to come back East. They love getting outdoors across New England to Maine, Vermont & New Hampshire with Tuckerman Ravine being a favorite skiing destination. They previously lived in Cambridge the longest and enjoy getting back to visit when they can for a night out. They’re more recently getting to know places like Brewer's Fork closer to their place in Charlestown.
Dan was Kard’s first product hire and has helped build out their product team to nine team members across product management, data & solutions architecture. It’s been a really fun experience building and implementing Kard’s product solutions and demonstrating how they show value through data.
In startups, there are few specialized playbooks to help you understand where to place people when, so Dan’s biggest mandate has been making sure his team feels empowered to make decisions on what Kard’s customers need. Next is to continue to iterate on the long term vision of Kard. In the quarters ahead it will be critical for their team to figure out how to add to their current rewards experiences for digital banks and brands. An exciting but challenging dilemma for a two sided marketplace.
Here are two career learnings Dan shared on his path from building physical bridges to consulting to SaaS and now Fintech at Kard:
Having Low Ego - “In reality, most good ideas come from the plethora of other people funneling stuff to you. A really good product person helps assess everything coming in and then figure out what needs to be built for the customer. Be thoughtful and comfortable by not being too tied to your own ideas. I don’t say no ego because you’re talking to a bunch of different people and not everyone will always be happy with you so you have to have some confidence, or ego, to continue forward”
Getting comfortable with the unknown - “I had blinders on to an extent earlier in my career and got uncomfortable with how much I didn’t know. I’ve worked at being more ‘ok’ with the unknown and coaching my team to understand there isn’t always going to be a clear answer in what we’re doing. Startups are hard and that’s ok, it’s part of it.”
Dan really enjoys his career in Product. Eventually, he’d love to be a Chief Product Officer at a company where he helps scale a team from a startup to a large product organization and work on businesses with sustainability in mind. He’s really optimistic about Kard’s trajectory, a two sided marketplace with a long runway and a dynamic, growing product org.
Thanks for sharing Dan. If you’d like to learn more about his career or Kard you can reach out to him on LinkedIn, catch him on some trails around New England, or shipping some very enticing merchant offers through digital banking. Excited to see the financial waves you & the Kard team make in the coming years!
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