Tame The (Gentle) Beast

Issue #31

November 7th, 2023

Quick Hits:

🐕 “On the internet, no one knows youre a dog”

🐱 300 facial expressions

🦜 This lucky parrot survived Hamas, most didn’t

 👨 Mom time vs Dad time 

💵 The Humane Society just raised $2.2 for the animals

This week we chatted with Ben Green, he is the CEO and co-founder at Gentle Beast.

1. How did you come up with Gentle Beast? How big is the dog training market?

Like millions of others, we adopted an adorable pandemic puppy who turned out to have some difficult behavior issues. My wife and I went on this nightmare training journey where we spent several thousand dollars on trainers and countless hours researching in just the first two years.

After half a dozen trainers who promised quick solutions but didn’t deliver long-term results, we found a trainer who changed everything. She helped us shift our mindset from trying to get her to “stop” our dog’s behaviors, to understanding why they happen and building a toolkit to help manage them. During that time, I talked to hundreds of other people who adopted a dog during the pandemic, and learned we weren’t alone – so Gentle Beast was built to make that same great training experience we had more affordable and more accessible.

The market for training is big. Every dog needs training – there are ~9 million brought into US homes a year, and of the ~100 million other dogs currently in homes, 85% of them have behavioral problems that require ongoing training. But with 16,000 dogs for every certified trainer, a lot of these problems go unaddressed.

2. How have consumers reacted to the shift from a trainer physically accompanying them through the training process to an online one? How does Gentle Beast work, walk us through it.

As with many industries, the pandemic shifted how we perceive different services. Almost every dog trainer turned to teletraining in 2020, which helped lay the groundwork for Gentle Beast. For training specifically, we love the phrase “it’s about training the human” because that’s the key to how Gentle Beast works – your job as a dog owner is to understand how your dog’s brain works, how they learn new things, and why certain behaviors exist in the first place. So, if the trainer’s goal is to teach the human, not the dog, then online training makes a ton of sense.

That said, it’s hugely valuable to have a real-life expert you can trust in your corner, which is why we pair you with a certified trainer upon purchasing your Gentle Beast membership.

Gentle Beast emulates the same experience you would get with a great certified trainer. Based on your dog’s age, breed, environment, behavior, and the owner’s goals, we build a behavior profile and a personalized training plan that adapts to how the training is progressing through a feedback loop with the user. That plan is then delivered through workshops made up of learning modules based on your behavior profile. We also match you with a group of other owners who had a dog of a similar developmental stage, with a certified trainer to guide that group so you can ask questions and garner feedback whenever you need it.

3. What does the current dog training landscape look like (online and in person)? How are you solving these issues?

Dog training is really interesting as an industry – everyone is aware of it, every dog needs it, and there is a ton of media around it, but there’s no clear leader in behavior. It’s also entirely unregulated, so there’s no real standard of excellence and the onus is on consumers to navigate it.

We see the landscape in three basic categories – private training, group training, and self-service tools. There are some fantastic private trainers out there who have spent hundreds if not thousands of hours getting certifications and continuing education in behavior – but they are few and far between, and are inaccessibly expensive to most dog owners. To find them, you also have to navigate through the not-so-great trainers – ones who use aversive tools and tout pseudoscientific guidance like the importance of being the “alpha.”

Group training is popular, and led by companies like Petco and Petsmart. While it’s a bit more affordable than working with a private trainer, it has the same pitfalls in terms of being opaque for consumers. By nature, it’s also not really personalized to someone’s unique needs – but a good option for the basics.

On the self-service side, most people turn to YouTube, but it’s a frustrating experience – it’s hard to find something useful, and even harder to remember a 20-minute video when dealing with the behaviors in real life.

Gentle Beast brings a fourth option – the same personalized, trustworthy guidance of a certified private trainer, with the accessibility of YouTube, but designed specifically for the act of training.

4. Why did you decide to pivot from the original business into the current one, and what was it originally?

One of my frustrations during the first few years working on our dog’s behavior was the equipment and tools. The stuff we liked and wanted to buy wasn’t efficacious, and the “training” oriented equipment was low quality and didn’t speak to our millennial dog parent sensibilities. The initial idea was to develop trainer-certified equipment, and go after a Peloton-like model where we would create content to provide guidance on how to leverage that equipment in training.

We pivoted when we tested the first piece of content with a group of beta users, and the feedback was overwhelming – the hair-on-fire problem was learning how to train, not the tools you leverage. We still believe tools have a critical role, but the pivot meant that we work with partners to provide those tools.

5. Where have you seen the most success with user acquisition?

The magic of training, and Gentle Beast, happens when we acquire the customer as soon as they bring the dog home. We’re really excited at what we’re seeing in the pilot of our Good Dogs Do Good program, where we provide rescues and shelters access to Gentle Beast for free for all fosters and volunteers, and they, in turn, give a free extended trial to any adopter who comes through their doors. It’s still early, but we convert those users at nearly twice the rate of our other channels, and it’s by far our lowest acquisition cost.

• South Korean pet space - SK Networks just invested $20.7M in BMSmile. 

• Central Gardens - Just acquired TDBBS.

• Pet care - Mexican startup Tu Mejor Amigo is in the process of securing an investment of $400k.

• Woolies - Woolworth is acquiring a majority stake in pet care retailer Absolute Pets.

• AI Collaboration - Royal Canin has partnered up with Gekkovet to provide tools for vets in India and across Asia.

PAWS right there!!! Don’t forget to subscribe 👇👇

• An Italian restaurant for…dogs - The first in Italy, and purportedly the world, to serve dogs.

• Blue Ridge, Meals & Mutts & Mid America Pet Food - All 3 companies have had food recalls.

• Breakthrough - Benson Hill has developed a proprietary soybean specifically for the pet food and animal feed markets.

• Natural or not - Purina is currently entangled in a class action lawsuit over exactly that.

• Microplastics - They are everywhere, yes even in your pet food.

• Extremely sad - 2 Abandoned Dogs were found in the Same Dumpster.

• This kid is an angel - This 12-year-old kid’s mission is to save as many dogs as possible.

• Great news - 48 dogs find homes in 48 hours.

• Not your average lizard - 2 kids found a three-foot-long lizard in Georgia.

• Fat cat - Feline obesity is on the rise, approximately 60% of cats in the U.S. are overweight.

• The Pupp Act - Would provide homeless shelters with grants to help them support residents with pets.

• Thief - A $7500 African grey parrot worth $7,500 was stolen from a store in California.

1. You've recently appeared on Alex Lieberman's 60 Second Startup. In the past, you've won a pitch competition. What's your advice to founders about being "the face" of a brand/company and getting out there in front of as many people as possible?

Your job as a spokesperson for a brand is to be a storyteller, plain and simple. Everything you talk about – whether it’s your traction, founding story, or product positioning, should have a simple and digestible narrative thread that runs through it and connects back to your company’s reason for existing.

2. What are common mistakes you see early-stage founders make?

Overall, I see a lot of founders with a big vision that are trying to execute that exact vision on day one – trying to solve all the problems of a particular customer, instead of focusing on the one that has their “hair on fire”. This leads to distraction – of priorities, strategy, and resources. The most successful founders have absolute clarity around the most critical problem, who experiences this problem, and have laser focus on how they can solve it.

3. How have you been funding the business and what are your plans for the future? Any key learnings you want to share with our readers?

We raised an initial round of funding from angels and a few select pet industry investors, which has allowed us to build the product and bring it to market. With the early traction we’re seeing, we see an opportunity for a venture-scale business with a path to becoming the most trusted brand in animal behavior – so we’re planning on going out for an institutional round in 2024 to expedite that.

The pet industry is such an interesting concept within consumer goods and services. While a lot of the dynamics are the same between the human and pet versions of these verticals, (food, supplements, services, etc.) pets are unique in that the brand loyalty is far higher. Once you find a brand that works for you and your pet, you’re likely to stay with that brand for the lifetime of the pet – and then resume again once you bring a new family member home. In the end, that mitigates a lot of the risk that comes with other consumer sectors, and explains why there’s been so much investment interest in pets recently.

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Finally, What does a dog stay in when they go camping?

A pup-up tent.

See you next week!

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