AppLovin, AI Bowls, and the Measurement Stack Running Ollie’s Growth

0:00Kalina Fridrich:Ollie is a fresh subscription dog food company, so we bring you fresh home-cooked meals for your dog. It's fully personalized and customized. We also have an app that lets you kind of track your dog's well-being. It's human-grade food that's created for dogs, so technically anybody could eat this. Actually, in some customer research we've done, we've had customers who do eat our dog food. So yeah, it's basically like a high-protein, you know, nutrition pack. Are you guys leveraging AI? We have these internal machine learning models that are fully trained by vet techs essentially and that's part of what powers our in-app health check-ins.

0:35Kalina Fridrich:If you upload a picture of your dog's teeth, we're actually running visual models on top of those images. Do you have a specific percentage of the budget that you like to allocate for certain channels? It's a combination of media mix modeling, multi-satch attribution, and also first-party data. So asking customers directly like, how did you hear about holding? What ads did you see?

0:57Hey, everybody. Welcome to the show. My name is Andres Tigueira, and I'm going to be your host for the day. This show is brought to you by the Global Talent Company, helping fast-growing teams hire exceptional remote talent from Argentina, South Africa, and beyond. We connect companies with world-class professionals who bring skill, reliability, and a global perspective to every role. And just for our listeners, we're offering an exclusive 10 % discount on your first hire. All you need to do is visit GlobalTower.co, click Start Hiring, and mention the podcast listener discount when we reach out.

1:29And today with me here is Kalina Friedrich, Vice President of Growth and Retention at OLLI, a pet wellness brand that's seeking to provide a healthier and easier way to care for our dogs. And with that said, Kalina, welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to have you here.

1:47Kalina Fridrich:Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. Very, very fun. Yes, no, we're also very excited too. And Kalina, just so that we can hit the ground running, get the audience a bit more in context, would you be able to tell us about your background, how you came to be VP of growth and retention at OLLI, and maybe what OLLI is in your own words? Yeah, I love that. So yeah, I currently lead our growth and retention marketing at OLLI, which is really focused on performance marketing and growing the business. I actually started my career in performance marketing working in an agency, but I studied math and data science in college.

2:22Kalina Fridrich:So I was kind of like drawn to this space for it's like applications of data in like very real world, real time, kind of like pace. So kind of started there. I actually spent a lot of time in data and came to OLLI to build our data function. And kind of as you do when you're working in analytics and data and machine learning, you kind of end up talking about this problem anyways. Like how do we grow our business? How and just like in an exciting way. So I've actually very recently come back to performance marketing and I'm really excited just because I've been at OLLI for a couple of years now.

2:57Kalina Fridrich:I like care about the product so much. I care about my dog so much who loves OLLI. And it's a really big year for us. We have a new brand launch campaign that went live last week. So really all about like merging data with that brand awareness lever and getting more people to know about OLLI. And yeah, to answer your last part of that question, Ollie is a fresh subscription dog food company. So we bring you fresh home-cooked meals basically for your dog. It's fully personalized and customized. We also have an app that lets you kind of track your dog's well-being and access vet information to support your dog's best life.

3:32Kalina Fridrich:So it's a very, very cool product. And Alina, I read in the Ollie page that it's human-grade food that's created for dogs. So technically, anybody could eat this and not be nervous that it might affect them negatively. It's something that is edible. It's not like somebody's going to go and eat the dog food, but they could try it if they wanted to. Yes, that's true. Actually, in some customer research we've done, we've had customers who do eat dog food. So people have done it. Yeah, they're totally good and healthy. Yeah, it's basically like a high protein, you know, nutrition pack. Nice. And now that you mentioned that, you said that Ali is a subscription service.

4:11So it's not like you can buy the Oli products in any grocery store or something like that, but you actually need to subscribe to a membership and then have the food you selected sent to you every month.

4:22Kalina Fridrich:Yeah, definitely. We are at our core subscription business and direct to consumer, you know, delivered to your doors. We have a very robust experience there and how to get frozen food to your doorstep. But we actually do have a presence in Petco, which is a U.S. retailer for pet products. So you can kind of like dabble and try all you can buy or treats which are behind me in person if you're interested in that. So I love that. I love that. And like I haven't talked to that many consumer good companies that are subscription based, especially for dogs. But I imagine that then once a consumer finds Ollie, they would go into your website, then select what their dog likes the most and just make sure that keeps returning every month to them.

5:00And that way they have like the product that they need and want. Right. Right.

5:04Kalina Fridrich:Yeah, definitely. The key benefit of the subscription business for us is really about making the perfect portion for your dog. So we actually have an algorithm that powers how much you feed your dog in terms of Ollie every day and actually like optimizes their health data points. So because we have the app and we have health check ins, we know a lot of our dog's body condition, their stool condition, their teeth health. And all of that is kind of fueling like what we recommend for your dog, what their portions are. um and so that kind of really is the benefit of the subscription is you're not ever thinking about how much do I feed my dog are they doing okay are they as healthy as they could be like all of that is solved in the equation of our product and our subscription experience um which is really unique I think when we think about you know the like human movement to take better care of ourselves and that applying to dogs um yeah I love that mission it's very exciting to me no I agree as well and I really like that fact it's then the subscription comes from the the possibility of having a more customized product for your dog.

6:02So that is why people would actually go ahead and subscribe because I was trying to think of a differentiator and that's what I believe is the real value there. And how would the experience of a customer that hasn't bought or subscribed to Ollie before work? Kalina, would you be able to guide us through that process?

6:18Kalina Fridrich:Yeah, definitely. So if you came to Ollie today and were interested in our product, we basically have a quiz that asks you all the information we need to know about your dog. It's also very fun. I think people love talking about their dogs and sharing that information. It's a very engaging process. And that is ultimately what goes through our algorithm to say, OK, based on all the things we know about your dog, this is their perfect portion, their perfect recipe mix. This is what we recommend as the experts in this situation to you. And then people can decide, do I want to do that? Do I want to not do that, et cetera?

6:47Kalina Fridrich:There's also variations within that. So if you are ready to commit full time and switch your dog's diet to Ollie, we have full plans for you. But we also have like half fresh plans, which are much more about, oh, I think I'm interested in this. I want to add this to my dog's current diet, but maybe I'm not ready to fully transition. So users or consumers do get a little bit of choice and like how much do you want to do this or not? And then basically your first box is kind of what we really view as the trial period. You get two weeks of food basically for your dog. But a lot of our experience is very much about hand holding.

7:19Kalina Fridrich:OK, you start your dog with a very little amount of food and you kind of ramp that up gradually over a week or two. and also trying different recipes. Dogs are really picky. We know that from all that we have. So for me having a dog and so it's really fun to get to try our beef recipe or our lamb recipe and learn about your dog and kind of build your relationship with them in that way. I would love to have a dog right now to actually try these new services and what's up with that because I feel the market is a lot more tailored to be able to personalize things for them than before. When I used to have a dog, it was like what, 10, 15 years ago and it was just going to buy the same brand of pet food in the store.

7:57It wasn't even the best one. And now I feel there's this whole array of things you can choose for that that just makes life a lot more colorful and flavorful for a dog and a cat, maybe. And that is another question I have. Do you just cater to dogs, Kalina, or do you tend to other pets as well?

8:13Kalina Fridrich:Yeah, we're a dog-only product right now. The reality is, you know, we love cats. We have a ton of, like, cat lovers at Ollie as a team. But they actually need very different macro and micronutrients. So the idea of making the best product on the market for cats is actually quite different from for dogs. So we're very focused on the dog market and the dog consumer. And yeah, we love dogs. I mean, our Slack channel internally is just people posting pictures of their dogs or dogs that people need in the streets. It's like very fun and high energy. All right. I love that. I would not imagine anything less for a dog company and for a company that I saw, Ollie's Page.

8:49and and I thought I found it to be like very cool and it's very like chill and I really liked how the the view of like the brand it's shown on LinkedIn at least from my perspective and that's something else um that I would love to like switch the scope a little bit now Kalina and it's talk about Ollie in terms of you guys as a company um how big is Ollie per se how many people do you have helping you out your team and in the company in general yeah my team is about 10 people I think

9:14Kalina Fridrich:our total like corporate employees were fully remote so it's always kind of hard to fully count is you know around 200 people but we have our own fulfillment centers we have our own customer service team so um you know and plenty of like agencies and partners that we love so uh i feel like we're you know a mid-sized business now in the u.s market um and when i started we were you know probably like two-thirds of the size that we are now so i've seen a really great amount of growth in the last couple of years. Yeah, very high energy and a lot of dog lovers internally, which is very cool. You mentioned our brand and our site.

9:49Kalina Fridrich:We did actually just do a pretty meaningful brand refresh. And we have a new campaign that we launched last week called Feed the Obsession, which is all about being obsessed with your dog and kind of this like, if you know, you know, like love for them. And so it's been a very fun time both to like see that work percolating over the past year or so, have it be out in the wild now, get people's reactions to it. We have some new TV spots and things like that. And my role is like so much about, you know, supporting the like funnel and our media dollars with that from a strategic lens, which has been really interesting.

10:23That is so cool. And you mentioned then that, okay, you are a remote company that's about 200 people big. And do you just cater to the US market or Or is Ali expanding or thinking about growing into other countries or maybe other markets that we're not aware of?

10:38Kalina Fridrich:Definitely. We are in the U.S. only now, and I think that's our plan for now. But it is super interesting. We talk a lot about the international pet food market, and we gain a lot of inspiration from other brands similar to us that really believe in the mission. So it's definitely something we are interested in and talk about, but not part of our concrete plans today. And in terms of the remote working of it, are you guys then hiring only remote workers within the United States or is that something that you could be maybe outsourcing somewhere else? Yeah, I do actually think we have a meaningful amount of employees now that live all over the world.

11:10Kalina Fridrich:We have a couple of engineers in South America. We have a couple of folks who live full time in Europe. So I do think it's like very case by case basis type of thing at OLLI, but definitely not closed off to that. I think, you know, with remote work, so many people have changed their lifestyles. And so to stay like a competitive, happy company to work for, it's definitely part of something we're like very open to, I think, as we've evolved as a company. Okay. I love that. I love that. And yeah, when you're a remote first company, you got to make sure you also cater to the fact that if you're in a market as big as the United States, maybe your customer service team could be distributed through different time zones.

11:47And that way you just follow the sun and make sure you have somebody covering each time slot that another is offline or something like that. But I do agree with that as well. And another topic I love to hate after I talk about teens and the company, and now that I heard you guys have a quiz and everything to see how the food is made is, are you guys leveraging AI in any peculiar or particular ways?

12:11Kalina Fridrich:Yes. So AI is core to our product in that we have these internal machine learning models that are fully trained by vet techs, essentially. And that's part of what powers our in-app health check-ins. So if you upload a picture of your dog's teeth, we're actually running visual models on top of those images to help contextualize and understand what's going on with your dog's teeth. So it's a really cool, like very centric to our products. It was one of the reasons I came to Ollie was I really wanted to be somewhere that was like passionate about building that into a consumer product space. I think with AI, there's so many like B2B companies in the market right now.

12:48Kalina Fridrich:um so i really love that about ollie um and then definitely in terms of ways of working we're also testing into it so actually one thing we tested recently was we did and like ai generated content that we used for an ad that took our dog bowls and turned it into a heart shape and it did really well on meta and got a ton of like social engagement where people are like i love the heart bowl it's like shape it's so cute like i really really want one and we actually like went and produced it we now offer it as like a gift in the member experience we use it as a promotion. So really good example of like, you know, sometimes I think creative and AI can be tough in a marketing lens, but you can get amazing insights out of it.

13:27Kalina Fridrich:And that's something where, you know, getting that nugget and making it real is like very much how we think about AI, like keeping the human in the loop is very much our philosophy. No, I totally get that because AI, it can feel fake at times when you depend too heavily on it to create or to do advertising or any type of like publicity. But when the human touch is not lost and is only helped and made more efficient by AI, I feel we can accomplish great things. And that story of the bowl, it was created by VAI and then it had such a good turnout, you guys actually manufactured it then. I love that.

14:00Do you have any other examples of cool campaigns you guys have run that have worked really well? I know you mentioned the Feed the Obsession, this heart-shaped bowl. Is there any other ones more in the past that you could tell us about?

14:12Kalina Fridrich:Yeah, we've had a lot of success with partnering with other dog brands and also not dog wins, but making dog products. So one of my favorite things we've done in the past couple of years, we partnered with Van Leeuwen, which is a very popular ice cream brand in the US. And we actually made a dog ice cream and it became a core part of our products line for a couple of years. It was also in their stores and retail. So you could like go get your type of ice cream and some for your dog. So I love those ideas. That worked really well, both from a, you know, just like awareness excitement lever, but also a performance marketing lens.

14:43Kalina Fridrich:we used that ice cream for acquisition and kind of as a gift with promotion to get new people into the door and um it showed a lot of success kind of on all signs so we really believe in those kind of like partnerships with brands uh as like the feature of marketing i feel like and and kalina in terms of of the channels you guys use um is there any channel that is working best in terms of performance marketing at the moment or that you feel the audience prefers to be spoken through um or or is there any are they all working well it's just a more general view definitely um we still have high success with meta so facebook and instagram are still very key for us um our demographic definitely leans towards women women who are dog owners and generally higher hustled income so meta is great for you know that general audience i think um more recently we've been seeing really interesting signs of success with apple oven um so kind of in these like native game spaces putting our ads and i think it's really interesting because our product is very app native and very like tech oriented and this concept of like well-being for your dog we talk a lot about like whoop and you know apple watch and kind of this understanding it understanding your dog's health um and so i think it's really interesting that these like app ads are like resonating really well with our market because i think it's people who are very like used to being on their phones used to having apps like gaming incentives and that kind of translating nicely to that part of our product experience is really interesting to me.

16:12Okay. I did see, like, I had a whoop at one point. I have my Apple Watch here. Like, I'm that demographic you're speaking about because I am in my house, like, watching Instagram and all that. But I have seen a rise in some apps that are specifically doing that same reading for dogs as well. So if you're able to position your brand within the ads in those apps, I think that's just like a very well played game because people who care about their dog's health so much will definitely care about what they're eating as well and then just see the metrics change or get better

16:42Kalina Fridrich:with time so i love that yeah we have like amazing we call it our food back loop it's all about the data we get about your dog's health based on what you're feeding them so we can actually see that when you start feeding your dog ollie and you're three months in and you're doing it consistently their body condition improves and so that means they're healthier they're going to live longer They're going to be happier dogs. And so it's like a really cool futuristic approach to taking care of your dog. Yeah, I love Whoop. It's Boston-based, so I talk to a bunch of people from Whoop all the time. Just like a really cool product space and a ton of innovation on the AI front.

17:16Kalina Fridrich:So definitely look up to them. That's amazing. No, because at the beginning when I had my Whoop and when I started to see these types of apps, it's like so much data that it's a little bit overwhelming at the beginning. Then you get used to it. You learn how to read it. You learn how to live with it. And then you start to understand it and like it and being able to add like your companions, such as your dog. I'm not sure if it can happen for cats as well, but being able to read in that detail what they do and having food affected and be able to see those measurements. It's a game changer. Like it really gives you a lot more visibility into what could go wrong, what is going well, what to keep doing.

17:48So it's really nice. You're being able to integrate that type of and what's it called knowledge for the consumer in what you guys do.

17:56Kalina Fridrich:Yeah, definitely an interesting task, though, to distill it in a way that makes sense. I mean, we have customers who are all over the board in terms of their exposure to like those types of products. So we've actually worked a lot on trying to, you know, offer the in-depth data and information for people who want it, but also like aggregate that and make that very interpretable for customers. So kind of we have this concept of a well-being score, which kind of aggregates all of the data points about your dog and gives you a very like broad read on, you know, what's our interpretation of how your dog is doing for all of these health markers in combination.

18:28Kalina Fridrich:And even that alone, I mean, that's a very complex thing to build, but it's really powerful for dog parents who are like, I want the reinforcement. I want to know that they're doing well. I want to see improvements. But like, I don't know how to interpret like the amount of plaque on their teeth and what that means. And Colleen, just a curious question. Do you guys have a count or a measurement of the specific dog breeds or types of dogs that are consuming your products? Like, is there a certain dog breed that owners buy Ollie for more than others? Or is that a more generic thing? I'm just curious that now we're talking about data.

18:59Kalina Fridrich:Yeah, definitely. We do know, you know, the breeds of most of our dogs. I actually think the most popular dog on Ollie is, you know, breed, mixed breed, unknown breed dogs. Yeah, rescue dogs, and we love them. And actually, we started working with Embark, which is like a dog DNA kit last year a little bit. So that way, our customers could understand more about the kind of breeds that are in their dog when they don't know. um but we also have a ton of like frenchies doodles chihuahuas um so those are some of the big ones laboratory retrievers um yeah i feel like they're still the most popular dog breeds in general um i think frenchies have like a special place at ollie we have a lot of frenchies i think compared to the general dog population we over index there and i really feel from from the way that you're telling me the story of what ollie is and how you've been able to gain exposure that You guys have really leaned on to having partnerships with a lot of other dog brands to make sure that you get your name out there and you get the proper endorsement with the brands that represent your mission and vision as well, I believe, right?

20:03Kalina Fridrich:Yeah, definitely. And I think also in the spirit of, you know, being dog wellness, like partnering with these brands who care about dog wellness. I talked about Ember. We also did a partnership with Fi, which is like a dog wearable. All of that is helping us understand, you know, what is this entire space of dog wellness? Where do we want to help support that in terms of like our literal products that we're building for customers? So it's a very fun space to be in and also cool to like work with brands who also love dogs and just have that spiral of being around dog people. Yeah, breathes a lot of life into the day to day of work.

20:38And I also would love to know, Kalina, now that we have started, well, I say started and we're three months in, we're practically at the mid of March already. But at the beginning of this 2026, now that you've been at OLLI for a while, what is your goal and what would you like to accomplish this year as vice president of growth and retention?