Building a $7B Health Tech Platform with Rob Schutz, Co-Founder of Ro

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Use these things that people deeply care about. If it's intimacy, if it's hair loss, if it's fertility, if it's crippling, acne, whatever it is, like things that people wake up and they probably are thinking about first thing as a way to bring people into kind of healthcare system. And then from there, you can almost trick them into being healthy in other areas. Right? Hey, as long as we're doing a blood test for weight management, let's run it for these other markers and see how you're doing. And what does your cholesterol look like and what does your blood pressure? And that's what I also learned over time as well, which is like, everyone wants to be proactive about their health. They say they want to be proactive about their health and take care of themselves and take care of their family. We usually need something germ to start that process. And, and that's almost exclusively things that people already care about or they already want to fix themselves. They don't usually wake up and say, I'm going to be proactive about this. I want to fix this thing that's impacting my life. And from there, you bring them in, you get them talking to a doctor, you collect their medical records, start to get lab tests and diagnostics, then you have a fuller picture and the doctor can help proactively point things out and help help get them more healthy overall. I need some traction. You need some traction.

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Hey, Traction fam. Super excited for today's episode, we sit down with Rob, founder of health tech company RO, which is over worth over 7 billion and also the founder of Snag.com. so Rob has an interesting journey going from healthcare consulting to becoming a successful entrepreneur in a number of fields, including his role in the phenomenal success of Barkbox, which you're going to dive into. So before we get into all of this stuff of company building, growth, etc. Let's dive right into Rob's backstory. Let's dive right into Rob's backstory. I want to know how did, how did you get started in entrepreneurship? The back history of Rob, where did you grow up? What made you the person you are today?

I don't know if we have enough time to go into the full backstory, but yeah, first of all, thanks for having me excited to be on the show and I appreciate the opportunity. But yeah. So let's see. I was, I know we were talking before I was born in Virginia, right outside dc. Go Wizards. Go Commanders. And yeah, followed my wife up to New York back in the early aughts and I was working in healthcare technology consulting. We were helping them scan that in and integrate with their existing medical record systems. So it was interesting for a little while and then got pretty boring after an extended period of time where you're working with these hospitals that they're just low and it takes a long time to get them to adopt new technology. I was working with someone on like the sales side as well. These are like two, three year sales cycle and that can be very obviously exciting when you sign them, but also soul sucking to be a part of. And so I kind of was always itching to find something completely opposite end of the spectrum. What are things I could do where I could get immediate results and get immediate feedback on it. And as E commerce started coming out, I saw, I remember I saw a Groupon ad. It was a right hand rail Groupon ad on Facebook and I was like, oh, that's interesting. Like half price restaurant gift certificate. And I was poking around and I realized that's a business that I could probably build myself. That's not so complicated, right? Go walk around, get people to give you half price spa, give certificates and they sell them on your website. So that was really my initial foray into E commerce and the Internet. That was back in 2008, 2009, and it was awesome. It was just like a quick way to jumpstart learning about marketing, learning about email list, learning about digital product. And so did that in conjunction with my job, my full time job. And then it got big enough where I wound up leaving and doing that full time. And daily deals were hot, really hot. For a period of time I rode that wave and then didn't know what I was doing and went up selling the company to a competitor. I got really lucky in terms of timing and sold that in 2011 and that was when Groupon was going public and Living Social was another company. They both had multibillion dollar offers so got very fortunate on timing and then used that as an opportunity hit in my career more around marketing and went deep into that and found myself at Barkbox, Treats and Toys for dogs back in 2012.

Epic. Now how did you get into healthcare consulting of all the spaces? It's super hard. Right. My wife's a physician, my brother in law works in. Both her brothers are in the medical space physicians and. And it's super hard to sell into that space. Like you pointed out three year sales cycles I've seen sales reps wait outside my wife's office trying to sell to her. So how did you get into that space?

It was all really random. I went to Penn State and I interviewed at a bunch of different places. I was majoring in basically business and technology before they had a school for that. It was a combination of those two fields and interviewed a bunch of different places across a bunch of different types of fields. Wound up at this company that focused on health care and they hired a lot of young people out of school. We will treat them up. It was, it was random. I would say I wasn't like thirsty for health care out of college but I was thirsty for a job. And they were by that and wound up being a really good foundational experience to learn. Just working in a, working at a company, being a grown up, being an adult in this environment. And yeah is funny how kind of life can be full circle where that was the first job in 2005 and then fast forward to 2017. Founding a healthcare company is not something I anticipated doing.

Yeah.

But a lot of like learnings I feel like from consulting like I started in the consulting space as well. Sales for a consulting startup that turned into a product startup. You learn a lot in terms of selling in terms of building product from that consultative process. Right. That you can carry over to our stack startup. Because these days I find a lot of tech startups all they do is start building without talking to the customer.

Yeah.

That's the first thing they do. Let's build software. And I come from a time like 2004 or five when I started working in the workforce it was like it was consulting and then talk to customers, figure out what they need, sell them to the need, then build the stuff. So you learn the process before of how not to waste money because you need to is you kill what you eat thing.

Yeah. Now I think in general too, any job that you have there wind up being threads of. Even if you hate it, there wind up being really interesting threads of things that you can learn that then allow you to pick that up and position yourself as an expert or be able to get a job in a different field because you've spent a little bit of time marketing in this job or a little bit of time and financing this job. Especially now things are so mobile in terms of being able to move from one career path to another. You can leverage that experience into whatever you want.

Now how did you find Barkbox? At the time it was pretty novel, right? Subscription based E commerce was growing and I think like maybe Groupon and Living Social were exploding. But then eventually the buzz started to fade. So you sold a company to a Groupon competitor, Is that what you said?

Yeah, that's right. That's right. There's tons of kind of competitors at the time. And I found one in New York called kgb. I wound up selling the company to them and working through the earnout. And then yeah, I didn't jump to Bark right away. I thought I was a super smart entrepreneur that like could build and sell companies. And so I wasted a fair amount of time and money trying to build other stuff out that that didn't work. And then eventually I was like getting married and I was like, I need to get a job. And so that was when I refocused, I would say my experience and kind of massage that into being more of a like a marketing expert. The reality is you're a small couple person business, you're doing a little bit of everything. But I was like, my path is going to be in marketing. And I wound up meeting the bar folks actually at a career fair. I went there looking to talk to them in one other company. My wife and I are big dog people. The whole family's dog, dog crazy. And so that was really cool and it was novel at the time. There wasn't a ton of like E Com subscription. There was Birkbox, which was one of the first beauty box, one of the first folks in the space. And Bark was pretty soon after that. So I got the opportunity to talk to them. They shared a very similar weird sense of humor and outlook on life and. And really jived with the team and got the opportunity to join incredibly early there. I was first marketing hire, employee number seven. At a very early stage and got the opportunity to do and see and experience a lot very early and very quickly in the E. Comm space.

And then Bark became a massive success story, I think. Had a multi hundred million dollar exit. Right.

Yeah, they're probably traded now. They went public couple years back.

Yeah. And what were some of the key things you did there that contributed to early revenue? I was reading somewhere that bark hit like 25 million in revenue in first year. Yeah.

Again, it was interesting. It was very early in the space and I remember being, you know, sitting at my desk on the day that like Facebook news feed ads launched and having money to spend and having amazing creative. Right. Like pictures and videos of dogs, there's not much better creative than you can. So people are already looking at on the Internet now you're just putting a CTA around it. So I think early on Facebook was a huge driver of growth. And being early to the sea meant costs were still relatively reasonable. And spent time there, spent time on influencers and Instagram and just the early days of all this stuff. You don't realize it when you're in it, but there were all these dogs on Instagram that had like hundreds of thousands of followers. And so I corralled them together and we got the team to create like the Bark Pack, we called it, where we'd send them a free bark box and then one day each month everyone would post their barkbox pictures and videos with a hashtag and there was. We would kind of flood Instagram. And so that grew the account. We got a really huge organic Instagram following. And then building on that, we were able to launch out of home, able to launch TV sponsorships, affiliate, the whole performance playbook. But it was really fortuitous in terms of timing. There's a subset of companies that happen to be live and have dry powder to spend when newsfeed ads went live. And I think would have been different launching today than it was in 2011.

Yeah, today a lot of the things don't squeeze out as much roi. Like ultimately all these social platforms, what I find is in the early days, they hook you on. Right. They make it very easy. The ROI is easy. And then over time, even with your own followers, they start reducing the eyeballs to your own followers. Right. Like it. It costs you almost twice as much to generate the same ROI from the same spend. And then even if you have a huge organic following, I think, like I was talking to Nass Daley, the founder Nassire, and he said Facebook literally dropped his viewership on his following for more than 50%, like something like 90%. So initially his users would see more than 50%, 60% of the content he'd put out. And he had like maybe in the millions of followers. And then Facebook eventually dropped that. So his Facebook revenue went to 10% of what he used to make.

Totally. Yeah. There was a whole ecosystem back in the day, right. Was like you could build a huge organic following, you could monetize that. There's all sorts of content properties that did that. Bark had one, it's called Bark Post, millions of followers, huge newsletter, etc. But Facebook reached that point where they said we're just going to stop showing as much inventory because we need more ad space. And it killed a ton of businesses. And for folks that were Nas daily, a bunch of others that were reliant on that kind of free distribution, it really hurt. And so we were lucky in that while we took a similar hit, we had momentum on the commerce side. It wasn't just monetizing content, it was like content was additive, but not the core business. Folks that were content only really took a hit. And I think very few of those survived the mass casualty of the Facebook algorithm update.

And that's what I truly believe as well.

Right.

Like all these social platforms you are renting effectively their eyeballs, even if it's organic and they can drop the impressions on your own organic audience at a heartbeat by changing the algorithm like LinkedIn did it very recently. And so the best thing you need to do is create your own community online first by collecting people's email address. You guys were in an interesting space because one, it's not an expensive product like a SaaS product. Right. It's subscription based. And to transact people then need to provide their email address. So you could have built a massive community on newsletter and other platforms. So I want to hear about that because a lot of people bash email and it's always every few months. I hear this email is dying. And I am of the belief have built various successful organizations on the sales side, GTM side, just leveraging the power of email. Like I'm waiting for it to die still. So I'm curious on your take on leveraging email and that automation side of things to continue to grow despite the dwindling effects of these social platforms.

Yeah, a hundred percent. I'm with you. I'm a huge proponent believer in email. And part of that I think comes from like my background with daily deals. It was just an email went out every day and you Lived or died by how good that email was and how good that deal was. That definitely carried over into Bard and Rowan a lot of other experiences. Especially when you're paying to get people to your site, you need to squeeze as much possible juice out of them as you can so that you don't have to pay to talk to them the next time. And so if that's email pop ups, if that's incentives or email, whatever it might be, building your own list and your own audience so you can reach them again in the future, I think is mission critical. And I think that's also the way. To your point, it's inevitable that CPMs will go up on the auction based platform. Things will get more expensive. Like how do you keep CAC steady, How do you reduce cac? You need more cheap or free channels that can help balance that out. Because it's inevitable. Two years from now, your paid social CAC is going to be whatever it is, 100% higher, 200% higher. Who knows what are the actions you're taking right now to build an organic community, Organic ways to reach out or very cheap ways to touch people. That doesn't require just continuing to plow money into those platforms because you can do it, but you're going to have corresponding increases in cash. So it's about blending that paid together with organic. And I think email is a really critical part of that.

Yeah. And even not only the paid social, but even organic social, you'll see from influencer accounts or anyone with like any amount of following over time, depending on the platform, their CPMs for the same audience will go down. Like the impressions. And I guess what the algorithm changes do is they show it to less and less people because now they're showing other content to your own audience. Like in, in the feed, like I'll go to somebody's account and in the feed I'll be shown ads for other people, for example. And so you gotta be cognizant of that. Now in 2024, where do you start building an email list? You're the expert, you're advising a lot of companies.

Yeah, I think it depends what stage you're at. Right. If you're literally starting from scratch, I think you, you do these, it's tried at this point, but you do these things that don't scale right. Where it's like you're literally personally emailing people in your network and asking them to sign up for the newsletter and then you're posting on social and then you're building email capture on your site and then you're experimenting as you get into paid with like your email capture rates and making sure that doesn't affect conversion if it's on the commerce side and then building out your Chase campaigns and understanding the impact of collecting an email. So I think it all starts with kind of that sweat of just hey, I'm starting this thing. If you're interested, I would love to have you sign up on the list. How do we get to 50 people? How do we get to 100 people? How do we get to 500 people? And then that starts to build on itself a little bit. And then just as mentioned before, being very mindful about especially when you're paying to get people to sell to your site. Squeezing that juice, right? Is it getting an email? Is it asking them to subscribe to YouTube? Is it trying to get them to download a white paper or doing a T shirt giveaway, whatever that is. Make sure you're getting max value to people. You're driving the site even if they're not ready to make a purchase right away.

Some people make it so annoying these days. I can't and usually it's even frustrating on mobile is I'll go to a website and the first thing I'm done is like the cookie collection is the first pop up you get by default. And then immediately two or three other pop ups get layered on I think automatically because they don't understand anything about the user experience and I'm like so mad clicking off. But by the time I've already left the website and so I think it's important to integrate that in the customer's journey throughout your website is I came searching for something. Give me that something. Yeah. Get me to a point where I got some value before you slap me with three pop ups. Right?

Or just be thoughtful about. You don't even have to do a pop up. Be thoughtful about where that data collection lives within the flow. Right? Can that be the first thing you ask for? The second thing you ask for versus creating an account towards the end, Increase your cart. Abandon numbers overall by having it as your second step. Right? You can be thoughtful about where that's positioned. It doesn't have to be like annoy people to the max with pop ups. But look, I think you balance that too right where you'd say it is maybe not the ideal user experience and I acknowledge that. But we're getting 50% more emails. We do that way. And then when we send out the Chase campaigns it actually results in higher overall number of conversions which Drives down my CAC on paid. So like everything is a balance and I always suggest that people explore and experiment and see what works because there are no. Every business is different and there are no like there are very few silver bullets when it comes to this stuff.

100% what works for one company may not work for another. I found email to be great especially when layered in with other things. Say you're building a community, say you're doing online events in person events especially for high annual contract value products. Maybe you're doing events, maybe you're doing webinars, maybe you're doing giveaways email. Like I've seen like email converts the most and then everything else is like significantly lower. That's why I wanted to chat about it. Yeah, absolutely.

I agree.

And then after Barkbox you went on to co found ro. Tell us more about RO and what landed you on ro.

Yeah, so RO is a telehealth company where you can go online, you can connect with a doctor and depending on the condition and the potential treatment, you can have over the counter prescription medication shipped to your door or to a local pharmacy. I got connected with Z and Simone who became my co founders at RO when I was at Bark. So Saman had was kind of part of this venture studio that was involved with Bark and Z was as well. And I knew that when I met those guys I knew that they were looking to start a company. It was a really unique opportunity because I knew marketing but I didn't know how to fundraise right. I didn't know how to build a digital product. Simone was like great at design, great at technical products. He was great at fundraising. His dad is a well known sexual health doctor. We had all of the core areas covered build out this business and that felt pretty unique to find others where we had such complimentary skills and wound up starting to chat about that in the beginning of 2017. That got pretty serious pretty quickly and decided we wanted to start this company together. Kicked around a bunch of different ideas around healthcare. Z was very forthcoming about his challenges with erectile dysfunction from a medication that he had taken from a surgery he had young as a younger man. And we realized that was a great hook and a great place to start. Start with something really taboo that people didn't want to touch. That felt very Stevie and make it legitimate. Right. Bring in doctors that are really well known that are the experts in these fields. It helped AT Z's dad was personal friends with many of them and had been in the industry for 35 years. And so we decided to build a men's health company to start with. Hope to use that as our wedge to expand into health healthcare overall. And so we launched in, actually we launched in Halloween 2017 and we were really excited. Spent about six months getting all the infrastructure set up. Very different from E commerce where you like, just need your product, you need your website in healthcare, you need. We need a accredited and licensed pharmacy for all the states we were shipping to. We need doctors that are licensed for those areas. There was a lot of regulatory red tape. We had the satisfied before we could get up and running. So we launched, I think three or four states October 31, 2017 and started with erectile dysfunction. And reason I think we were all bullish on it was this is not like a new product or solution. Viagra and Cialis are the most popular profitable drugs of all time and people wanted access to them. Now this was like, is does this fit? Will people be willing to go online and talk to a doctor versus in person? And very quickly that became evident that people actually prefer it that way versus looking your doctor in the eye and telling them you're having intimacy problems with your partner. Right? So they called it the door handle prescription or the doorknob prescription. Because people would come in to the doctor and be like, my knee hurts. And then on the way out they grab like the doorknob and they'd be like, oh, by the way, could you write me a script for Viagra? Because no one really wanted to talk about it. And being able to do it this way, we found pretty quickly let people let the doctors get a lot more information and provide better care than they could in person in many cases because people are actually willing to answer questions about it. And from there we felt really good. We've now invested in this platform. We built the National Physician Network, the national Pharmacy Network licensed across all 50 states. We had up to 11 pharmacy physical pharmacy locations at one point. It can now apply all that technology and infrastructure to fertility and to weight management and to dermatology and to mental health. And we use that wedge of men's health and this surrounding ED and then hair loss, etc. To then build out more digital doctor's office and digital health system. Right? You walk in for hair loss treatment, but then you see the door across the way says cardiology and you're like, ah, maybe as long as I'm here and they have all my information, I should be proactive about my health and some of this stuff. It was an incredibly exciting ride. I Was there for almost six years. Very proud of the work I did there. Proud of the team that is still there and a lot of work to be done. But the, the experiences was completely unrivaled for me personally.

It's a phenomenal way. Right. Start with a hyper niche. I can't tell you how many entrepreneurs I talk to, they want to sell to everybody and then you're selling to nobody. You carve out a positioning that puts you as one of the only in that market. I don't want to go to a doctor. It's purely taboo. Right. I think these things, even some of the other products you guys now offer, people don't want to openly talk about it. Like fertility issues. Right. Nobody's going to talk about, oh, I'm having trouble conceiving. And it's like, you got to kick yourself in the pants to go and get all those blood tests and go and see a fertility document. Hair loss, the same thing, right?

Yeah.

It's all of these. Even the weight loss now with. I guess people are more open given social media about zempic and stuff. But these are all things that were taboo that people only didn't want to talk about. And you give them like a private way to, to speak their thoughts without looking somebody in the eye and get them.

Our philosophy there was also, like, use these things that people deeply care about. If it's intimacy, if it's hair loss, if it's fertility, if it's crippling, acne, whatever it is like things that people wake up and they probably are thinking about first thing as a way to bring people into kind of healthcare system. And then from there you can almost trick them into being healthy in other areas. Right. Hey, as long as we're doing a blood test for weight management, let's run it for these other markers and see how you're doing. And what does your cholesterol look like and what does your blood pressure. And that's what I also learned over time as well, which is like, everyone wants to be proactive about their health. They, they say they want to be proactive about their health and take care of themselves and take care of their family. We usually need something different to start that process. And that's almost exclusively things that people already care about or they already want to fix themselves. They don't usually wake up and say, I'm going to be proactive about this. I'm going to fix this thing that's impacting my life. And from there you bring them in, you get them talking to A doctor, you collect their medical records, start to get lab tests and diagnostics, then you have a fuller picture and the doctor can help proactively point things out and help help get them more healthy overall. It's certainly still in the early stages, but I think finding these hooks was really powerful. Learning to then bring people in and help them get healthier over time.

Most doctors are still not proactive. Right. And I think proactive preventative medicine is a huge space and it's just going to explode and explode because people now tied into their personal data. You can give them analytics on how they're doing, how they're feeling, what they need to be taking. Like even with supplements, certain supplements, I don't even know what I need to be taking. And so then you just copy whatever is promoted to you or what your friends are taking. Oh, I need to take zinc and I need to take vitamin D. I'd been taking like 10,000 IU of vitamin D a day. And then very recently I just did a blood test and if vitamin D is super high to near toxic levels, you need to stop taking. So there needs to be something that I can test myself and figure out what I'm missing and only supplement with that. Right. So I think there's massive scope. Now how did you guys decide what products to launch? You started with ed, which makes sense. Personal problem, connection, space, all of this is right there given your co founder's background. But then how did you pick the next product and the next product and the next product? What's the framework for thinking about what to build next?

Yeah, we experimented with a lot of different frameworks, I'll say. After we launched Men's Health, the second product we actually launched was an ill fated product called Zero, which is for smoking cessation, to help people quit smoking. One thing we realized was 18% of men who were coming onto the platform were smokers. That was a big contributor why people were having trouble with intimacy and brought that to the market. What we found was a couple things there. One, we learned that even if people know it's something bad that they shouldn't be doing, if they enjoy it, it's really hard to get them to stop doing it. And we were trying to get people to sign up and pay us to help them stop doing something that they even, even if they knew that it wasn't great for them. And the second was just efficacy. The treatments weren't crazy effective in the same way that hair loss or ED or any of these things, they can be in the 80 to 90% effective, much less so on some of these other types of conditions. We learned that from smoking. We learned that from the third product we launched, which is called Rory, which is for menopause. There just weren't a ton of treatments that were terribly effective. And so that product also struggled to get off the ground. But what we're able to do is we're able to leverage that infrastructure that we built, the national pharmacy network, the national physician network, the physical pharmacy locations across the country and find things that people already actively were looking to improve in their life. Dermatology, mental health, fertility and acquisition and weight management. Certainly some trial and error. And we were good about shutting things down, I think, versus letting them linger too long. You can just say, ah, it's not that much work to like let this thing live and that it can be another tab on your website. But everything you keep live takes effort from somebody. And so we were pretty good about sunsetting things that clearly didn't have the product market fit that we wanted and moving on to things that did. But yeah, a real iterative process.

What was the, was there a, was it a financial benchmark on these products that had to hit. What was that amount that you said, you know what, it's not worth it. Let's just.

Some of it was just efficacy of being able to bring people in from an acquisition perspective. Like how much does it really cost to get somebody centered for this? What do you think the LTV looks like on this? And you could tell pretty early on some of these where we had seen the success and what you could get with some of the men's health stuff and it just wasn't there with some of these others. And you can say, all right, we could get twice as effective or three times as effective, but if you're 10x off, it's going to be real hard to optimize your way there. Yeah, there's financial benchmarks, there's CAC to ltb, those ratios, et cetera. But I think we also knew out of the gate, when you're launching to hundreds of thousands of people you have on email or you have on these other communities and you're just not getting like the click through or the uptick rate that you would expect. But you're probably not going to be able to optimize your way to victory on this.

Now as you are launching some of these products. Right. You said you built this massive network of physicians and doctors and, and pharmacies. It's like a. I guess there's elements of Community led growth in that you get massive feedback and also referrals. How did you build and scale those networks or those communities?

Be honest, community was not really a big part of certainly earlier stage growth. Like when you're dealing with more taboo topics. There's not a lot of community around erectile dysfunction. Right. Whereas hey, join this email newsletter that I'm on about tips and tricks to improve your erectile dysfunction. We didn't have social followings, we didn't have great newsletter opt ins. We didn't have a lot of word of mouth but the intent was there and that's what was really interesting about starting with Ed. It's. I hadn't worked in a business where there was such high intent like search volume. People were already thirsty for this and we were just providing them a solution. It was much less organic word of mouth to start. I think now and again I'm out. I've been out of the day to day for two years. But watching what the team has done, when you look at things like weight management, Ozempic, et cetera with GLP1s, there's much more of that community, word of mouth, et cetera because it's become less taboo and it's become, become more talked about publicly. So I think likely enjoying that now. But in the early days that was not really a thing that we could, we could lean on. We certainly tried. But believe it or not, the referral program did not crush.

Yeah, I think with these taboo topics it's usually like you'll see anonymous posts on Reddit by huge volume. Right. But then you still build this online physicians network, the national physicians network and the national pharmacy network. Why did you build that and how did that help?

Yeah, that was a big differentiator for us versus competitors. There were a handful of competitors that kind of launched and they cobbled together like we're going to partner with this third party pharmacy. We'll partner and. Or we'll white label this emr. We'll use Partner for xyz, which is a fine way to do it. But we always believe in vertical integration, owning the whole process. It would create a better overall customer experience. And yeah, literally our first office in New York was half pharmacy which had to be locked up and locked down and the other half was like desks and chairs for, for the small team. And so we were always big proponents around vertical integration and making sure we controlled as much of that process as possible because you just learn a lot more. You learn about what people want, how to make changes to the Product, et cetera, when you're actually owning those pieces of the workflow. And that continues to this day. RO is still one of the, if not the most vertically integrated health care clinics around. There's a diagnostic arm that can ship a blood, blood test kit at your home, where you prick your finger and put it in the center of use, you put it back in the mail, get it sent back, and they'll give you your blood results. Just. There's been a lot of investment and innovation in that space, and I think it will continue to be really important over time.

Now, when you say like the National Physicians Network, what is that? What is it like an online community? Is it like directory?

Yeah, it's physicians who contract with ro and they are licensed across different states. Some doctors are licensed in one state, some are licensed in 50 states, and they're able to practice medicine. But in order to practice medicine in that state, you have to have a license through the same medical board.

And then they send you, partner with them, you service their clients. You probably get a lot of feedback on.

So ro. And RO is bringing. RO is bringing potential patients into the platform. Then depending on the state that someone is licensed in, if they're working that day, et cetera, that will bring up patients for review and they'll, they're using the RO platform, the RO software, to review and make recommendations, but they're generally not bringing like their own patients onto the platform.

You're sending them patients and they're prescribing. That's very smart because for one, for scale, but also then for like word of mouth, customer feedback, yada yada.

Yeah. And it's also important how you build those incentives. Like, physicians are not incentivized to write a prescription or get something mailed. They're compensated for their time. And RO has done a really good job of building out ways to make sure that physicians can spend more time at the top of their license. It's called so, like talking about problems, answering questions for patients. And then if there's billing questions or script questions or whatever, there's another team that can help with that. But again, I'm out of day to day at this point. I've been out for two years. And so I have some of the historical context, but I know the team has made a lot of changes and adjustments and continues to grow really quickly.

Fantastic. And then you transitioned out and now you're consulting on the growth marketing side. You sit on a couple boards, you started snagged. Tell us more about this whole thing. Like why leave a rocket ship like that and. And jump into this sort of. It seems like you value freedom now more than anything else. Freedom of time. And I often tell people he's like, all my life I chase success and money looking for happiness. And I finally realized that success and happiness comes from having freedom. Freedom to do what you want, where you want.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The way that I looked at it was have been really sprinting for 12, 13 years, five years at Bark, six years row. And incredible experiences I wouldn't trade for anything. But I got this bug stuck in my head like how fun and exciting would it be to just take a breath and do nothing for a little bit? And felt really good about where the team was. Z and Simone are still running the company. Are doing an amazing job. I felt really confident in the trajectory of RO overall and I just really wanted to take a breath and take a break and reevaluate and see are there other things I can spend my time doing. Can help. With some smaller companies that are at a much different stage. It's incredibly exciting to watch the company grow. And at one point I think it was 900 or 1,000 people a row. And I think that's just as a different set of day to day and different set of requirements from you than it is when you're like getting something off the ground. And so yeah, splitting some time across nonprofit, across consulting, but really excited about snag and domain names has always been like a weird nerdy obsession that I've had because it's something I've had to do for my companies and then friends, companies and that investors would come to me or people be like, hey, how do we get this domain name? Or like how do we get the social handle? And I just have loved that it's like a, it's kind of like a scavenger hunt where you're trying to figure out like, hey, who owns this thing? Like how do I get in touch with them? How much is this for? How can I make an offer? And so as I've done more and more of that, I just realized I get such a dopamine hit when I can help close one of these deals. Whether it's a really small deal with somebody coming out of Y Combinator that just getting started, whether it's like a really big deal with a public company or experienced founders, I realized it's just a problem that many people don't get a lot of reps on. If you're a founder or startup person, maybe you get one or two Times where you're trying to go out and figure out how to buy a domain. I love that now I have a thousand reps on how this gets done, know how the world works. So it's been great. And I've gotten to work with uh, really amazing people. Work with Alexis Ohanian a lot. At six I work with Parag, the ex Twitter CEO and Ben Silverman, the one of the co founders of Pinterest. So I get an opportunity to work with really great people on really great projects. Some of them helping with naming, some of them just going and acquiring an asset. But I've always just loved this space. Domains feel like the original NFTs to me and so I, I, I've had a great time going deeper into this world.

Especially if you're wanting to optimize for search. The first step is people are going to search the name of the category.

Yeah.

Or the company. I know, pilot.com for example. They spend a lot of money on acquiring Pilot. I don't know if you help them but I also know through the circle that meta paid like nine figures for threads.com or. Right. I don't know if we help with that but it's, it's one of the parts of your business is you need to get the.com if possible. So what are some ways that you guys help at at Snagged and do you help with things outside of domains like Instagram handle. Your handle is at rom.

Yeah, primarily domains we have, we can potentially help with social. We'll pass to another team that kind of does that all, all within terms of service from those platforms, but primarily domains. And yeah, sometimes it's people coming and saying hey, we're starting a company and we're like pretty flexible on the name. Help us figure out a name that also we can go get the.com for. And then other times as people are like hey, I'm a series B or C D company, like it's time to grow up. We're going to go start running TV ads like we need the dot com. And so we work across that spectrum to help people figure out where to get access to these assets, how much they cost, what the process looks like. But a lot of it comes down to three different buckets. There's like knowing how the system works is very valuable because most people outside the space don't really know. Two is just like how to get creative in deal making which we have a lot of experience doing. And the third is I've gotten so many reps on negotiation, it's I feel really confident I can help folks negotiate a really good deal. So on the like knowing how the system works piece, I have a whole bunch of examples where someone will come to me, they want to get this specific name. We either get in touch with the owner, they're not willing to sell, or we can't get them to respond to us. And then eventually, by monitoring things in the right way. Have seen these domains just go up for auction and they're available for 20 bucks or 500 bucks. And some of these we offered 50 grand to acquire and. And they declined. But because it's a big company and they never keep track of it, it expires, you can just go pick it up later. So a bunch of examples like that where client was super happy he got over half price. They'll bonus me well for knowing how the system works. But that's one example. But then being creative in deal making is another one. Like, I have a client who was trying to get access to a really specific asset and the owner was like, post economic, they're like, I don't need money. I don't want to sell this thing. But it wound up figuring out this guy was the board chair of a nonprofit that built water wells in Brazil and Senegal. And so I pitched him. I was like, hey, what if we build a water well for your nonprofit and you just give us the name? And he was like, okay, if you do that, we can work something out. So we end up raising the money and helping with logistics to actually build as well. And in Brazil, in a small village, in exchange, he gave us the domain. So sometimes it's just about getting creative on that stuff. And then the last one, as I said, is just about negotiation, right? Like understanding the back and forth and the parry of repost. Like had one a couple weeks ago where the this guy was set on I won't sell a domain for less than I think it was 50 grand. And just worked him down and worked him down and we wound up getting the domain for $4,000 in the end. So there's a lot of strategies and ways that you can. If you're smart, you understand the space, you can get really good deals. And so that's what we bring the table is like, we know how the game works. And it's really helpful for folks who maybe are only doing this once or twice to have someone that's like in it pretty consistently to help them navigate.

Interesting. How do you charge for your service?

It really depends. Like, again, if it's somebody who Wants one specific name. There's certain structure. If it's like you want to do a whole consultative process to help figure out naming and we run down 30 different names for you. It can really depend, but usually there's some, some sort of upfront fee that covers off on the time that goes into like research and outreach and then generally some sort of success feed. We help you get the name that you want.

Awesome. Love it.

Why you got you. You have something you're after.

Maybe, maybe lobo.com I don't know what I'll do with it, but I think it's hugely valuable to have it anyway because might do something with it down the road, but I might have lobo.com or another domain name.

You think about it, you hit me up, we'll get you one on the house.

But I, I also ask a lot of people, like I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs. I'm advising a bunch of companies LP in a few funds and people always ask me, oh, and the first thing is, hey, get a name like Boast is like very easy to pronounce. I would love to get boast.com for example, for I'm still on the board, still a big shareholder. I think that would be pretty cool. I helped us get the Twitter handle at Boast, but we had already been using another Twitter handle for a very long time and so this never got used. But this conversation actually made me ping our new CRO and say, hey, why haven't you guys been using the atmosphere.

So you can get it swapped over?

What I find is there's a lot of bots for Twitter that in the process of swapping over, they just grab your handle. Yeah, there's a lot of scripts that are running that high value handle like this. If you do a swap over, it might just be gone, right?

Yeah. Y y gotta be careful for sure.

Cool, cool, cool. So now looking forward, if I had a long journey, you said you sprint for 12 years. What were some of the most valuable lessons you've learned and would you do anything different?

Yeah, plenty things to do differently. Most valuable lessons learned. I think a couple things. I think one, one of the more valuable lessons. I remember when I was deciding whether or not to leave Bart to join to join teams of entre row, I was really struggling with the decision. It was in retrospect, it seemed like an easy decision. But at the time I had been at BART for five years, it's very senior there and made a lot of great friends and a three month paid sabbatical. Coming up, when you reached five years, we just bought a house in New Jersey. We were having a kid. And I remember really struggling with that. And my wife gave me some great advice that I think about a lot which is, are you going to look back and regret not doing this? And for me that was clarifying because I knew that I would. I knew this was like a really unique set of circumstances where I had conviction around the product and company were going to build and really felt like the two guys I would be working with were unicorns. And so that was really helpful. And I think putting in perspective for me just there's never really a good time to do anything. There's never a perfect time to do anything. And if you're waiting for the perfect moment, you will wind up not ever doing anything. And so understanding that and being willing to take some risk and make some leaps, some smart, calculated, educated leaps, but not being afraid to take a chance when it presents itself. So I think it's definitely one of the lessons learned there. And I think to that as part of that, I think one of the reasons, as I mentioned, that I was excited about the opportunity on the RO side was just how powerful I felt this combination of complimentary skills were at the co founder level. It's something I talk about with a lot of folks that are getting started and they're thinking about founding teams. Complementary skills so important not just because it means you can do a lot of things yourselves and you don't have to hire people for that, but I think people who overlap too much at the founder level, you wind up over indexing and spending lots and lots of time on like those areas versus the other areas of the business, like the 50,000 other areas that you have to build out and win. And as possible, if possible, if you can have complimentary skills at code 100 level, I think it just allows you to move more, more quickly and nimbly.

Yeah. And you don't step on each other's toes. What I tell people is complimentary skill sets and also an alignment of values. So you gotta be different in the things you do, but align in the things you believe in. Because I think most relationships will fall apart because of that values. And a lot of people will have a lot of business people but they can't find a tech co founder or a marketing person kind of thing. So I think that complementary skill set, you hit the nail on the head there. Now, what has been the lowest point in your entire career? Maybe it's at ro, maybe it was a bark Box maybe it's been recently. And how did you navigate it?

I think back to a time where prior to bark in this intermediate period, after I had sold my deal company and decided I needed to get a job where I was tinkering around with all these different projects. And again, I felt like I'm this super smart entrepreneur that can build things and sell things and now I'll just build the next thing for people to sell for me to sell to somebody. And I remember working on this project. I still love this project and I still think it's a good idea. Not from an economic standpoint, but I had this tool slash company I built called Chirp Guide and it was meant to be TV guide for live tweeting. So you could find, if you're watching a football game, you could build your own stream of somebody who's live tweeting the game. That's an ex player and a comedian and whatever, like a set of fans and you could see who is on and live tweeting at that time. Again, I love the concept, but I think it was really tough for me to stomach that. I had to. I wound up paying a lot of money to developers to help build this thing out. Twitter wound up changing their API as I was building it out, which was tough. And in addition, something I realized was like, so many things have to go right in order for this thing to make money. It needs to be sticky enough that I get a lot of users to want to actually log in and use the product and then I can go approach advertisers and see if they're willing to put money into it. It's like you have to nail two different things. That was really sobering because one, I wasn't getting traction on the first part with just the users and I'd spent so much money and I had so much conviction, I just felt like, what an idiot. Like what an idiot I am for not realizing this upfront that I was going to spend months and many dollars getting to this point. Whereas if I'd been a little more thoughtful planning this out and thinking about what domino pieces need to line up, I never would have done it. I remember that being a pretty tough pill to swallow. But I've also tried to take things away from that and learning about just building a business. And I'm a much bigger fan now of just launch a thing, see if people will pay you money, and then give them that thing versus build a thing, get customers, sell to advertisers, repeat just a much longer, more painful process.

In my opinion, I 100% agree. Like I've been through this process of building and trying to sell and failing and then with Bose we had no product, we sold the promise, we delivered the promise manually on the back end. And I think first couple million was like low code jangled together with zapier to fulfill and then over time we build it and even like with traction the community I run the first conference, we didn't even book the venue, we had no money. So I cold emailed a bunch of big name speakers like the Marketos and Postmates and Twilio at the time. They confirmed, put their photos on a website with an eventbrite widget, sold $50,000 in ticket and then they were like, oh, I guess we need a venue, couldn't find a hotel, so we had to retrofit an EDM hall. Those things that quick validation are more exciting kind of thing, right?

Yeah, totally. And it's yeah, I'm with you and sounds like you wrote down edm, Paul. That was probably a hell of a hell of a conference.

It was crazy because the funniest thing was there was a stripper pole that need to be hidden. The screen now was the pixelated screens, the giant pixelated screens, the EDM pole. And we had more speakers than we could accommodate. And so we slotted them all in 12 to 15 minute lightning talks. So just don't give us, don't ramble on, just give us the key learnings on a specific topic. So like how do we keep people on point here? We put a smoke machine in the backstage and every time the hit time we'd hit the smoke machine so it made a sound like. And people would see the smoke and start clapping. The speaker would get startled, right? When the speaker gets startled, audience hears the sound and then they start clapping. Now towards the end of the night, I think it was TechCrunch going on stage with the founder of Meerkat. Back then Meerkat was super popular. And Frederic from TechCrunch goes like, why are these guys releasing the smoke? And what had happened was the smoke machine ran out of water and the drapes backstage caught fire. Okay, so that's how ghetto you gotta start sometimes just to get validation, right?

It sounds like that conference was fire. Literally.

It was literally fire. Now that you are doing a bunch of things away from the sprint, how do you balance professional life with personal interests? It feels like you've prioritized the things that bring you joy, like nonprofit and the things that don't take a lot of sprinting and join the marathon of family personal life.

Yeah. So right now I'm pretty comfortable kind of with this lifestyle business where the whole goal is I'll take on as much business for the snag or consulting side that I can personally do. But I'm not looking to hire anyone. I want to like keep it very flexible. If anything I'll get some contractors or some 1099 so. But I love people, I love working with people. I've hired hundreds of people and manage, manage a ton. But for right now I'm really enjoying like the flexibility of. I'm going to go pick up my kids after we finish this and I'm going to bring them to basketball and soccer and dance lessons this week. And my kids are young, they're seven and nine and I like being able to prioritize spending a little bit more time with them. When I was like fully in the grind, the hustle, I'd sometimes go days without seeing my kids and that didn't feel great. And so I like this flexibility that I have right now. We'll see what happens in the future. You never sit, never on anything. But I really just like after running this sprint for a decade plus being able to take a breath and make sure I'm prioritizing the right stuff.

I'm right there with you. I think the media has perpetuated this addiction to unicorn porn that you got to keep sprinting and build unicorns. But in reality the world is run by horses, camels and donkeys like the day to day brick and mortar businesses. And I think if you don't prioritize the things that bring you joy, life will pass you by. For me, a bunch of things came to a head after we sold half the company to growth equity firm and I had come into some cash. I almost died of COVID and everything lost its meaning for me. And then my daughter who was 8, I got three kids. But my daughter, she was 8 at the time. She comes to me and says dad, why don't you just get a job somewhere? I'm like, why? She's at least I'll see you more. All my friends see their dads and they're working. Nobody has a startup like can you not this startup stuff. And that broke my heart and took a long break to do the same thing. After this, I'm going to go pick my kids from school.

Yeah, tough. It's tough, right? It's a balance. And I don't think you or I would probably be happy with just doing one or just doing the other forever. Like there's different moments in time where you need to do certain things and prioritize different things. Maybe when kids are older or you have kids, you do a certain, you work in a certain way or prioritize different things. But I think it's just like part of life. It's moving pieces at all times. You have to do what's best for you at that point in time.

This has been a great conversation, personal, professional hit. All points as we close out.

Thanks for having me.

Likewise, man. Thanks for joining. As we close out, anything you'd like to add or anything you want the audience to hear? Where can we follow you where what you're putting out there?

Yeah, you can always follow me or DM me on Twitter. I'm just at Rod. Or if you email me if you ever want to jam on growth or talk domain names. Just hi com and yeah, always happy to hear from good people and particularly interesting folks that are looking to upgrade or figuring out their digital assets on the domain side these days. Find that very fascinating. So feel free to reach out.

Thank you so much, Rob. Have a wonderful weekend coming up.

Hey, you too. And good luck picking up the kits.

Thanks man. You too.

All right, take care.

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