Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / Disrupting a category, acquiring customers at scale through guerrilla marketing & a $9m raise with Maev Founder Katie Spies (part 1)

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Disrupting a category, acquiring customers at scale through guerrilla marketing & a $9m raise with Maev Founder Katie Spies (part 1) · Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast)

• 0:00
  This is Katie Spees for Female Startup Club. Hey everyone, it's Dune here, your host and hype girl. Today on the show, we're learning from Katie Spees, the founder of Maeve. Founded in 2020, Maeve started as a collective of dog parents who wanted better food for their dogs. They were a host of the show.
• 0:27
  After Katie's adopted dog, George, experienced a health scare, she turned her focus to nutrition to keep him healthy and happy. With help from her pet parent community, she began conducting deep research into the modern dog's biological needs and the shortcomings of products we've been told to trust.
• 0:46
  Fast forward to today, Maeve has raised $9 million and is on a mission to totally disrupt this industry. If you love this episode and you learned something, please do share it on Instagram, tagging us or by leaving a review to help other ears find us. Let's get straight into this episode. This is Katie for Female Startup Club. Katie, hi. Welcome to the Female Startup Club podcast. Thank you. I'm so excited to be here.
• 1:13
  I'm so excited to have you here as a fellow dog lover who is obscenely obsessed with her dog right now. I'm excited to chat one dog lover to another. Same here. You're in good company.
• 1:30
  Do you want to give us the elevator pitch on what your brand is and who you are and the ethos behind what you're doing? Sure. So I'm Katie, the founder of Maeve. It's meetmaeve.com. We're the first human grade raw dog food company. So we believe that feeding your dog the healthiest possible diet should be a really easy choice. But when we look out in the market right now, it seems like healthier foods are way harder to use and more inconvenient. And
• 1:56
  the easy to use things are pretty bad for your dog. And so we try to make it really easy. Our first product is a human grade raw dog food. And then we have a couple of other products like supplements and bone broth toppers that are all natural human grade made in the US simple ingredient lists and as easy to use as possible just convenience and ease. Interesting, you know, my dog eats
• 2:19
  I guess it's called kibble, like just the little plain things. And I'm like, for obvious reasons, I can see why maybe like home cooked meals or fresh cooked, you know, raw meals are more important. But what's the easy answer here? Like to be like, why would your dog switch from this to this? Yeah. Because like the vet told us to give her that, right? Yeah.
• 2:42
  Yeah, that's the thing. It's really confusing and it's not a very transparent industry. It's really opaque to find information about which things are actually better for your dog and which things are causing harm. So what we found is most dogs in the U.S. at least are sick.
• 2:58
  60% are overweight, 30% have mobility issues, 30% have anxiety issues, and 25% have skin and coat issues. And so everyone that I was talking to, I was a dog walker for about a year, they had one of these things and it affected the dog's quality of life. And the person was really guilty and worried about it and trying to
• 3:17
  work on it. And studies have shown that most of those issues are correlated with diet because dogs aren't designed to eat highly processed, super high temperature, high pressure, high fat foods. And that's what kibble is. It's designed to be easy, shelf stable, affordable, and it's designed to fit the human's needs in those ways. And so it's 60% starch and it has all of these extra ingredients added to it. It's not super transparent in terms of the quality of
• 3:45
  And it's linked to all of these health issues. And so when you switch from kibble to a raw food, and raw food is a least processed diet you can feed your dog, your dog's stomach goes through a detox and you see visible improvements in their health, usually within about 30 days where their digestive system rebalances, their metabolism improves, weight maintenance improves, dental health improves.
• 4:04
  if you have a breed that's worried about hip and mobility issues or skin and coat issues, you tend to notice improvements there too, because your dog is absorbing the maximum amount of nutrients from their diet, which is where health really starts. And so we talk about it as like a preventative way to think about your dog's health and the link between food and nutrition and actual health and wellbeing is becoming more and more well-known. And so
• 4:29
  That's the big reason. But at the end of the day, people should do what works best for them. And because Better For You is often a lot harder to use and way more expensive, it's not super accessible. And so that's kind of like the problem that we set out to solve.
• 4:44
  Wow, that's so interesting and so cool to know and to hear that perspective. I'd love to go back to what you were doing before you started the brand to understand that kind of light bulb moment that led you down the pathway of entrepreneurship and going into this space in particular. Yeah.
• 5:01
  Yeah. So I've always been a product person. I love to tinker. I always had side projects. And when I was just graduated college, I was working at this startup and got a dog and told everyone I need to get a dog. And they all said, this is a bad idea. You have a full-time job. You don't have a car. You don't have a yard. You have a roommate. Yeah.
• 5:20
  Not a good idea. And I was like, I'm going to do it anyway. I've always wanted to do this. I can do it. Don't tell me no. And I got this dog, George, and your life turns upside down. And it's way harder than I ever imagined. And keeping him exercised and healthy and training him was, it was just difficult as a single person in a city who had a full-time job.
• 5:42
  And eventually he had a health issue. He started having seizures. And that was about six months after I adopted him. And we really couldn't figure it out. We tried medication. The vets ran every test that we could think of. And then they started asking me about nutrition. I'd never once thought like, what is the food that we're feeding our dogs? I just always bought the kibble that I grew up feeding dogs.
• 6:05
  And when they started asking those questions, some of the light bulbs started going off. I didn't ever think I was going to become a pet food entrepreneur, but I had to make his food for him. And then these other people I was meeting in dog parks asked me to make it for them too. And so I kind of accidentally became a dog food manufacturer in my kitchen and would Venmo people and pass it off on Saturdays.
• 6:28
  And then when I had spent three years at that job, I just needed to clear my head and take a break. The only thing I thought would work is going and being a dog walker and meet more of these people, hang out with dogs. I thought I would do it for a month. I did it for a year. And then it clicked of like, this is the space that I have to be in. Everyone is struggling with this. Nutrition is such a big problem. And there isn't a solution on the market. I'm now hand making too much food in my kitchen. I have to just go full in and do this full time.
• 6:57
  Oh my gosh, that's so cool. What a nice story. Well, not George's seizures because that sucks. Yeah, he's much better now. Oh, I'm glad. But coming to this realization through going to the park and meeting other fellow dog lovers and being kind of in your community or finding your tribe to be able to then start a business off the back of that. What did the early days look like when you were like, okay, I'm actually going to get started and I'm going to try and make money from this?
• 7:28
  Yeah, they were really hard and lonely because you leave a place where you usually have co-workers and you have people in the same cohort as you and you go set out to do something on your own. In the early days, we were shipping beta product to these people that I had met through dog walking or that those people had referred. And so our little community of referrals had expanded just
• 7:53
  organically, which was amazing. But we were shipping product and in beta for about three years working with veterinary nutritionists. And every product that we got out the door felt like it took so much effort. And every new customer that we brought into the beta felt like it took so much effort. Because we were a team of one to two people sitting in a WeWork in Soho, doing something that nobody else really understood. And my parents definitely didn't understand. And
• 8:23
  hand-making food in a small little manufacturing facility that we ran. Every problem under the sun came up, like UPS would return boxes or delivery would be late. Everything was so much harder for every ounce. It was like you were just pushing for each little bit of traction. Mm-hmm.
• 8:44
  And so what kind of changed things around or like got you onto the better pathway of feeling like it wasn't so hard?
• 8:54
  Eventually, I mean, during that time, everything was really hard, but there were these really motivating moments where the product was definitely clicking with our customers, even though we would have no customer support or we would take three days to respond to an email. Somebody would say, you know, this is really frustrating, but I love the product so much. I'm willing to put up with anything. I just want more. That was really fulfilling despite these hard moments like each day.
• 9:22
  Eventually, we found solutions to one problem and a new one would pop up, but at least that one would get smoother. We would find something that would work for hiring people or we would find something that would work for managing inbound deliveries of ingredients. And suddenly it felt like, okay, that's a little bit less friction here. And there's going to be more friction each day, but at least you solve one problem at a time and can get easier and easier over time.
• 9:51
  hiring great people helps. It does help. It absolutely helps. During that time in those three years of kind of like, you know, figuring out the hurdles and the bumps and trying to iron out those kinks, I know that now you've raised a ton of capital. I think I read you raised $9 million last year, but were you bootstrapping in the beginning or did you raise straight away? What was the kind of funding path for you in those early days?
• 10:16
  Yeah, I bootstrapped the business for the first year or so of those beta tests. And then we decided this is going to be a venture-backed startup. That's the path that makes sense. That's the financing model that makes sense for the type of business I wanted to build. And so we raised the first round of venture capital as a pre-seed about a year into the betas. So we had a little bit of data, but we had no brand. We had no website, no team. And that was our first partnership there.
• 10:47
  When you say you had a little bit of data, what are we talking like? Are you kind of, you know, 50 customers, 1,000 customers? What does that actually look like for someone who's listening and thinking like, yeah, I want to follow the venture-backed model, but I don't know how much data I need to be able to take that out as proven kind of traction to pitch to investors? Yeah, absolutely.
• 11:09
  I think developing the conviction yourself and figuring out what amount of data do I need to have full conviction in this to dedicate a few years and really spend time going and having these pitches. That was the milestone that we were working against. And for me, I was shipping these data boxes to customers, a lot of whom I was a dog walker for. So I had met that way. It wasn't like there was a scalable marketing channel to finding them.
• 11:35
  Um, most of them didn't pay for them. We were pre-revenue and they were free product boxes, but I would store any feedback in a Google survey. And so I had probably a couple of hundred lines in the Google survey of different people who had received product over time and said positive or negative things. And we had learned from those. Um,
• 11:56
  And a few hundred lines in a Google survey, even though most of them didn't pay a dollar for it, they didn't run through an A-B test on a landing page, we didn't pay to acquire them. Knowing how many people loved it and knowing the product feedback, that gave me the conviction and that was enough to raise that first round.
• 12:14
  Wow, that's really cool and really interesting. And it's one of those things where like, yes, you don't have this scalable marketing channel, but you did have a community that you could immediately kind of go to and work with and get feedback and kind of grow from there. I'd kind of like to go more into how you kind of took that community and then started to grow outwards and start getting your first, you know, 50, 100, 1000 paying customers or subscribers. Yeah.
• 12:42
  Yeah, having that community was a huge help because when we first launched, at least on day one, there are some people visiting the website versus the big launch moment that you're working up against for years and you finally get out there and then the traffic is really low and you're really worried about whether it's a good enough launch or not. So having that small community was very helpful.
• 13:04
  In the earliest days, we were really lean on cash. We actually launched in March 2020. And a week later, everything shut down with COVID and the pandemic hit really hard. And so we did everything as scrappily as possible. Pre-launch, right before the launch to gain momentum, we were doing a lot of guerrilla marketing. We would post flyers. We were like printing flyers in the WeWork and then posting them up throughout the city. And they were very branded and unique and showed the product.
• 13:34
  And that really worked. People texted in. We had a little texting phone number that we posted on them or found the website that way. And people would post about it on social. And so things like that actually went so far for Maeve. And then because we were so cash lean, having a little community of founders who are in a similar space, a lot of like CPG founders at the earliest stages, maybe six months ahead of us or behind us who would talk about us and we would talk about them.
• 14:01
  Whether it's on social and a very formal brand partnership, or just when they're out to dinner talking to other people, everyone has a dog or talking to investors. That's how we met the first 50 to 100 customers was through these guerrilla word of mouth actions. Mm hmm.
• 14:19
  Wow, that's really interesting. And from there, like, obviously, it is the pandemic. So it's all digital, you're doing less, I guess, of that, like, on the ground, pounding the pavement. How do you then take 50 and reach 1000 kind of customers?
• 14:37
  Yeah, at the first month or two of the pandemic, everyone was really scared about what would happen to consumer categories like pet, especially a premium pet. But by maybe like May, June, we found that online spending in the grocery category was really taking off.
• 14:57
  We leaned into Facebook and Google marketing. We were very in the weeds of AB testing every line of creative, every audience segment that we set up. I was in Facebook ad manager every day, and that's not my background. My background's in product. And so just trying to learn as much as possible and be really scrappy there helped because we weren't willing to spend the amount that most of our competitors could spend. We were still so lean at the time. But luckily those channels were really performing for us.
• 15:26
  We had to build channels from scratch like email where pre-launch we had no email flows. And so how do you build those while you're also trying to grow your customer base and you don't really know what works? And we didn't have the money to hire a professional email marketer at the time. And so putting them together as quickly as possible is what kind of scaled us from that 100 mark to 200. And then from there, we professionalized a little further and reinvented it again.
• 15:55
  When it comes to the email side of things, you know, for anyone listening who is an early stage founder and is going through that potentially now, what are the things that you learned that worked in the early days that are kind of like, here's the blueprint, pass it on? Yeah. I think in each of the email marketing platforms, there are these blueprints. There's like templatized flows that everyone has. There's a
• 16:24
  a newsletter signup flow with a discount code at the end. There's a post-purchase welcome flow that educates the customer about the brand. Putting out those standard flows definitely works. But I would say, think about your very specific customer journey and ideally talk to customers who are at those stages in the journey and just have a phone call with them and hear what was still an open question for them. And do that as frequently as possible, even after you build the email flow, because you
• 16:51
  For us, it's all about educational content. There's so much complex nutritional content that we want the customer to understand if she's interested in it. And so as a person building the flows, you don't often see what is completely missing from the flow and that they really didn't understand one component that would be very helpful to conversion or to retention. So getting in the mindset of your customer and understanding the specific journey that they're on and then just following the templates.
• 17:21
  And so do you mean like getting on the phone with someone, a customer, and then stepping them through your flow and being like, do you understand everything? What do you think of this? Is that what you mean? Or you mean more just talking to them about their journey and coming to buying your product and how they kind of found you and things like that?
• 17:38
  Definitely the latter. So my background's in product. And whenever I do the former, you're kind of biasing the audience to think about what you think about as the person building the system. But I take five customer phone calls a week and have from the very beginning. And the customers just tell me whatever they want to tell me. And with dogs, it's great because people will talk about their dogs for two hours and I don't have to say much. And they just kind of
• 18:08
  Word vomit, anything they know about the brand or what their open questions were, what was frustrating, what was really great, all about their dog's life story. And I get to just absorb. And so doing that, you...
• 18:21
  If you do a few of them, even just three or four of them in a couple of weeks span, you can find similarities and hear like, okay, people don't understand that you feed it frozen. They thought that you had to feed it thawed. And so how can I just make sure that messaging is really top of mind? And you can find the little gaps from that.
• 18:40
  Wow, that's such a good piece of advice. And I'm so impressed that you ongoing do five per week to just continually learn. And it sounds like obviously from the beginning, being in that kind of dog walking dog park group where you had that full on feedback, real time shaped the way that you approach customer feedback moving forward.
• 19:02
  Yeah, that's exactly it. I mean, that's our biggest advantage is that if we think that we can understand the customer better than anyone else, we can build any product. And not that many brands in our space actually directly communicate with their customers, which has turned a lot of direct consumers.
• 19:21
  And it's kind of crazy because you think that like, I know people tell you all the time, like interview your customers, talk to your customers, like make sure you're getting that direct feedback, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But then it feels like people just don't actually do that. Even though you know it's best practice, it's like one of those things that's the first for people to be like, oh, I already know, like I'll skip over it. But it's actually so critical.
• 19:42
  ongoing, like maybe you don't have the time to do five calls a week, but you certainly would have time to do a couple of months or, you know, every quarter doing a batch and just being like, where is everyone at? What's missing? What have I kind of like left? Where's my blind spot? I think it's a really great piece of advice for people to remember listening right now. Like, oh yeah, I need to build that into like my strategy.
• 20:05
  Yeah, it is so fulfilling because people will tell you their frustrations, but they're willing to take a call. So they also are invested in the brand just like we are. And that's fulfilling. And there's some stress room because you're like, oh, I got to put that on my to-do list and I need to go do it right now. And I'm too busy, but it's really helpful. And the customers then get to be a part of it. And for us, in the beginning, I think I was really worried about like, we need to show up as a professional, serious brand where we don't have,
• 20:35
  name awareness in the space. People need to trust us because it's a nutrition product. We need to build credibility and having the founder call you that is too humanizing. It doesn't seem serious enough, but...
• 20:46
  At the end of the day, humanizing is great. People want to buy things from people, not from faceless corporations. And so once I got over that, it was way easier. And these calls are sometimes a highlight of my week and sometimes they are a distraction, but they're always useful, whichever way I feel about it going in. Is there a specific example of something that you came across on one of these calls or a number of calls where you were like, whoa, totally missed that, need to change this immediately? Yeah.
• 21:18
  So many. The customers have had so many comments about every detail of the product. I mean, when we were in beta tests, our product is frozen and it's individually pieces of frozen food. So you can just pour it directly out of the bag. But at the earliest beta tests, we were suggesting that people thaw the food because that's what every other dog food does. They say thaw it in the bowl before you feed it.
• 21:44
  And nobody was thawing it. And some of our customers at the time were veterinarians and veterinary nutritionists. And they were like, you know, I love that it is frozen and served frozen because that's actually really great for teeth. And one of the biggest dental health issues is soft foods. And it was like,
• 22:01
  wait, you're serving it frozen. We said, serve it thawed. Um, and so things like that, where they actually pushed the product forward and credit it back to us, but really they were, they should take the credit. Wow. That's cool. That happened all the time or like comments about, um, different brand partnerships we should do different things that we should include on the packaging that would have made it easier or something that was confusing. Those things come up every week for us. That's really cool. I, I,
• 22:31
  wanted to ask you about shipping frozen goods because I feel like, you know, there are challenges to every industry and shipping something frozen sounds like a pain in the butt. How has that journey been for you? And how have you kind of dealt with the challenges that arise? Or what are the things to consider if you're someone starting a brand that needs to be frozen?
• 22:56
  Yeah, that is a great set of questions. I feel like I've aged 15 years shipping frozen foods during a global pandemic and from starting at ground zero to now having multiple locations and customers throughout the country. Shipping frozen food is really logistically difficult.
• 23:18
  It's been made easier over time by the big meal kit companies that all ship frozen. So now there are more and more fulfillment centers that specialize in frozen shipping. There are more and more founders who can tell you the watchouts. For us, we launched in March 2020. And during the first year of COVID, a lot of the dry ice plants went down because of labor shortages when
• 23:43
  parts of their crew would get COVID and be out sick. And dry ice is critical to shipping frozen. You need a box, an insulator, dry ice, the product. You need to know how much ice to put in the box. And then you need really trustworthy carriers to get your box from A to B within the right period of time.
• 23:59
  And so there was a big pain point just with the dry ice supply chain falling apart in the early days. And everyone was really scrappy. It was just about getting up at 4 a.m. and calling everybody who had dry ice in the city and trying to contract some of it and hiring trucks to move it from different locations because they would have some in Boston but not in New York or some in North Carolina but not in New York. Oh, my God.
• 24:24
  Just making ends meet to get dry ice, which isn't even the product, it's just required to ship the product, became tricky. And then the biggest headache was that we were so small, we had one facility in New York and we were shipping across the country from New York to California at the furthest. Um...
• 24:43
  And as a small company, the big carriers don't care too much about you. And so you don't have much leverage over FedEx and UPS or the bigger carriers. And during COVID, their on-time delivery rates plummeted. Usually they're at like 95% to 97%. And during COVID, they were at 80% to 85%. So 15% to 20% of boxes are showing up late.
• 25:06
  For us, if I were setting out to build another frozen food company, the most important things we've learned are make sure your AOV is high enough to pay for the cost of shipping. Your average order value. Yeah. That box, the insulated liner, the shipping is so expensive. So if your average order value is too small, it's going to really hurt your margins.
• 25:27
  Pushing that up or finding different ways to put more in the box, that goes a long way for any frozen shipment. And then we found amazing last mile delivery partners who would have micro fulfillment centers in different metro regions.
• 25:43
  and can ship short distances and you need way less dry ice, that shipping is actually far cheaper for frozen for a lot of ambient goods and typical CPG or fashion goods. The same day shipping is way more expensive than traditional, but for frozen, it's way cheaper. And so finding those innovative partners and making sure that you can be profitable on every box, that's the key. Otherwise it's a really risky business to be in.
• 26:08
  Wow, crazy. How did you, when you realized that you needed to kind of make sure that your average order value was a certain size, what did you do to, you know, beef that up and make it bigger? Yeah, we did a few things. Um,
• 26:25
  From just the most basic perspective, our AOV is tied to how much food we're shipping. And we could either recommend shipping a month's worth of food to a smaller dog or two weeks and a month will be a higher AOV. And so we changed some of the defaults on our website. Or we could start targeting bigger dogs and people who just need more food naturally. And we started testing a lot of audiences on Facebook to find these big dog groups that
• 26:52
  That helps a lot, those two things, changing your defaults and changing your targeting. That's two really good ones. I love that you can search by size of dog groups. What kind of dogs you have? What kind of dog lover are you? Yeah, exactly. Oh my gosh, that's so cool. Classic.
• 27:11
  If you think about, you know, kind of then when you were just kind of getting everything together and figuring it all out to sort of now and looking forward to the future, what have been the key kind of milestones that have leapt you forward and kind of gotten you really off the ground and crushing it?
• 27:29
  Yeah, they continue to happen. And the credit goes to our amazing team more than just me. But in the very early days, having customers rave about us and repost us on social, a few of them had very large reaches. And so that went a long way to growing the beta list. And any sort of stepwise jump like that was a great week for us.
• 27:53
  When we were growing on the contract manufacturing side, initially we launched and we were running our own facility and we outgrew it every three months and would have to bust down a wall and expand. At one point, we bought a machine to automate a lot of the work so that we could run more capacity through it. And...
• 28:13
  We thought we would get this machine delivered and we could just plug it in and it would work. And it turned out you can't just plug in machines like that. You have to hire an electrician and wire them through the wall and build an extra step up generator. But finally, we got that turned on. That was a huge improvement because we could just run more capacity. At some point, we outgrew the facility entirely and found amazing contract manufacturing partners. And we wouldn't have been able to talk to them earlier because as you're growing, you just have to
• 28:41
  build the business that will scale to the next milestone, but, um, finding the right partners so that we could, uh, continue producing enough supply to meet demand using contract manufacturers and third-party fulfillment centers. That was the biggest unlock for us because margins improve and you can stop working in the business so much and just work on the business. You don't have to deal with the day-to-day headaches of manufacturing a product anymore. Mm-hmm.
• 29:07
  Yeah. Wow. Gosh. All things that just sound so, it would be so odd thinking that that's what you need to do when you first start the business. Like, oh, I needed to like buy this machine and get it all like hooked up to my wall. And that was like a really big unlock. Whereas like, I just feel like you wouldn't imagine that in the very beginning of the journey.
• 29:26
  Yeah, I really did not imagine me going into a facility in Long Island City with a wrench when I started the business. But that's what it took that day. And then we got the machine running and it was it was like an early Christmas. So that's super cool. What is on the cards for the future? What do you want to shout about? What do you want to let us know?
• 29:49
  So we are actively growing. We're expanding our product list. We're coming out with a new protein very soon. So, um, chicken is the most popular protein in America. It's, it's healthier. It's more sustainable. Um, we're launching a chicken version of our raw food in the next couple of months, which I'm very excited about. Congrats. Thank you. It is, I, I can't wait. Um,
• 30:14
  Now that we're coming out of COVID and more and more people are outside and doing things in real life again and doing it safely, we're launching a lot of brand activities and in real life campaigns and getting to move off of just digital and show up in the real world. And since those were our roots from this like guerrilla flyer and wheat paste era, I'm really thrilled to start having events and show up in the city again.
• 30:41
  Are you going to do stuff like in the dog parks and with dog walkers and stuff like that? It just sounds like a really fun kind of easy, natural place for you to be. Yeah, that's exactly it. The partners who know a lot of dog people and like to think about this stuff, they completely get it. And so those kinds of partnerships are spot on.
• 31:04
  Oh my gosh, so fun. Is there anything you wish that you knew or would have done differently kind of when you were starting out now that you look back in hindsight? Yeah, so many things. I would say the biggest one is
• 31:23
  Think about what your core competency is. And for us, it's really the brand and design. And originally, we thought we need amazing partners to help us with this because who are we to do this ourselves? But at the end of the day, that's our core competency. And so we spent a lot of time and money working with outside agencies when we should have just always kept it in-house and we ended up doing it in-house anyway. But don't let people tell you that you need help with something if you really don't think you need help with it.
• 31:50
  Um, there are plenty of things that you do need other people's help with and lean in there and figure out where you need to own something versus have partners. Absolutely. Great piece of learning there. I feel like I've definitely struggled with that many times, many, many times.
• 32:09
  What is your key, kind of on that same note, what is your key piece of advice for entrepreneurs in the pet space or in the frozen goods space specifically? That's a great question. In the pet space, a lot of people say know your consumer, but it's a really crowded, fragmented market. And so knowing your consumer is one thing, but figuring out what makes you unique.
• 32:38
  What's that one thing that people need from you that they can't get anywhere else? And you got to know your very specific consumer well enough to know this one unique towering strength that you have because it's a crowded, busy market where there are a ton of brands showing up on Facebook advertising or in the aisles that are all going after the same consumer. What's yours? What's your like one super unique thing?
• 33:08
  We, it's all about making it easy. So my background's in industrial design and really hardware product design, but nobody really thinks about food in that way, the way that you would think about a machine or an app or a piece of furniture. So for us, it's like, how do we design this product to be as easy and accessible as possible? And luckily that's been working. So that's ours for now, but know your towering strength is my one piece of advice. I love that. That's super cool.
• 33:42
  Hey, it's June here. Thanks for listening to this amazing episode of the Female Startup Club podcast. If you're a fan of the show and want even more of the good stuff, I'd recommend checking out femalestartupclub.com where you can subscribe to our free newsletter. We send it out weekly covering female founder business news, insights and learnings in D2C, and interesting business resources.
• 34:06
  And if you're a founder building an e-commerce brand, you can join our private network of entrepreneurs called Hype Club at femalestartupclub.com forward slash Hype Club. We have guests from the show joining us for intimate Ask Me Anythings, expert workshops, and a group of totally amazing, like-minded women building the future of D2C brands.
• 34:29
  As always, please do subscribe, rate and review the show and post your favorite episodes to Instagram stories. I am beyond grateful when you do that.
• 34:46
  Hey, it's June here. Thanks for listening to this amazing episode of the Female Startup Club podcast. If you're a fan of the show and want even more of the good stuff, I'd recommend checking out femalestartupclub.com where you can subscribe to our free newsletter. We send it out weekly covering female founder business news, insights and learnings in D2C, and interesting business resources.
• 35:10
  And if you're a founder building an e-commerce brand, you can join our private network of entrepreneurs called Hype Club at femalestartupclub.com forward slash Hype Club. We have guests from the show joining us for intimate Ask Me Anythings, expert workshops, and a group of totally amazing, like-minded women building the future of D2C brands.
• 35:33
  As always, please do subscribe, rate and review the show and post your favorite episodes to Instagram stories. I am beyond grateful when you do that. Thank you.