Scaling to £35M+ with Minimal Meta Spend: Pure Pet Food's Story

0:00Could I ask, because that in hindsight is such an iconic marketing play, was that planned?

0:11Cool, well today I'm joined by Matt, co-founder of Pure Pet Food and also Joe, growth director. Guys, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for having us. Yeah, cheers. Coming down all the way from Leeds as well for the episode and I think it's a bit of a unique one actually because I think we technically met through the podcast, didn't we? Yeah, we were just saying, actually, I think because we're in Leeds, we try to keep as close as we can to kind of like the London startup scale-up scene, which in the UK is where it's happening. And I think all of us, or there's a couple of us at least, who spend a lot of time on podcasts and searching companies that we like and listening to episodes.

0:49And I think it was by luck that we found you that way and then went a little bit deeper and then we were chatting to each other. And I know Joe really liked a lot of the episodes and that kind of led us to, yeah, clearly the podcast works. Keep going. Yeah, we've been listening for a good nine months now. Yeah, that's amazing. No, I appreciate that. I think, yeah, it's like, for us, it's relationship building more than anything. Like there's, if something else comes off the back of that, great. But yeah, obviously we've been working together now for about just six weeks, something like that. Yeah, six weeks.

1:21Yeah, so on creative, which has been really exciting. I think genuinely, you know, when you guys reached out, I already knew who you were. I think we can get into that in a little bit more detail. But I think what you've created in the pet food space and D2C space specifically, and your unique approach is really, really interesting. Obviously, you raised some money from VCs recently as well. So we'd love to tap into that in a little bit more depth. But I think it's pretty incredible what you guys have done and the growth that you've had, especially since as we spoke about before we started the episode you know since you were on Dragon's Den god that's what 10 years ago now yeah yeah a lifetime ago basically yeah looking very looking very fresh face at the time yeah I've aged a bit yeah that's what that's what startup does to you isn't it Matt how how's the wedding first let's get into that it was brilliant yeah it was um joe's there as well i i would say it was better than what i expected and i expected a lot of it and uh yeah an emotional roller coaster i think that speech was the hardest speech i've ever done in my life i think uh yeah i've never seen you so emotional i'm not an emotional person so like yeah yeah i actually just couldn't look at my wife when i was saying the speech so it was like yeah i think that would made it quite endearing though people like kind of uh gave me good feedback at the end of it but yeah it was it was they always say it's your best day of your life and you I think if you go in thinking that it almost has a risk of not being but actually it kind of superseded what I even thought it was going to be so we were dead happy with it yeah any tips because I'm uh I was engaged earlier this year so that's something we're gonna we're starting to prepare for now I I would say like me me and Gemma quite relaxed people and I think we were speaking to like we had a videographer on the day and a photographer and they were saying sometimes especially like the bride on the day can be so stressed that they actually end up having a really bad day because they're over worrying about every single little detail and the thing that james really good at and i'm good at as well is just focus on you two of having a good day and you've got all your friends and family around everyone's you realize there's only a few moments in life when everyone's really happy you know it's a really joyous occasion so like kind of just embrace all that and don't worry that the band don't start playing this very second or whatever you know like I'd say focus on that yeah it harks back to a bit how Matt treats work it's always been let the experts do the expert job same with my wedding was similar you just let let people that know what they're doing get on with it behind the scenes and don't think about it it seems to work out alright yeah but no you'll have a great time you'll love it yeah I'm sure you will yeah shaky legs yeah I was actually I was really again I'm not that much of a nervous person but i was so nervous about like what the aisle when you turn around and your wife's walking down like that that is difficult to try and like hold yourself back and if you're even slightly an emotional person you'll probably go so yeah be prepared for that anyway um well yeah let's uh let's dive into a bit of the origin story of the uh brand starting i know joe you you were one of the first employees yeah point number two yeah amazing so yeah let's start back at the um you know at the start and we can we can then dive into uh some of those other areas that we discussed um at a later point well there's probably a little bit i'll say in the early stage where there was a few years of where it was me and dan the family and then i then i will jump to when joe came on because that's when the business really scaled there's probably some fairly hard grinds before which is uh yeah it'll be interesting in itself scrappiness yeah cool well yeah how did so how did the brand come about so me and dan are from a small town called halifax uh just outside of leeds i think both of us through different paths we've actually grown up together so my younger brother is dan's best friend we've all grown up together we live two doors down from each other and i wouldn't say there's been any real inspiration in terms of like a person or someone around us but we both have the same view on life that for whatever reason we didn't want to work for other people we kind of wanted to set up our own thing and we started really early and failed in a couple of businesses i would call them learnings but but definitely failed and actually then start to realize we need to do something that goes beyond just trying to make money because we wanted to set up a business and actually you realize because it's so hard to get going you have to actually care about what you're doing so we went on a bit of a journey and I've always been one of these people who I like to research like trends I've just had a genuine interest in it and I was always looking at like what is going on in America what's going on in Europe what sort of categories we've both always been into health we've both had animals growing up you know we've we've kind of been in similar sort of places throughout life and actually just started researching different sort of concepts and ideas and we looked at loads of different categories we looked at supplements we looked at all sorts and we actually looked at pet and it was genuinely like um a common sense approach to it and i and i actually think um being naive is a really strong thing and i think you don't realize how how not knowing something is really good so we looked at pet food i mean you look on a shelf it's full of these weird things that say chicken and vegetable and then you open it up and it's a lot of biscuits and if like you were to go home to your fiance and she said you're having spaghetti bolognese tonight and you got a plate of biscuits you'd kind of wonder what that was and uh we started to then do the research and like how is that made and we actually had a pet food factory at the top of the hill where we grew up and it used to absolutely stink if the wind was blowing the wrong way so dug into like all of like how it's made and you realize quite quickly it's a it's a byproduct of human food it's not been around for that long but basically it was what do you do with this waste product they put it through an extrusion process which i think as years have gone on people have started to understand that heavily processed is not good they turn it into this biscuit form and then that gets sold on the shelves with loads of like additives preservatives to make it tasty so we started looking at that and thought is that that clearly is not healthy for a dog and then when you look at the research hpi and you see obesity has gone up cancer rates have gone up so like just like you know just like humans you know unhealthier with like feeding processed food was the clear correlation and then back then this was like 10 11 years ago saw that there was like an emergence of this like raw food and and people were like defrosting meats and i think we sort of had this thought of like everyone surely didn't want to like defrost a chicken carcass every night and feed it to a dog and although there's definitely gonna be a market for that and that is a really good way to feed an animal is the different processes and then started looking into like human food started looking into subcategories and saw that like there's this like army food camping food which is just air dried you essentially remove the moisture it means you need to know put no process into it and then you just send it out and that was kind of like the aha moment of actually why is this not done in pet this makes sense we then started looking globally saw that there was people doing it in the us and then thought actually can you get this over into into europe and into the uk and and this was all literally from dan's mom's spare room like no understanding of how to manufacture how to build a website like just just this kind of like inner belief of like we'll make it work and then that was the starting process we managed to get a regulation passed to say that we could sell what was then kind of like an air-dried concept of food in in in europe but then we actually didn't know that there was a world and i actually think this is a real positive now but we didn't know there was a world where you could go and speak to people who'd manufacture stuff here we just presumed we had to manufacture it ourselves so we bought an air drying machine off amazon for like 100 quid and put it in dan's mom's kitchen and genuinely thought we were going to run it from the kitchen and uh dan who's like the i would say financial kind of like he's like the person who will operate and scale i'm probably more of like the idea ideas salesperson we work really well together be calculated how many air drying machines you could fit in his cellar and like what that would get us to so we realized pretty quickly that one when we had like we got audited and was told like if you ever tried to sell this to the public it's got all this like risk of bacteria and stuff so we were like we need to find a different way and actually and this was probably one of the hardest moments at the time so we had no money we were doing the most horrible job you can imagine where we were trying to put money into this pet food business that we really believed in but we had no money we didn't have family money we got a calderdale council grant for 300 pound which didn't obviously get you met get you get you far we were doing cold calling for financial services businesses and every person we rang so we rang 150 people a day every person that we set up for a meeting about pensions which you can imagine how the response you get when you ask someone if they would like that we would get paid 150 pound so we'd both try and get two a day and if we did that we'd have to call usually 150 people we could then focus on doing the pet food and that's and it was actually dan was going through one of those lists and was like they look like they make air dried pet food air dried food not pet food let's go down and speak to them about actually making this pet food rather than do they want a conversation about a pension so we went down got mega lucky there was this small unit in halifax who were making air dried products for human chains like for nhs for like supplements and you know like the cereal bars those types of things we told them what we wanted to do and they were like we think we can probably help you do this and uh i think we spent 300 pound on our first manufacturing run put it in the boot of my car my brother had moved to london at that point put it in the in the bedroom and that was our first manufacturing run and then we started to find people to build the website etc etc but that was kind of then the point of actually we've got a business so that's probably a very long-winded way of saying how we uh how we got there i love i love it it's like that scrappy entrepreneurial spirit isn't it like you know you make find a way to make it happen.

11:43But no, that's interesting because it doesn't sound like the most straightforward process to go through. Not at all, yeah. Not like starting a clothing brand where there's thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of suppliers all over the world that can supply that to you. And something that hadn't been done yet in the vertical. I mean, I'd love to just know, just to touch on like, what was the state of the pet market at that time? Because I feel like, although, you know, and this sounds weird to say, but it feels like you were very early in many ways. I look at like, you know, as we discussed before we started, you know, if I look at this niche now, it is absolutely exploded and continued to explode.

12:30I think we definitely follow behind America and, you know, just seeing how much people are spending on their pets nowadays. talk a bit about that and the state of the market versus now i think i can probably give a much a much better understanding and explanation of it right now i think when we were doing it to be totally honest again that naivety we realized it was a unique idea and i i i used to always give ideas to dan and he'd basically tell me if it was a bad idea or not he's still doing still do and i basically said i told him the idea and he saw he actually because i used to email him in and he actually came back and was like that actually makes a lot of sense and it so it made common sense that actually this convenient way to feed a healthy food if we could do a job of educating it we've probably got a chance but the state of the market then i would say was like you've said very early i remember we went we paid to go to like one of these kind of like um industry events where you go and like you talk to suppliers and you talk to potential retailers and at that time we didn't realize we were going to go into this d2c world and we won like innovation awards we thought we're clearly on to something but there's something that's gone on which I'm sure you've probably seen but it's become bigger and bigger I think as as we've gone through and like life's got more expensive or at least it definitely feels like that people are kind of like putting off children later i know me and my wife are like this where we've not had children yet but we've got a dog instead that we treat probably better than most people's children

14:06i think that but that trend is kind of like definitely been um accelerated throughout the years back then there was definitely something there but i i wouldn't be able to tell you at the time it was going to turn out like it did so it was very early to be honest and i think um it wasn't until probably about 2014-15 the the early kind of d2c early adopted businesses like your tails.com started to come into the market and that sort of i think bubbled up around kind of like the investment community and probably people who were kind of like operators and understand how to scale d2c businesses all of a sudden started to see this as like a hot category to get into they could see the trends of humanization of pet you know people there's some interesting stats that people in a time when they lose income the the dog is usually the last one to go in terms of dropping that spend they will sacrifice themselves and i think there's a don't quote me exactly on this but there's a stat that like your child up until something like 18 months is number one but then actually becomes number two in terms of like what you will drop on spend so all those things were going on and then i think and again i wouldn't be able to say what these words were at the time but people clearly who understood the market as it started to develop could see that you know there's really good unit economics in pet and if you can obviously get the right product at the right price all those things so i think that became attractive for both people starting pet businesses and also the wider investment community and it's been the last i would say what would you say three four five years something like that where it's all of a sudden become this like really hot category to be in yeah yes probably since it's become the set it's become sexy hasn't it yeah yeah lockdown definitely was a massive growth point for pet um especially pet online because obviously everyone got dogs at the beginning of lockdown uh matt included um but it was like obviously when when everyone knew we were locking down everyone went straight a local breeder and got a dog it just it the growth in pet was huge yeah yeah yeah so it's it's turned into a like you said like a quote-unquote sexy category and i think people think this is a really interesting category i've even heard you guys speak about if you're going to start up a d2c business it'd be in i think you either said health or pet and you know there's all the trends that you see going on in humans they're going on in pet as well just in a slightly a different way but there's it leads to loads of opportunity yeah exactly i think just as humans we become more conscious of you know what we're consuming and what those around us are consuming whether that be pets or you know siblings or kids um and that that those trends play through to to pets 100 um i want to take this in chronological order then i mean let's because i assume it was almost pre-inflection point with the dragons you going on dragons then and i want to want to touch on that first to make sure before we kind of hit that big point of growth but i didn't you know um it was quite an iconic episode in many ways for for context um you know dan dan was he was eating the food on the episode i think peter called him out and asked him to to try and put put uh the the food where his mouth is yeah yeah yeah um talk a bit about that and you know uh that that journey of going going on the show and uh whether that that helped in any way kind of put you guys on the map yeah yeah well i'll say a few of the tactics that got us there as well behind that so we managed to get it to and dragons then was part of this but we managed to scale it up to around a million but but pre that we we were completely hand to mouth so we had no avenue to say let's put 10 grand into meta ads and and we wouldn't even if i'm honest had the capability to do it at that stage we were kind of like just hand to mouth playing around we'd boost a few posts on in meta etc and one of the things that we realized quite early when you had no money that actually got you a little bit of traction was enter as many events as possible so we would turn up to the opening of you know an envelope a bit of a letter it'd be literally any event we could enter you know a regional startup event anything we'd enter it and we'd usually actually do pretty well and we we managed to win a few of these events and we won like a national event and we got a grant off the back of it and so that was a strategy that worked quite well but then clearly because at the time we were both discussing saying we need to find a way of actually getting in front of a wide audience let's apply to dragon's den and as we were applying the directors clearly look at like a lot of these like events and like startup events that people have a competition sorry and look at the winners and then just ring them so we actually got a call from dragon's den saying would you want to be on it as we were thinking about being on it and i think we'd literally sent the the letter application that day and we were like how do you know and then they were kind of oh no we've just seen that you've won one of these competitions um so we then agreed to go on it got through all the process and i think to be totally honest we we were so young that we weren't kind of like um worried about the outcome we'd really both me and dan all the very different characters are quite kind of like um in very different ways quite quite methodically now we think we thought about every every question they could think of asking and we had each other had the responses like if they ask that i'll answer if they ask that i'll answer so we'd really got to grips with like the business so we weren't worried about any sort of question to catch us out and then we went on there i mean i can probably share a little bit but it's like a full 12 hours of a day you know we had to get there really early sat in a green room you can't see the dragons like someone follows you everywhere that you go so you don't cross paths all that sort of stuff and it was a bit of an eye-opener because you're in with businesses who are like this is our last chance saloon before like we're going to go under i remember speaking to a couple uh i won't say the business but they were literally like hysterical because they'd like put the mortgage on the line and you're thinking oh my god you know like you're making me nervous you know like at this point it's kind of like for us it's just all upside you know we're young we've got nothing to lose so we then went in and uh went into the kind of like do the pitch and it is definitely kind of uh a bit a bit of the naked purposefully scary so you walk in there's people staring at you both sides all the lights are shining on you and you have to walk to this spot and then say the pitch it's not actually a lift is it either the lift doesn't even you have to pretend to look up and down yeah all that sort of stuff but then once you've done that pitch you kind of just you end up phasing everything out around you phase all these cameras pointing at you and you realize you're just in a conversation because they edit it down to kind of like you get like a five minute slot maybe 10 minutes tops but you're in there for an hour and i think we were in there for well over an hour but they start asking you questions and as soon as you get into that you start to feel comfortable but you can tell that they've not been told what the business is so at first they're trying to work out because they obviously throw in a few like joke businesses to kind of like not to discredit anyone's business but they definitely do throw in a few to like for them to you know do the whole ripping them apart and all that sort of stuff but they're trying to figure that out quite early and luckily one of the dragons deborah meaden knew the category and actually said this is an interesting business actually i could see this has got potential and that kind of turned it and they obviously had the moment which is still featured in most of our, up until the last few months has been in a lot of our ads.

21:44They had the moment where they asked Dan to eat it and Dan ate it on camera, which, you know, from a trust point of view, like you don't realise how valuable that is looking back at the time. It just... Could I ask, was that, because that in hindsight is such an iconic marketing play. Was that planned? They actually planned it for us. Interesting. They didn't actually. What they said is, ask the dragons to eat it. So we were like, well i think dan said would will you eat it or something like that or would you like to give it a try i remember because deborah then pulled this horrible face yeah would you like to give it a try and i think i can't remember how he worded it but peter jones kind of said we'll put your money where your mouth is and you eat it type thing and so then he ate it but that actually that kind of like clip itself has turned into like such a big trust point and you know we still use it today in a lot of our comms so that was a huge moment and then from that point the tide started to turn all of a sudden you know we got given really nice feedback and we got two offers and i think we went into it again if i'm honest completely with his eyes wide open we we realized if they were going to give us what we want we were going to say yes but actually it was so early in the journey we were a tiny business we'd already done a good job of opening a lot of the doors so this kind of promise that we're going to like do it all for you and i think you've got to be again eyes wide open with this peter jones ain't going to be in your office on monday morning asking what he can do you know it's very much you're going to get the money you might get kind of like the odd bit of help and a few connections but i think we just had the belief that we could do it so we just thought well unless they give us what we want we're going to say gracefully no and to be honest we came away from it i remember walking out and it was like that could not have gone any better you know we've we've nailed it we've not been ripped to pieces we've not been told that it's a stupid idea they validated it like one of them said it was like the best pitch they've ever seen or something like that you know like yeah and then came away and thought wow and i remember it going live because you shoot it kind of like early in the year and it was july it went live and it was like a sunny day and i remember because i hate watching myself back both of us watched it by ourselves in in in at the time we were both living with our parents like watched it by ourselves and then the second it went live you could just see the counter and right now it actually probably wouldn't even be a blip on us on a day of sales but at the time i was like because at this point we didn't have an office i was printing out the orders in our home printer running around to danny's dad's garage putting the labels on the boxes and driving them down to the post office and i could see like the ticker of the sales just go i'm thinking holy shit i'm gonna be up all night here you know kind of like printing out orders and we then just spent probably the next two weeks just frantically packing and we couldn't pick up the phone you know we just had to turn the phone off and you know you realize after that we realized we had loads of people like trying to bang on this door for you know wanting to talk about investment and all but we couldn't even literally pick up the phone it took us probably a month to kind of like lift his heads up and and realize it was obviously a big thing for us and it allowed us to start to get in the game and scale you know we we actually i think at the time in sales we made back what we asked for within probably a week if that you know and at that point when your two guys just sat home with no cash at all all of a sudden you had a bit of money to play with and we then went on the journey of starting to learn how to scale it from having a little bit of cash and started to learn about you know how we do this kind of e-commerce world and how we do online sales and all that sort of stuff and then Doug went really deep into it and that probably gets us to the next stage.

25:24That's amazing no I it's it's great to to hear the impact the initial impact just to give it that nudge that it had and I guess like that kind of takes us on before we get into actually then you you raising at a later stage. Joe you coming into the journey then we mentioned before we started that that was a bit of an inflection point and a massive growth lever for the business. Let's talk a bit about that and yeah, your impact there. Yeah. So I think from my understanding, at least, there was a look around point of other online DTC businesses in pet starting to come around. And Matt and Dan always tell me that they were kind of, it was either get on the train or kind of grow really slowly and then it was seen that like subscriptions a thing in dog food now suddenly it wasn't a thing before like tails and butternut came along and did subscription it didn't exist before then so they saw this kind of inflection point of um like we should we should get on board this opportunity here so then when i came on board obviously it was it was still very early when you look at what we've done now um i had six months of a metal part of a kitchen sink at my desk so it was it was it was a gamble but it was uh it was fun and that was the main point um but yeah it was I was very much tasked with so I I whilst I'm the growth director now I was um I joined the business as a developer so I was just a website developer at the time did a bit of design and development and um yeah they just said can you can you build as a subscription first website again like like like matt says like matt and dan aren't people that have historical careers uh or like um skill background essentially job yeah yeah so which is great for someone like me uh beyond to come in because they just back back you and you get full reign to to do what you think is best so there's no like they're not from a design background saying well i know how to design so this is the skills are from even anything.

27:28So when I come in and say, I think we should drop Shopify and do something custom and build something a bit special, they said go for it, which is what we did. And luckily it worked out really well because it could have gone either way. But yeah, we launched the subscription first 2020 just before lockdown. And that kind of metrics turned overnight, retention doubled and then lockdown hit and that obviously grew the metrics further but yeah that was all just just after um the investment round yeah i think we got we got really lucky in our first hires because because like joe said we we didn't know what we didn't know and um i think both me and dan have always been quite good at like going out and speaking to other businesses and even going into the raise people would be surprised and and and maybe people people aren't if they're in these communities already but i was definitely surprised like how open people are to like help so we spoke to a few businesses who were like turning over 20 30 million a bit in front of us and well a lot in front of us at the time and had gone through rounds of venture and we were kind of like how do we even do this now i remember him talking about unit economics and cac 12 tv and having to write it down and be like what the hell does that actually mean you know like and yeah yeah dan who's who actually qualified as an accountant he trained himself going through the business then went away and um modeled it and was like actually we have a pretty good business i think you know i've actually done this and i've because at the time and i mean i don't even want to say what the cpas were at the time but i wish i knew what i knew now because we should have absolutely flown but we just didn't have a clue and didn't know that you know there's like i know you guys talk about like way fly and ways in which you can like get revenue finance no idea of any of that so we were kind of like very hand-to-mouth and then obviously did the raise and that was literally by listening to people putting together our own deck go out totally did it ourselves didn't take any sort of corporate finance advice anything like that and they got really lucky with some of the first hires and joe being you know i've said this to joe loads of times but really lucky with bringing joe into the business who like it's got that kind of um self-starter mindset like i think again when you've not been in a work environment you almost think that everyone has that mindset of like there's a problem i'll figure it out i'll solve it and i'll do it whereas you learn actually over the years as the business scales that not everyone's got that skill set and i think we got super lucky with joe where he'd come in see an issue and just solve it and do it and tell you that he's done it and i remember we were talking about uh it'd be really good to have data dashboards joe literally taught himself in a week how a weekend out how to build like actual proper like you know look a studio kind of dashboards and then here presto we've got kind of like cac 12 tv and all these metrics that would comply because joe's taught himself and didn't almost took that for granted and it were only years later when the team started getting bigger you're like i'm gonna admit it like that it's not a normal thing that to be fair and we got really super lucky that i think joe was looking for a startup culture to get involved in and wanted to get his hands dirty and it was just really lucky timing and an opportunity kind of met each other and uh and and since then we've always tried to find that skill set and like joe said you know i don't know more about tech than joe does so i'm not going to tell him when he was obviously in that role and have that same view on most areas and i think if you find the right people and you give them the tools and the autonomy to do it you usually get a good outcome i think that's a really interesting point when you mentioned that joe as well because i think it's it sounds obvious but like you know bringing people in trusting them to do their job giving them the empowerment to be able to to do what they need to do and you know really lean into their expertise and i think you see it more often than not where founders aren't good at that they're not good at delegating they're not good at empowering their team to have ownership in in what they need to to achieve through that and i think i've noticed that from us working with you guys on creative you know there are times where we have brands that um you know they bring us into to do a job and um any suggestion kind of gets shot down and isn't isn't right um so i think that's a great a great thing for founders to to learn from because that's how you get the most out of people yeah i think so i think um i remember when me and dan went through investment we had like um like is it's called like a psychological assessment and we both were very low on ego and uh and i think that's that's actually stood us in good stead that we're i don't need to be the one that's been seen as the person who's done xyz i'm more than happy in fact i prefer the person who's you know in that team to have the limelight and and give them the autonomy to go out and do it yeah it's a true yorkshire business yeah i think so yeah yeah um so let's you touched on it there in terms of raising but how many how many rounds have you through we've done technically three but i would call it two because the two of them with the same investor okay um and i think if you think about and i'm sure you know about this from subscription world there's a few factors that go on in terms of you know it's essentially and i wouldn't call it a race you're trying to build a business when you when you take on venture funding in different constraints for what you think about a traditional business and i remember me and danny it was like a real kind of like mental shift where in the early days you're used to just running it from cash in the bank profit and loss very steady you think how you think about a business when you take on venture you're trying to get you know you have to accept this that you're investors and this doesn't mean that i want to leave the business as soon as we take on venture or anyone else does but you have to accept that they are giving you money for equity a valuation that you're not going to get from a local bank but they are going to want an exit at some stage so they want a disproportionate return at some stage so the rules of the game almost change a little bit and when we looked at our business being as joe said a subscription first business you're also playing in a market where people are playing different games and you've got you know some massive competitors in our space who are raising huge amounts of money who are buying market share and being in the auctions and pushing up the cpms and the cpas and a meaning that if you want to play that game first of all you've got to do a really good job and think outside the box and do things differently but secondly when you play in a world where you know it's a cac to ltv and your cac is not offset in your first order you're effectively not making money on that first order so if you want to fuel it and you've got ambitions to grow it you've got to take on venture funding and you've got to have a real good understanding of what your co-ops look like what your retention profile is and then the levers to scale it are improve cpa improve retention think about your margin in between but those are the three things and and how can we do a good job of all of those so yeah that was going to be my next question like any any advice for brands that are going through that right now but i think what you broke down there is one you know clear path to an exit and really then breaking down those those economics so they know you know they they understand the scale that this can get to anything outside of that i think you've got to have real clarity on what you want from the business you know do you want to be a command and control and own your own destiny and and bootstrap and and that for some verticals can be done and is a really good path and if you don't like having people in the business who are going to at times challenge you it's probably not the right thing to do again me and dan as i said are both low ego so we we were quite comfortable of bringing people and that brings challenges good and bad but you've got to be really clear on where do you want to get the business what does that look like and you've got to be able to to tell that story to people who who are potentially going to put money in and you've got to give a real clear understanding of like why is this proposition better than the other 550 100 have been talking to me in this sector what's going to make you stand out and we had a lot of those components without thinking that through when we first started the business i would say by luck more than anything but if i were going to do it again i'd have a really clear view of do i want to be in this as a lifestyle business do i want to be out of this in 10 years and again your personal is not always tied to to the investor but you've got to have a real clear understanding that investor has probably got a life cycle on that fund they've probably got to get a return and you've got to work it back because you know maybe not to go into now although i'm happy to but but it can also turn different you know if you don't have a real clear view and you get into an investment you can end up being in a worse position than taking the money doesn't mean you're going to be successful it actually ups the risk and it means that you can have a disproportionately good outcome but you also increase your chances of potentially not having a good outcome so you've got to really think that through can also really change your behaviors if you think like you you know when you go from being bootstrapped fully bootstrapped to suddenly this big cash injection it suddenly changes the way you behave around the cash in the business and how you you kind of uh spending cash i mean how did you approach that with that first cash injection did you you know did you have a clear strategy of where that money was going and how are you going to use that and i guess avoid wastage uh as well you feel free to you've been as well during this but i i i think again we were so early and you you realize over time that sometimes like a gut feel is actually most of the time if not every time is the right thing and i think we went through stages in the business of not quite fully understanding the paths that we wanted to go and i think as the years have gone on we're really confident in ourselves now and we spend all of our time now oh i say all of our time a big part of our time speaking to others who were on the same journey and really understanding it in the early days i think we took on money and actually the early investor he messaged me recently from being getting married he kind of said to us and uh and i really like him for this he was like i remember seeing two guys in the shed in halifax who've managed to get a business to a million and i thought they've managed to get a business to a million with no money i'll just the the kind of investment thesis was they probably will do all right if i give them some money and it was no more and he really took a chance on us and i said how much i admire him for that back the jockey not the horse yeah but i think when we took the money on it was almost to your we didn't really have a like a clear path we had a very strong view of director subscription but then how to scale it i think we had a few bits of like nuggets of ideas but there wasn't a clear like we are going to absolutely nail this that's i think you said it but we were really early we were early in a lot of ways and we've from not having jobs in an industry or being from a venture-backed world didn't have that strategy it's taken a few years for us to now i think now if you asked us we have a really clear focus on what we're going to do but that's evolved over the years we probably made some we did definitely make some silly mistakes and in hindsight we'd never do them but you live and learn and i think that's been the big thing there's also a reality that uh tight yorkshireman the purse strings are a lot tight I don't know the reality of this but you hear a lot about some of the startups in London splashing pretty big cash on just life and offices and stuff like that, I mean we moved office recently and some of the discussions I was involved in involved like how can we spend£500 less on this sofa and we've got millions of pounds in the bank but we're a traditionally tight purse business that want to spend sensibly and it's part of the DNA of the business.

39:19So I think part of the point of it all was to keep the DNA and not get away from that. But yeah, it's a different, I think we play differently up north. Yeah, and I think the thinking is evolving as we're scaling. Yeah. But I think Joe's right. Like we've not come from that world and sometimes you kind of, when you're in it and we've immersed ourselves in it over the last few years and you realise that there's definitely different games being played and the way that their playbook has played out is very different to how they've thought about what the use of cash and where they spend it. I think it comes down to ego.

39:54As we've said earlier, it makes for a great LinkedIn post to say we've just raised X amount of millions and a lot of founders, it's about status and it kind of ties back to some of those core human desires rather than using that as a vehicle to continue growing. So, yeah, I think that's definitely served you, the fact that, you know, ego hasn't got in the way. And you're the same people as when you started the business as you are now, you know, doing multiple eight figures a year in run rate. One of the things I remember Matt and Dan saying, which always sticks with me, is that sometimes you can raise too much money.

40:38I think again this goes back to ego where if you raise the more you raise the more you've got to the bigger the business has got to end up being so sometimes you can just if you raise a lot of money it means you've got to get to a certain size before you can exit and it just makes life a lot harder and you're a lot more pressure because you've got to be huge and sometimes you don't actually need like sometimes you'll be pushed to raise more so that it can be a bigger business in the end and I think there's a balance there. And that's probably another good bit of advice of like be really intentional and and and prudence probably the wrong word but think about what the outcome is going to be because actually you know you've seen lockdown was probably one of these and these businesses that that i heard of and kind of secondhand knew where they raised massive money because consumer was absolutely flying but you've got to remember that for argument's sake you raise a hundred million if that business then sells for a hundred million usually in that contract the investor will get 100 million back and you will get nothing so you've got to be really really thoughtful around what do you actually need and what do you honestly think the outcome is going to be like is it realistic to think if you sell you know i don't know pick a category but you're going to sell it for five billion when it's in a kind of like a commodities based consumer product with no real usps possibly not so probably don't raise money with expectation that that's where it's got to be.

42:04You know, have a think back of like, what is the outcome? And I think that's an important thing to do. Yeah, yeah, I love that. I'd love to just, you know, it wouldn't be DTC Diaries without going a little bit into, you know, page strategy. I know when we first started talking and ahead of us working together, you kind of were touching on Meta as a channel, maybe struggling to like fully unlock the true potential of Meta this year. Can we touch on that and maybe like going into a little bit of what you've changed? I know you've restructured slightly internally in terms of, you know, the growth side as well.

42:35So, yeah, it would be good to touch on that. Yeah. So we've been doing Meta for a couple of years, I would say. We started probably more stronger on it. Maybe Jan 23 is when we started pushing a bit harder on it. Matt saw it really as an opportunity where I think part of the problem with Meta when you have certain attribution models is it looks like a very high CPA channel compared to Google. especially when you've got a product like ours, which is highly searched for, but Google works pretty well for us. And there's always historically been a larger channel because people come looking for a solution for dog food.

43:14It's very common for people to Google, what should I feed my dog with pancreatitis? It's much different to what T-shirt do I wear. I mean, it's a searched for thing, which is great for us because it's cheap. But as we obviously start to grow, So that search volume runs out and you need to start driving awareness, which we've tried to do. And we've had a few hits along the way. We did a founder ad last year, I think it's Gen 24 now. I can't believe it's 25 now. But that did really, really well. And we really grew through it. But we didn't have any kind of strategy. We didn't know this thing people were doing of just running loads of ads.

44:00We'd seen it a bit, but hadn't managed to get backing internally to scale the team. So we weren't releasing loads of ads and we didn't manage to scale that ad fatigued and growth slowed in that area. So we tried a few different things. Earlier this year, we tried a kind of a more old-fashioned way of doing things where we'd use a large marketing agency. we had a more traditional kind of 2018-2019 funnel through meta of kind of your tofu mofu bofu stuff um and it just wasn't really working for us it did we uh cpas were going up growth was slowing and we were we had we had a tough for us it's april to april so q1 for us was was april to june but it was pretty tough for us um so we made some changes um and we decided to um bring the kind of growth engine in-house and we kind of backed ourselves to do it.

44:53That's when I moved from tech to growth with some internal restructure stuff. And that's when, obviously, we'd been listening to your podcast, which gave me and Matt, I'd been listening to it for a few months at that point. And we were really keen on, we really backed Meta and we talked to, I think in seven days, we talked to 15 different people that we thought were experts, including you guys and some other founders of other businesses that are doing well and some agencies, just loads of different people to, and we just got this real feeling of meta is the answer here. We're not doing it right.

45:28It is, like everyone else, it's their biggest channel by far for us. It was our third biggest channel at that point. That's what I found crazy about when we spoke, like you were at the scale you were without meta, which just was like, for me, I just saw the money signs because it's just in the sense of, you know, there's just so much potential there and, you know, nowhere near the ceiling. So the opportunity based on where you were able to get to without Meta as a primary channel, which is very rare in today's, you know, DTC landscape was pretty amazing. Yeah, no, yeah. And everyone would tell us that, which is what I got this reason to believe really built up.

46:03And I think that's what was a big thing for us. We got this massive reason to believe. So when we kind of kicked off doing it, we brought the team in, built the team in-house to start making ads. we talked to you guys about kind of scaling that ad production and um i look back and a little bit it was luck but we we went out and filmed this ad um the yorkshire show at the time just a fairly fairly simple um street interview ad and it absolutely demolished it did really really well and it meant that three weeks after we launched this new um strategy and way of doing things we halved our CPA and two and a half X sales in three weeks.

46:43And then we just doubled spend in a week just because we could. And it was there. We saw like, and it was fantastic. And that was what, two and a half months ago now. We've had another hit recently with one of your guys' ads, the founder ad. And it's just, scale is doing really, really well. We've definitely seen Meta's now our biggest channel. So it's been a real, real quick turnaround. And obviously, because of the scale, like you say, because of the scale we're at and the money we have in the bank. And I mean, when we were 30 mil run rate at the time of the change and we're a bit more now, which is great.

47:18But when you're that scale and you turn things around that dramatically, you can really go at it. And we understand as a business, as long as your CPA is reasonable and we've got a bit of cash in the bank, we can spend and can just scale. who don't have to go off the budget we made six months ago, which is a change we've recently made, but been really useful when stuff goes well. So yeah, it's allowed us to really, really push on, which is really exciting. Yeah, and I would add to that, the times I've seen, because we've got two really good, and we've got three performance channels where we've got, I would say, the meta side and the face-to-face side, which have kind of like been standouts for us.

48:02and the times when that has been done well is when we've had, I would call it, like a bottom-up approach. I think it's so easy to go to like, you know, be sold the dream and like get this cookie cutter approach, but you realize that you need to be from a bottom-up because the nuances are around, and you talk about this a lot, but like, what's your product market fit in that category? What are you trying to get across? And it always works when you get really in the weeds. And like what Joe's probably not said, which Joe's been pivotal in this is we've now got the work has now gone in how we structure and think about creative creative testing how we think about all the different propositions how we think about the stages of the funnel and all those things in terms of how we do it creatively that that's been the lever that's and like Joe said we got lucky with a couple of unbelievable winners like you guys have got one of them and the Yorkshire show one was like almost too good to be true but that that came from like intentionally it wasn't look it was actually the structure behind it and i think we've got a structure now where you know the next big winner might come in six months or six weeks or six days but but the intention and the structure is behind it so could you talk a bit about that structure in terms of like how how's your growth team set up internally now then yeah so we um we actually had some of the the talent in-house already that we just repurposed a little bit they were quite spread thin doing a number of different things affiliates and all that kind of thing and i kind of just chopped a lot i um when we changed my strategy was simplify and focus so we chopped a lot of channels that we were doing and there were some interesting conversations internally of people saying why would we stop doing that that's going okay but the focus was very much we should do less and we should do it really well and i love that by the way that's a big thing for us yeah it's it's really worked but But I think there was a lot of surprise that I came in and said, we should do less, not more.

49:59So we repurposed a couple of people's roles. So we have a kind of a lead creative strategist who kind of runs the team. And she was doing a lot of it already, but just didn't have the remit to be able to perform how she wanted to. And then we have another creative strategist on board. We've just had another one. Well, we're just in the process of hiring another one as well. So we will have two creative strategists and a lead running that team, working with some freelance video editors to prop up some skills that are needed to produce internally. And then we work with yourselves as well. So that doubles up our internal resource.

50:36So we end up, currently we're making about 200 ads a month, but we want to scale that. Obviously, it's difficult at our price point and CPA point that you can't make. I'm finding at least you can't I don't understand how we could make a thousand ads a month because I don't understand how we could spend enough in testing to test a thousand ads a month at the moment without having ad sets with 30 ads in them which you could do so we have a kind of pretty basic like everyone suggests a testing campaign and a scaling campaign where testing we just put money behind kind of ad sets where we give each ad set a certain amount of money each week and just scale the winners.

51:18You're horizontally scaling. Yeah, both. So we, if it's under a certain CPA, we'll promote it, but also we'll scale it within the campaign as well. So we do both to try and make the most of it because we did think about turning it off and just putting it in scaling, but I think if it's winning, you might as well spend on it. It's not harmed. I don't particularly see loads of cannibalization of each other between the two campaigns. so I'm encouraging you just to spend until when the CPA goes up then you turn it off it's pretty straightforward we've kept it really simple so that we can focus on the actual creative I myself and the other lead creative strategists are doing the media buying which is very much just feels like gambling at times turning stuff up and off when it reaches certain things I think it can very much be automated at some point it feels very straightforward one of the things I like though of being of doing it obviously i've kind of taught myself how to do it as we've gone along because it's not particularly complicated um and i liked uh my my um theory is always i should know at least a bit how to do something before i get someone else to do a better job of it i that's just the way i work i want to know how to do everything that my team does at least to a degree um and that helps my my level understanding my advice giving i find um so yeah the um the media buying side just it feels fairly fairly straightforward keep it simple and then the focus is on just go out and make as many good ads as you can um and we'll test them and find out how they do and keep them diverse we tier them up we have like tier one which is kind of your statics and tier two which is um ugc and kind of street interviews or stuff filmed on phones in the office and then your tier three which is um kind of high production stuff a lot of you guys do um we've done some high production stuff in the past internally as well and try and keep a blend between it because we really create that diversity and force us to be as diverse as possible yeah and that seems to be working pretty well for us but again it's fairly early for us a lot of what we do is just from the people that we've talked to we like matt says part of the problem of us being up north is that we're not in a natural community of businesses doing a good job of stuff um so we've had to be really intentional of making friends talking to people and building our own communities to get and give advice to obviously we do some stuff and have done some stuff really well um especially around the direct sales face-to-face stuff so we have done a lot of sharing uh of what works well for us in return to turn for advice on sharing of what works for the people and that is working that that works really well for us yeah i love i love that by the way that you just how bullish you guys are it's definitely see this trend with founders and just brands that we either work with or get on the podcast.

54:08And just, you know, the ones that are just so bullish on just always being the students, I think are the ones that really win at the end of the day. Like it's that idea of always learning from others. And you guys throughout the whole journey seems like you're so, you know, that's such an integral part of your strategy. Because yeah, it's, as you say, you know, we do that with the agency as well. People that are just further ahead than us that we can just learn from and just always be sponges. So I love to hear that. We've got about 15 minutes left. I'd love, we talked about acquisition a bit there.

54:40We'd love to just touch briefly on retention. Obviously, you know, a lot of your enterprise value will come through the subscription model, LTV, things like that, I would assume. And I, you know, I bet this has been an integral part of the growth of the business. What, you know, any tips there for brands that are looking to increase LTV or, you know, introduce subscription? What may be some of those bigger lever moves that you guys have done over the years that have really helped with that? I'll say a little bit. You jump in as well. I would, again, take it back to, like, first principles of kind of, we realized quite early is really understand the customer dynamics in dog food.

55:24And we actually kind of had a very early stage of cat food and came out of it because we were trying too much too quickly because we understood the dynamic we started to understand the dynamics of of that category but in dog typically a consumer wants the best for the dog first of all but will want to try a food will not want to kind of risk the house on kind of like saying i'm going to spend a hundred pounds up front because i get a better deal they're going to want to spend a fairly low-ish amount to be able to try a product and then once they've done that they will then buy big so to understand So we, for example, know that, but there's an interesting point as well around take that kind of low amount to a point.

56:05If you're giving it away, you're going to get customers who are in that kind of like giveaway, throwaway mindset. And we've always seen the lower the AOV on the first order, the harm on retention. But then after that, think about your product and proposition and think about the mechanics behind it. So we now realize in our customer base, we've got some who want to do it every month. we've got some who want to do it every eight weeks we've got some who want to do it every 12 and that giving those options massively improve retention and this is obviously away from all the product mpd stuff but that just just giving those options because understanding that you might run your finances differently to me where i run it month to month and you just want to get the best deal and you're prepared to pay up front give all those different options will allow you to improve retention and we've seen you know those bigger packs lead to better returning customers etc the key is listening to the customer at the end of the day we we do a lot of customer stuff we're really big on that we have a big post-purchase flow um i think part of it um because we've built all of our stuff ourselves we we have our own subscription platform we have our own tech that runs our factory that we have ourselves we are very vertical in the business um that we we have a lot of our own stuff it allows us to basically do any idea anyone has we we can do it we don't and have to think about whether it's possible or not, which is fantastic.

57:24It means we have to have a decent-sized development team, but it's really useful for stuff like this, where you go, oh, there could be a retention play here. We do a lot of testing. So it means we've done some really nice flows from after purchase to really make sure we've got a great post-purchase journey. And we do a lot of asking customers questions and getting direct feedback. and then we pipe it all through into some custom dashboards that we just have on the wall in the office. So we've constantly got something a customer has said to us in the last 10 minutes is on the wall in the office at all times.

58:00And just we get everyone to really soak in that customer feedback and know what a customer actually believes. And two things we ask are, why did you purchase today and why nearly didn't you purchase today? And that second one is so useful for working out how to improve retention, like what nearly stopped them from buying. should be exactly a for improving conversion rate but also like what they're worried about what what what concerns if you have and same with like a cancellation process obviously subscription cancellations is a really big part of it um and we've developed a way where um we get free text um inputs from people there so that's again a bit of ai stuff there going on so we can summarize it because a big part of cancellation flows is categorizing people into the right thing so you can target them with the right messages to try and keep them um but we we get free text why are you stopping um for every single person that cancels their plan and again it's up on the wall we've got live tickers of this information about what people don't like about our product and our business and fuels it back in straight into what what to do next yeah and that's going deep on that basically fuels our NPD pipeline you know knowing for example that prices are levered like well what can we do there knowing that some dogs don't like the food well what is it about the food go deeper on that and then that turns into a product pipeline and that's the kind of to joe's point just getting that fit in the early days and we still do now because i still think there's value in it used to ring customers every week and just ask those questions what motivated you to buy and what i think you've talked about this but it's really valuable just kind of like tell me the journey you went on to buy oh i went to the vet i tried this food i've been at my wits end for six months etc etc and you paint that picture and you piece it all together and now we've obviously got the tools to layer in all of that where we've got the kind of like qual and quant data and you can piece it all together and you can do clever things with AI but that then leads you on to your MPD pipeline so that's been that's been kind of game-changing for us and there's there's loads of things I'll be honest we're at the tip of the iceberg I think with it and there's loads of things that we've probably not done which we are about to do which probably probably can't say just yet but we're really excited by it because again it's just leaned into those things which we think will make a massive impact on retention 100 yeah customer centricity is just so so key isn't it so important i think you forget just how much of an impact that can make and even you know you guys have obviously built some pretty um pretty strong tech on the back end to be able to enable that further but for you know younger businesses and brands even as simple as calling up customers just getting feedback like we do that for a few brands where we will literally just you know get ask ask the brands we work with for a list of uh customers numbers and we'll just give them a call and just ask them some questions dig a bit deeper and just really nurture that golden cohort as well like with my brand like again that's just been so valuable really nurturing those those early customers and just you know they they then become those true fans that can really help drive the brand forward yeah i would definitely echo that we we did a lot of that and we still do do that you know we still call call customers today and to really understand that i would also say as well um we've built out a massive direct sales part of the business but one thing i would really advocate if you want to learn that is you know if you're in an early stage of the business go and go and get a little gazebo or a little stand and try and sell it to people on the street not because maybe you don't want to scale it to you know that becomes a channel in itself maybe it will maybe it won't but you'll understand the objections immediately you know if you're trying to sell and i've i did this in the early days i spent six months before giving it to some far better than me to just to scale that channel i spent six months just physically stood there trying to sell to people and do you have a dog come over here what do you currently feed your dog going through the whole sales process and you get told the reasons why people don't want to buy yeah immediately and that'd be something I'd advocate for.

1:02:05I love that. Yeah, it's just the objection handling in real time. I think it's something that, you know, that's just old school sales, but we've kind of, you know, we've moved so far away from that now that it feels alien. But I think that's a great idea. Guys, it's been so valuable. I guess like before we end, I love to ask, you know, what is the future for the brand? Like where is Pure Pet in five years time? Where are you both? Give me the first thing you want me to go. obviously we've got we've got a plan we're something we work on quite a lot we want to be a lot bigger we are just looking at European expansion we just launched in Netherlands two months ago so we'll be in Europe as that all goes well a bit further on and yeah a bit of NPD product work that we're working on at the moment that's really exciting but yeah I think just bigger and better, really.

1:03:04I think we've got, obviously, targets, multiples of where we are now. So growth is our, I mean, revenue is our North Star at the moment, which just hikes back to what we're bothered about now with growth. Yeah, anything you want to add to that? I would say, I think we've got now, we're at a place in the business where we've got the structures, the flywheels are going. you know there's been a long probably much longer than most people who kind of understand the dynamics from the word go but it took us a long time to get that flywheel going and you know i people always say this but it's really true but the first million in turnover or the first five million is far harder than the next 10 15 20 and i feel like we've got a really good kind of like structure of of teams and we've got you know we've we've managed to get the meta flywheel starting to scale that's dead exciting and we're now starting to you know go international we're thinking about other opportunities we've got loads of product stuff coming up in the pipeline so i think we're i it's actually exceeded where i thought this business was going to go already you know i think in in my wildest dreams at the time i thought if we can get to like a 30 million turnover we've we've done unbelievably well and now i sort of look at it now and think actually i think we're not even at the start we could really scale this so i think it's it's as exciting as it's ever been and I think we've got a really good team behind us and I think, yeah, to echo Joe's point, we've got some targets but I actually feel like we've got the team behind it to go out and execute it now.

1:04:36It's not just a kind of a, let's hope that'll happen and no idea of how we're going to do it. We've got a really clear and reasons, and really clear reasons to believe of why we should get there as well. I love that. And you don't have to answer this, and definitely don't need to tell me the timeline, but is there a timeline for exit for an exit or is it more based on once you're you hit a certain point i think i think the honest answer is it's nuanced is that question like how long i want to be in it i i don't want to do anything else i actually really enjoy it you know me and dan say this a lot and i think joe's probably in the same mindset of like this is far better than going and getting a job you know like it's actually fun and i know and i get it's people's lives like yeah but it actually feels like um you know there's roles and responsibilities with it but it's it's actually a really exciting place to be i think the category the fact that we're doing something that that changes dogs lives and makes a good impact on society as i've got older that that has become like a real big thing like i would never want to do a business that i feel that is not having a good impact so i think that is something that is so hard to replicate but I actually think when you get off off the bus is like I'd be really honest I'm not sure I know I know we want to get there and whether I'm there for 10 20 30 years after that it is probably up in the air I think it's um you have to go into situations as soon as you take on venture funding with your eyes wide open there is people going to be exiting the business at a certain stage whether I do at that point or not I don't think you'll know until you kind of get there I think we definitely know that we're going to be on this journey for the next five years after that i think it's there's so many i'm sure you know i'm sure you've seen this play out enough times that there's so many possibilities of where that could go but yeah i think um i think whilst we enjoy it and it feels right now and i think joe would echo this but it's so fun right now especially this kind of like metacrit like there's people like running around with cameras every day you know like and everyone's being creative it's like it's exciting yeah absolutely yeah yeah i don't think i want it to to stop for a while it's part of the when you work with dogs like we have we obviously we've got a dog friendly office so we have there's 10 dogs in our office every day and from every person you hire now has a dog because they want to work for pure because they know pure likes dogs and they like dogs and a lot of people's reason to join the business now is dogs so when i when i joined we were it was a tiny little factory where you couldn't have dogs in it i um we got a dog uh just because because we moved to a factory where you we had a separate office that you could have dogs that's the only reason we got a dog and is a number of people like a lot of people say um if you don't have a dog when you join pure you'll have a dog in six months it's it's that kind of it's a really nice kind of feeling of we know we're doing a great product that is improving dogs lives there's it's a really great place to work a great great environment like why wouldn't you want to keep going with it yeah and i think it's like i'm such a believer of like purpose is is much bigger than money at the end of the day like you know i you hear these stories all the time of people that exit a business and you know they've got all the money in the world but then they've just they've lost their purpose in life and as a result they're much unhappier than they ever were before that so yeah i think that makes that makes a lot of sense guys thank you so much for coming on today um it's been it's been really really interesting i think loads of takeaways that the listeners can take away but where can people find you we'll uh we'll put all the links below but yeah well i i would say if anyone wants to talk to us further about anything or like wants to learn anything or share anything hit us both up on linkedin we're we're trying to make more contacts than ever do you know i mean it's a good thing for us to like i say we really like talking to other businesses so if anyone wants to talk about anything we're both on linkedin purepetfood.com for if you want to buy some pet food um yeah i think that is it anywhere else no i think those that yeah those are the places yeah i think yeah joe's right i think we um we we feel like we're made a real effort to be part of the community and actually when you give you get you get back and you know we're looking at new channels now and you know we've had so much feedback from like other companies and who are doing these channels really well and so we're always happy to kind of share and uh i think yeah feel free to add us on linkedin amazing joe matt thank you so much um i will see you on the next episode i forgot to actually say at the start but this is obviously episode 50 um so thank you to all our listeners that have you know been on this journey with us please make sure you subscribe if you haven't like the video follow us on spotify and youtube and we'll see you next time thanks thank you Thank you.