Fabian Geyrhalter:
Welcome to Hitting the Mark, Joe.

Joe Spector:
Thank you. Thanks for having me on.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Oh, I’m so excited to have you already. I know this is going to be a really exciting conversation. So just to give a little bit of background to our listeners, you co-founded Hims, the D2C prescription and over the counter drugs brand that started off by selling erectile dysfunction and hair loss treatments and has since exploded into, I’m sure it’s more than that now, but a $1.6 billion public company together with the Hers brand. Moving from that company, that brand into a pet telemedicine platform does actually not seem too far-fetched. Sorry for the pun with fetch, but it’s real. It makes a lot of sense that you did this. How did you and your co-founder Brian derive the idea and how did you set out to launch Dutch, I believe it was last year, wasn’t it?

Joe Spector:
Yep, a year ago.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Wow.

Joe Spector:
First of all, me personally, I’ve spent the last 20 years working at small series A startups and generally speaking, I love, we were talking before the show, that one year period where it seems so chaotic. And for better or for worse, I’ve developed almost like a masochistic personality where I run into that fire and with Hims, by the time things got calm and it was ready to scale as a public company, it was that clear moment that it’s time for me to move on because my sweet spot, what I love to do is that unknown creating the universe part. And by the way, I was so lucky I had a chance to ring the bell in the New York Stock Exchange and as an immigrant, dream come true.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Amazing.

Joe Spector:
At that moment I again knew that it was time to do something else. And what happened, it was the pandemic. I got a pandemic puppy, like so many millions of Americans. And as I was dealing with all the issues of going to the vet, the expense of the vet, I realized, wait a minute, I was just part of changing the legal landscape of telemedicine, creating this $1 billion brand. And nothing like that existed on the pet side. Nothing. And so I felt like, okay, let’s do this again. And I get to do it again with a lot of the lessons learned from Hims of what worked, what didn’t work. But I get to do it in a slightly different space and I get to do it my way. So that’s exciting.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Well, and you were already hinting at one of my follow up questions. What was the biggest lesson you learned from Hims that you wanted to apply and what have you learned that you wanted to ensure to avoid with Dutch?

Joe Spector:
With Hims, and again, so many wonderful lessons, but we made a commitment to brand and we invested in brand. And the fact is that brand can’t happen overnight and you can’t do brand cheap because people are going to smell that a mile away. So if you’re going to commit to brand, you need to commit to creating beautiful experiences. And on top of it, by the way, unlike selling socks, we’re selling healthcare. We’re selling a medicine that goes into your own body or your pet, someone you love. So your brand needs to exude high quality, needs to exude trust. And that doesn’t happen when you’re doing it on the cheap. And a lot of times in Silicon Valley, there’s a mantra to of course test and iterate and do things on a low budget, but brand that’s a mistake to do that on the brand side. And then I think the differences are with Hims, to your question of maybe what not to do or what are the differences.
And it was, when we launched Dutch, the idea is there are so many categories and issues that pets have that we didn’t want to be known as the ED brand. So I wanted to make sure that the brand, and we’ll hopefully talk about it later, can feel like it can transcend into so many different categories and conditions and experiences and not be cornered into something specific. And when you think about Hims, Hims is very gender specific. So we later had to launch Hers. And so again, I wanted to have a brand that can grow into lots of different areas later on.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Areas which you can’t even define yet. And that’s the thing.

Joe Spector:
That’s right.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And we can jump right into that conversation about naming because obviously branding is super important to you and clearly so is naming and in Hims before Hims even became Hims, you went through several names I heard before you actually hired an expert and said, let’s actually do this the right way. And interestingly enough the right way was very right for the time being because I’m sure that the Hims the name change to Hims at the time really set you up into that we are a niche and we are focused on you, the guy, and finally someone’s here for you. But then five years later you’re wondering, wait a minute, now we actually have to create other brands because it is so very descriptive.

Joe Spector:
Totally. And I think that’s by the way, a lesson learned as an entrepreneur to keep pushing myself to think big, you have to think bigger than you ever imagined. And that’s an insight I learned coming out of Hims is you have to think big. And like you said, you have to think about things that you may not even be thinking about or exist today, but you’ve got to create a space for that. And you constantly have to push yourself to be thinking big. And it’s easy to get tactical and to think small. And there are so many problems as a founder, you’re dealing with minute by minute. But you have to, as an entrepreneur, as the CEO, you have to force yourself to be thinking of the big picture.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yeah, absolutely. I just got off a phone call with my patent attorney who’s like, oh, and would you like to file the patent in all other 123 countries? And I’m like, oh God. There goes this, right.

Joe Spector:
Totally.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
But let’s talk about the Dutch name then. Tell us about the name. How did it come about?

Joe Spector:
Again, having been part of developing Hims, there’s an art and a science to it. So I wanted a couple of things that were important to me as a brand. I wanted the brand to be easily spelled. One of the things when we were developing Hims and once in the early days of Hims, people were spelling it as a church hymn, H-Y-M-N-S. So it was often misspelled. So I wanted a name that was not that easy to spell incorrectly. Then I wanted a name with a hard ending because again, I want the brand to exude authority and convey trust. And so I wanted this hard ending at the end.
And then on the other side, the name snuck into our heads because, it’s kind of a random story. We had been addicted to the last season of this last season of The Crown. And we learned, my wife and I, that Princess Diana’s nickname growing up was Dutch. So it was something we didn’t know. And so that’s how the name first came into our head. And then I think this is the most, I don’t know if entrepreneurs really talk about this a lot, but it’s finding the URL and the URL dutch.com was available.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
How was dutch.com available, what are we talking, how many figures are we talking?

Joe Spector:
It was low six figures. I’ll tell you something. So we, Hims, it’s actually URL is forhims.com, but we had tried desperately to buy hims.com, so there’s a whole underworld of domain ownership and getting a domain. And we even showed up with a pile of cash at the house of the guy who owns hims.com.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
That’s awesome.

Joe Spector:
So I definitely lived through the underbelly of getting the desired domain. So that was again, another experience from Hims. But here, yeah, it was this miracle that this domain was abandoned and the person wasn’t really going to make anything with it and he was willing to sell it. And I got it so early before there was any press around fundraising or who I am, none of that. Because the moment that they smell any money, then the price will go up into the millions.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Exactly. Yeah. That’s why. But I always tell the founders that I work with, if we want to get a domain, it’s like, no, let’s have some junior person that I know off of her Gmail address ask for it. It’s like, let’s not, but you went down a complete different kind of hole. I could just imagine it’s like here are the founders of a D2C erectile dysfunction known for company with a bunch of cash in front of your house, what could possibly go wrong?

Joe Spector:
Oh my God.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
You’re like, yeah, I don’t want to go back there. It all ended really, really well. But you’re like, yeah, maybe not. Look, we are 10 minutes, 11 minutes into our conversation. I don’t think in the 80 plus shows that I had, I never had an entrepreneur talk so much about branding even in the first 10 minutes. So obviously this is super important to you with the Dutch name. How do you go about brand storytelling? People must ask why Dutch? What is the connection with the animals? What is the connection with what you do? How do you tell that story when you are asked, like right now?

Joe Spector:
I think one of the things, it goes back to what is at the heart of it all. And I hired an agency Red Antler, which I think is one of the best branding agencies out there. And again, it goes back to if you’re going to do brand, make sure you sign yourself with amazing people, amazing photographers who are going to build this beautiful brand. But the very first exercise that we do together is figuring out this brand pyramid. And it starts at the bottom of what are the messaging pillars that you want? What is the personality of the brand that you want? And then it all ends with what is the one word feeling you want your brand to have.
And so we spent several months, because again, this doesn’t just jump out and these are somewhat hard topics because you’re framing and narrowing down this one thing that brand is going to exude, which includes the name but includes brand colors, it includes photography, includes language. So once you narrow that down though from there, everything else, it goes back to center around that word. And for us, that feeling was relief. And relief was really important because what we see, and this has come true, it’s just so wonderful when things come to life is that pet parents are because of this vet shortage that’s going on in this country, it can easily take several weeks just to get an appointment. And what may start off as a simple rash and you’re being told, oh, just it’s not a big deal, just wait a couple weeks and then we’ll fit you in.
Well it becomes a big issue and now it’s Saturday and you’re deciding should I go to urgent care or what should I do? And so for us, Dutch is this brand where you come and in under an hour you’re going to see real veterinarian over video who’s going to walk you through what’s going on and potentially prescribe a plan of treatment that hour. Whereas you were just waiting weeks just to see someone. And so that is that feeling of relief like, oh my God, I was about to spend $1,000, four hours sitting in urgent care and for a fraction of the price actually someone listened to me and solved my problem.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Amazing.

Joe Spector:
So that’s that feeling of relief that we want Dutch to convey. And so whenever we are, like I said, doing any of our photography, any of our copywriting, that’s the one word we’re thinking through to make sure it’s conveyed to the consumer.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And I love that because I would’ve asked you about, what is that one word? Because that is something that we do here too. And I think it is so important to have that compass of it always has to go back to that. Whatever we do, whatever we feel, whatever we think with the brand, it has to go back to that. It’s so strong to have that singular focus as a company, everyone within the company so that the customer can feel that slowly of like, oh my God, this is what Dutch provides me with. It’s relief. Where I was also heading with that question because I thought it was interesting when you told the story about binge watching the show and Princess Diana and then Dutch came up and you’re like, this is it, we love that idea.
Do you tell that story of Dutch being meaningful in the way of you being the outsider doing things differently? Or to me that would’ve been an immediate story or do you just never talk about how the name Dutch was derived and what it stands for and you just say, Dutch is now meaningless, it has nothing to do with the country, it has nothing to do with the Princess Diana story? Now it stands for within this environment of the internet and of businesses.

Joe Spector:
For me so partially, this is to take another step back, I think that when you’re developing a brand, the founder and the CEO is inevitably going to be intertwined into that story, into that feeling. And whether it’s you mentioned CEO of Everlane, whoever it is, those founder personalities I think are inevitably going to be intertwined into that brand story. And for me, one of my pillars, and again my personality’s fairly cemented, is I’m very transparent and it’s almost more difficult for me to not try to share a story and keep it corporate, keep it controlled than to be honest and transparent. And those are pillars of our company culture. Those are pillars of what we’re doing, how vets are speaking with patients. So that’s a very important pillar. So I end up telling that story quite often.
I think what’s interesting is I think sometimes talking to the PR team, they’re sometimes like this is a weird story, it makes no sense, it doesn’t fit into this neat story. But I think that’s just part of who I am. Like you said, I’ve had a crazy background that has, and I think whenever and now again, as I’ve gotten older, as I’ve seen the underbelly of Silicon Valley, you realize no one has that neat picture story that’s all put together. And I also just think when you see brands where everything is just so magically perfect or even magically perfectly imperfect.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Right.

Joe Spector:
That to me is my spidy sense goes off. And so one of the things that I want Dutch to be is that I had wanted Dutch to be as a brand is to have this rawness. When I looked at a lot of the pet landscape and the pet branding, there’s a lot of pet brands that are cartoony and very playful. And then there are maybe food brands that are just incredibly aspirational. So that’s where, like I said, perfectly imperfect.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yeah, it’s like clinical. Comical or clinical. Those are the two categories usually with pets.

Joe Spector:
And so for me, I wanted a brand that was, again, someone is coming to us with a rash, this is not a cute moment for them and it’s not an elevated moment. And so I didn’t want to minimize that experience. And also I didn’t want the consumer to feel like we don’t understand where they’re at. So partially that’s where that desire to be raw and authentic. If you look at our photography, if you look at the color schemes, it conveys that. And that goes back into my personality of just being raw, real, and authentic. So I do tell that part.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
No, and I love that. And I think that’s great. And you make a really good point with obviously this buzzword in branding and marketing and business of authenticity. And how it’s spilling over into LinkedIn, which becomes Facebook now, and it’s all over glorification of authenticity. But if we get rid of that buzzword and we just say people being real, and that’s what people want, they really want it, consumers want it, they want that. And it’s just horrible how we brand people always have to make everything a brand in itself. The word authenticity is a brand. Transparency is a brand, but in reality it’s just like if people are just more normal and themselves and they just talk like they would to a friend, and that’s what the brand becomes.
And then suddenly you have a whole group of friends that has another group of friends. And that’s just the beauty when you see these startups just growing organically to put another buzz word out there is because it’s like it used to be. There’s a good butcher shop in town and people go there because it’s word of mouth, they’re friendly, they’re reasonably priced and they have the most amazing meat, boom, that’s it. It’s really, there’s not much more to it. And so I think that sometimes we have to remind ourselves of that.

Joe Spector:
Totally. And by the way, I also think it doesn’t have to be, sometimes even a vice can be endearing. So for example, I’m Russian and sometimes I go to Russian stores and people are incredibly rude. But to me it’s almost like sometimes that’s part of the charm and the culture and that’s just like, that’s what I go there for. It’s to experience that slight rudeness. Now maybe Queen Elizabeth, and we’re talking about Diana, there’s a certain British culture that is keep a stiff upper lip and be self, make fun of yourself. So I think it doesn’t always have to be this ideal state that you’re trying to reach. It could be just whatever you are. But even in doing so, that could be endearing as well.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I do agree. I do agree. Every country has their little quirks and either you embrace them or you just hate them. And embracing is always a much, much better route because it’s in the end at some point you will miss it. You talked a little bit about your background. So you left Uzbekistan via a refugee camp in Italy back in the late ’80s, right?

Joe Spector:
Yes I did.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And then you arrived with your parents in the US with pretty much nothing, right?

Joe Spector:
That’s right.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And then I read, I believe it was in Ink Magazine, I’m not sure, but I read somewhere that your father gave you the advice. He said if you really want to succeed in this country being the US, you have to be an entrepreneur. Was that a pivotal moment for you? How much has that experience, that experience of coming to the US and in the way and under the circumstances that you did plus your father being someone who always pushed and had that attitude, how much has that shaped you as an entrepreneur today?

Joe Spector:
I think there’s two things because I will say my brother is completely different than me. So I do think there’s nature and nurture involved. But because I think I’ve always been someone who didn’t want to follow the rules or listen to authority or always wanted to color outside the lines. But I do think that experience was so life changing for a couple reasons. One, and it goes back to entrepreneurship, having lived in poverty and have had nothing, I think it’s been easier for me to feel like I have nothing to lose because I’ve been to that place. I’ve been to that place where everything was gone and taken away. And so it’s not so scary for me.
There are many entrepreneurs who have wealthy parents and failure for them is a much more unfathomable prospect because they think, oh my god, I won’t be able to survive if I get to that. But for me it’s like I was there, I survived and I think that gives me that extra ammunition to take on more risk, I think. And then from my dad, and then further reinforced it of the only way to really succeed, whether it’s financially, but also in creating something new is to take risk.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
And he was a risk taker. He was running, I believe a dental office where he wasn’t really allowed to do so right?

Joe Spector:
That was my grandfather. So it runs in the family. But yes, my grandfather ran this practice on the side because yeah, absolutely no one could have any private enterprise in the Soviet Union and he still did it.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Unbelievable. And talking about risk taking and bringing this back to Hims, and I’m almost certain to Hers as well, the two brands, there was a lot of risk taking from the brand side and subsequently it did what most to me what I believe most great and controversial brands do. It created fans and it also created enemies, right? Where there’s love, there’s hate.

Joe Spector:
Totally.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
How did the brand navigate through that phase of finding a voice and sticking to it despite the uproar or what people said or all the haters? How did you go through this? Because it’s so easy for me as the brand guy to say, this is what you have to do and it’s good to have enemies, you’re going to have fans. But it is so difficult when you’re the brand and all you get is there’s this shit show happening right and left and you’re like, nope, we got to power through because this is how we going to grow as a brand.

Joe Spector:
Again, I would say look, to be real, it’s never a pleasant experience when people are hating on you and being mean. It’s not something that I’d raise my hand to do and no matter what, it’s never something that doesn’t affect you. And on those days, I need to go and what I do is oftentimes just run my heart out for 10 miles until I’m just so tired I can’t do that anymore. I’m more just like, oh, I’m so exhausted. But I think what happens is those moments are shorter and they end up feeling not as painful when then you see the buzz and the conversation anyway. So I think it ends up being that the pluses outweigh the minuses because what you do is you take a step back and you’re like, oh my gosh, I’ve created this beautiful fuzzy brand that’s having an impact on people’s lives and a meaningful impact.
I think both brands have been so mission driven, have saved people time and money and changed lives. And when you think about that, the hate becomes such more of a, it really minimalizes the negative feelings from that. And then I do think, look, it’s at the end of the day, like you said, people are talking about you. You are big enough that they hate you, you’re important enough that they hate you because that’s still, you’re creating a feeling, you’re creating an emotion in someone. I think that’s still pretty powerful because especially in today’s world where there’s so much content, there’s so much media, there’s so much going on. It’s the easiest thing to let something slide and people pretty much not even caring about it. So the fact that they cared at all one way or the other, I actually think it’s still pretty awesome.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I totally agree with you. I totally agree with you and I’ve been through this multiple times and every time I’ve been through it, I knew that success is on the other side. That is a sign. It’s like, oh, this actually, people have emotions about what you just said or did or launched or whatever it is. And I love that you first answered the question in a personal way of coping with it rather than what did the brand do because interestingly enough, out of all of these founders like yourself that are on my show, I learned that so many of them are hardcore runners, hardcore bicyclists, a lot of cyclists because that’s the way that you sweat it out and it’s a solo sport and you can think, you can just wear yourself out over tens and tens and tens of miles. So it’s interesting. I think there’s a reason for all of this and it connects, and I love when that happens.
Looking back Dutch has been around now for about a year, as we said, and it had its breakthrough moments. When did you feel with Dutch, and feel free to also answer that question with Hims or if you feel like it’s more appropriate with Hims, what was that one big breakthrough moment? When did you feel it’s suddenly, here’s a startup, but now it’s actually a brand, something happened and what was that something where you just suddenly said, okay, we got it?

Joe Spector:
So just a few months ago I was on the panel at the National Veterinary Conference, thousands of veterinarians and on a panel one by one, the panelists, the questionnaires were saying that they are on our website almost every day.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Wow.

Joe Spector:
And I was like, really? I don’t know that I’m on our website every day. I check in.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
You’re like, you people are weird.

Joe Spector:
I don’t know that I’m on there every day. And so I think that was this aha moment. Wow, our moves are being tracked and what we’re doing and what we’re saying and how we’re saying it is being tracked by really people all over the industry. That was definitely eye opening for me as a brand.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
That’s huge.

Joe Spector:
So that was a big moment recently.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Well, and I’m sure you must have, it’s different if you’re at a panel of a startup conference where you’re most probably all the time and it’s your backyard, right? It’s like, okay, let’s talk founders. But suddenly you’re with the people that in the one hand you disrupt a little bit and you’re the guy who’s the outsider and you’re sitting there and you don’t know what to expect. And then you hear that. That must be extremely rewarding.

Joe Spector:
Yeah, it is. And again, it’s like you said, it’s so easy for people to not care or dismiss, and the fact that this is something that it’s on their radar and at this rate, then it’s like, okay, we are definitely hitting something of value here. Hitting something that is really important to these people.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
What I find interesting with a brand like Dutch is how do people find out about you? And I think this is funny when I say traditional, traditional, in the sense of social media these days, is it traditionally through someone’s just forwarding a social media post or to start interacting with you to start finding you? Which most probably social media was huge for Hims. Is social media super important for Dutch or is the word of mouth and the actual interaction happening outside of social media?

Joe Spector:
It’s less social media, I will say that. And it’s more a combination of word of mouth, a lot of education. So one of the areas we’ve made pretty significant investment in is SEO. We have tens of thousands of pieces of content at this point. And so oftentimes people find us because they’re searching for something fairly specific that has to do with their pet. And then the other hook is, like I mentioned, is the pet owner. It’s after hours or it’s a weekend, and they are trying to solve what is becoming quickly an emergency situation. And so as they’re frantically on Google, that’s how they find us.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I see.

Joe Spector:
It could be organic, it could be that specific term, but that’s been our main bread and butter so far. And that’s been that hook of how people are finding Dutch because they’re in the middle of an urgent issue. With Hims, it’s more passive because it’s like if you’ve had hair loss, it’s not like one day you woke up and you have hair. It’s been happening for a while. Or again, ED, it’s not black and white. One day you woke up and it’s something that happens over time. And so social media’s a better medium for that because you nurture that. You build it up, it’s happening over time. Here it’s fairly, something’s happening in that moment and then people are trying to get to a vet right away. And so that’s how they find Dutch.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
That’s super interesting. And I thought so when I reviewed your social channels, I’m like, I wonder. There is something else behind the scenes. So that’s really interesting. Talking about how, I’m sure you’re very active in the startup scene, branding is very important to you. A lot of founders say, oh, that’s an expense I don’t have to make right now that can wait after launch. Famously, Donald Miller, who’s an author, he stated that companies shouldn’t even be thinking about branding until they’ve hit the 50 million revenue mark, which I totally disagree with. But what are your thoughts about investing in branding pre-launch, or any other piece of brand advice that you can share with founders specifically as a takeaway?

Joe Spector:
I would say you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression. And that’s number one. And then number two is shit in, shit out. If you create a shitty brand and you have shitty results, don’t expect to have amazing results when you didn’t put in the work to create a beautiful branded experience. So I think you’re setting yourself up for failure, setting yourself up to have false negatives when that’s what you did. And I don’t know, because I’ve been in the consumer world for so long, maybe I just don’t know. Maybe if I was developing a game and it was just more numbers driven, I might have a different perspective. I don’t know. But I can say in healthcare, in consumer, you’re just setting yourself up for failure if you’re not investing in brand upfront.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
I could not agree more obviously. That’s why I do what I do. So I think you said it really, really, really well. What’s next for the Dutch brand? What are you excited about in the next six months? Obviously, you just launched 12 months ago, so the next six months is pretty big. This is an important time. What’s around the corner that you can share with us?

Joe Spector:
There’s definitely a number of, as I mentioned, the idea for Dutch is to grow into a variety of different areas within pet health. And that’s the stuff that will be happening in the next three to six months where we’re going to launch new categories, launch new verticals, launch partnerships that make us be a part of the overall integrated 360 pet parent experience both and expanding from our online experience into the offline experience a little bit. So I’m excited about growing our tentacles into these additional areas.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Now you got us curious. That’s super exciting. Very cool. You said something at the very beginning of this show that I want to repeat because I thought it was, I’ve never heard someone say it like that. You said that you want to be out there creating the universe, you don’t want to get stuck in a company after they already had significant growth in their certain place. So it seems like you’re going to keep creating the universe with the Dutch brand. I can’t wait to see that and to follow you along. Where can people follow you personally either or where can they get to know Dutch and start using the services?

Joe Spector:
So best is to go to dutch.com. Then you can always find us on Instagram @HelloDutch. And then you can also follow me on @JSpector on Instagram. Although I will say I’m also doing, probably my biggest, my most favorite social network is LinkedIn.

Fabian Geyrhalter:
Yeah. Cool. So people can connect with you, follow you along. Hey Joe, this was so amazing. Really appreciate you diving deep into branding and talking about both of the brands, the big brands that you were and are a part of. Really fascinating story. Thank you so much for your time.

Joe Spector:
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. This was fun.