Rocketbrew

When we last checked in with Rachel Wong and Heidi Ye back in 2021, the two UBC Master of Data Science Vancouver alumnae, were just finishing the program and at the same time launching their start-up Rocketbrew. 

Rocketbrew has evolved into a tool that allows organizations to automate their entire sales outreach motion on both LinkedIn and email including initial message, follow ups and scheduling a meeting - without a template.

“Every day we get closer and closer to solving one of the greatest pain points in sales and marketing, across all industries and geographies! Plus, we’ve been having a lot of fun doing it,” said Wong, who is also Rocketbrew’s Chief Technology Officer.

Highlights include building Rockbrew’s platform from zero to a fully-fleshed out tool, scaling the solution from 0 to over 100 customers, and growing their team with the most incredible and scrappiest engineers and data scientists. This includes two MDS Computational Linguistics students from the class of 2023 that Rocketbrew hired after their capstone.

The nature of Rocketbrew’s product is based on conversations, particularly, conversations with context about both sides of the conversation.

“We process a lot of conversational data, which can include a heavy amount of unstructured text and images/videos,” added Wong.

To handle the amount of data that Rockebrew has, the organization uses a lot of different techniques to gather and particularly process the data into useable pieces for their platform.

Wong said that Rocketbrew utilizes some of the fundamentals learned from MDS. This includes natural language processing, text analysis, and unstructured data analysis.

Because of their experience with their own capstone project, Wong knew that Rocketbrew wanted to submit capstone projects of their own to contribute back to the MDS program.

“There were a lot of techniques we didn’t learn in MDS due to time that we thought would be awesome to have in a capstone project. Things like cloud services (GCP, Azure, etc.) and database management,” explained Wong. “We really like how the capstone projects give students a taste of real-life data science work!”

For the class of 2024, Rocketbrew had two capstone projects for the MDS Vancouver and Computational Linguistics programs.

The first project, entitled “Personalized Magic”, students were tasked to create a pipeline that would collect data on a specific person and create a snappy one-liner that would capture their attention. This one-liner would then be used as the opening line in a cold email. Data collected could include their occupation, where they work, what their company does, etc.

The next project was entitled “Evaluation Magic” and students were tasked to create a model that would evaluate the success of cold messages that were generated or hand-written. These messages would go through the model and be rated a success percentage on how likely the message would succeed in capturing the receiver’s attention. 
Wong noted that the students faced computational challenges when processing large amounts of data. 

“We allowed the students ample time to R&D to let students try tools and test different methods to find what could solve these data processing issues,” she added.

This isn’t the first time that Rocketbrew has submitted a capstone project and it probably won’t be the last. In fact, Wong said they’ve recommended MDS to their startup community and founder friends. “It’s a great resource for smaller companies to get quick access to data science resources.”

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