Felix: Today, I'm joined by Leili and Kevin from Supakit. Supakit designs dreamy cat collars, cat harnesses, and accessories that cats love and really work. It was started in 2017 and based out of London. Welcome Leili and Kevin. Leili: Thank you for having us. Kevin: Thank you. Felix: Yeah. The birth of this idea really came out of a scary time for you. Tell us more about what happened. Leili: Oh. It was a real nightmare, actually. A strange way to start a business. We have a cat called Lola, and she was quite young at the time. We live in London. Here, it's fairly normal to let your cat have access to the outdoors, at least for certain parts of the day. We'd let her go out and about, but one day she didn't come home. We were really worried about her, not just because we were concerned about her whereabouts, but there'd been a backstory where we tried to put a collar on her, because we knew that she should be carrying ID, at least something to say that she was loved and had a home. She previously removed every single one that we tried to put on her. We were burning through cash. It was getting so frustrating that we gave up. When she went missing, we knew that we'd messed up. She had no collar on, she had no ID, and she was just roaming the streets. We were distraught cat parents, weren't we? Kevin: Yeah. Luckily, we did get her back. Really fortunately, through a local group that we put a message out, and we got her back. We promised to try harder. We were like, we have to make it our mission to get her to wear a collar, basically, and to keep it on. Leili: Yeah. Actually, it happened, it was really serendipitous at this time. Our two cats were fighting quite a bit, and we'd been in touch with our veterinarian about ways that we could help them, specifically to help our more active cat expend her hunting energies in play, and not towards her sister. The vet had recommended that we try to find natural materials and create homemade toys out of them, for Lola to play with. I had loads of scraps of leather and other materials lying around. We just started experimenting. Our big breakthrough was when we realized that A, it's not a dead set that cats are going to remove their collars. They don't have to be intrinsically uncomfortable. They also don't have to intrinsically be bulky in a way that can snag on things. We knew we wanted to put a safety buckle in. That's the tricky thing, is it should spring open in an emergency scenario. When we started using natural materials, we found that our cat was just so much more comfortable in them, because scent is a really important sensory modality for cats. Then, we also started working with materials that were really lightweight and slim lined, so that we could create a collar that didn't have a profile on our cat's neck, so they forgot it was there. It couldn't get snagged on things. After many months of experimentation, it came together. Kevin: The leather just seemed to come together. Yeah. We could make it strong enough, but light enough and flexible enough, is the key thing, I think, and the sensation that a cat has against its fur of the material. It's so important, that I think we hadn't considered it enough. Yeah, when we found that leather stayed on, we were like, that's great we'll make a collar out of leather then. Leili: Yeah. We knew we kept our one tricky customer happy. She was tricky. Yeah, that was how it all started. Then, we found that other cats were just as fussy about their collars as our cat was. It went from there. Kevin: We realized it when we researched, just seeing, how do you get your cat to keep their collar on? And realized, in forums and message groups, that loads of people had the same problem, and that collars were almost considered semi-disposable, in that you'd buy a pack of five from Amazon, and you'd get through them in a certain amount of time. Then, you'd just go and buy another one. It was almost like, we thought, that doesn't seem to make sense. They're obviously not happy. Why don't we make a collar that makes them happy? Leili: Yeah. Felix: Now, it sounds like when you first started this product development process, it was really just for yourself. Tell us more about that. What's your background? How are you two able to just create a collar? It looks simple, but I'm sure there's a lot involved in creating something that will work. Kevin: Yeah. We weren't really planning on it as a business, when we started it. We had been looking for an alternative business for the two of us for quite some time. We both worked in TV before this. Leili was a producer and I was a cameraman. That's how we met, and worked together for quite some time doing that. We'd always been on the back burner just thinking, wouldn't it be nice if we could do something ourselves? We always wanted to have our own business and work together. We tried a few different things, and they hadn't really worked out. They weren't ideal. Leili: One of our early abandoned ideas was an ice lolly business in London, which obviously does not have weather that's most conducive- Kevin: Doesn't have great weather. Leili: We were quite good at abandoning, maybe less good ideas quickly. Kevin: Yeah. We tried stuff and abandoned it, and we did some of our own TV production, doing small commercial stuff for the internet, which didn't really tick the box. After working on quite high-end stuff, we didn't really get much satisfaction from that. That isn't what we wanted to carry on doing anyway. This came at a nice point. I think Leili realized this. There's a market here. There's a lot of people who are in the same position as us. It's a good product. It works. Let's make them, and see if they sell, and see if they work for other people. That's how we started, in a very small, while we were still working in TV, just as a sideline, as a little hobby, making them ourselves and selling them. Felix: Yeah. I think there's an important nugget that you dropped in there, which is around being able to quickly abandon projects. Given your experience now, where you have projects in the past that maybe worked a little bit, fizzled out, or just lost interest in it, and then finally one that did work. Tell us more about what you saw between those two ... Not two, really, all the other projects that you've left in the past, and then Supakit. Now, what did you see that allowed you to, or kept you moving forward, and saying, this is actually something that's worth pursuing more? Leili: I think it was a combination of factors. One was that we saw some early ... I think the feedback from our very early customers who are so dear to us, they're still are customers and part our community now. They really, they took a leap of faith. Kevin: It was important for us, I think, to run the business that we wanted. It had to be our business, in our own image, if you know what I mean. It had to be something that we were proud of, and that we wanted to deliver a product that people really like. The purpose wasn't just to have a business to make money, although it has to work. It was to do something that made us happy, and that made other people happy, and that served a purpose and provided something that people needed. I think this ticked a lot of boxes, that we realized that people actually really wanted this. There was a need for it, and it worked, and it made us happy. It made the customers happy, made the cats happy. It sold. It made money as well, which made the business work. It ticks a lot of boxes for us. Leili: In the really early days, we would get reviews from customers and we'd pinch ourselves, like, did we tell them to say that? They would say things like, "I got this collar and it's amazing. It stayed on." We seeded those thoughts in their brain. We really realized that other people were having the same experience as us. That, coupled with curiosity in terms of finding out, how far can we push this? Can we cure this problem for more cats? Really fueled us in those early days, where it wasn't ... Not really a business, it was a hobby, more than anything. That definitely got us over the first hurdles. Kevin: I think realizing that there was also a delivery system to the market, in that it was a worldwide issue, in that cats are universal, and it's a universal problem. The product could be shipped across the world easily in that, there was a big enough market of people, if you looked at a worldwide way. We were only very small, but even in the beginning, we were shipping collars all over the place. Leili: Our first order was to Australia, which is extraordinary, really. Kevin: Yeah. Leili: Yeah. Felix: Yeah. I definitely want to come back around to this testing of the waters and seeing who would buy in a bit. I think one thing that you touched on was just around this, I think Kevin, you mentioned the business that you started had to be in your own image, something that you were proud of. I think this is an important point about how I think there are a couple different types of people that might be introduced into entrepreneurship. One is where it's almost opportunistic. What is the maximizing for a profit, a bottom line, or even top line? You mentioned that for both of you, it was about being happy and something that was maybe intrinsically rewarding. How do you keep this top of mind these days, and make sure that the moves that you make, the decisions you make, the things you commit to for the business are intrinsically valuable to you, that that will keep you happy, versus just an opportunity? Leili: I think it's something we think about all the time. We always remind ourselves that that was our founding principle. In things like our customer service, you could probably approach that in a few ways. There would be a profit or financially-driven approach, where you work out in the intersecting lines of customer satisfaction and return on investment, customer service and refunds, where the perfect sweet spot is. For us, our priority is to make people happy. We design, because that's how we'd want to be treated. We design with our customer service protocols, to achieve customer happiness, not the optimal financial resolution for a request, things like that. Kevin: Yeah. We were talking about it earlier. We come up with ideas, lots of ideas, and we've got short attention spans. There are thousands of ideas that you come up with, and lots of things you can do. I think it's the limiting of what you do. Often, we think, let's not do that. It's overstretching ourselves. Is that really delivering anything better for the customer? You'll go, no, not really. Then, if it's not, then why do it? We do limit our decisions quite often. Leili: Even on a selfish level, we limit the scope of our product range. For example, there are other products that we could offer for cats, but they're not things we use ourselves. They're not things that I feel like we could advocate for with the same passion as we do our existing products. We just don't stock them, or we don't design them, because it wouldn't come from the heart. That would come from a budgetary decision. Yeah, it weaves through everything, really. Kevin: Yeah. We dabbled with selling other people's stuff, didn't we? Leili: Yeah. Kevin: With the idea thinking, we could do with trying to get some more revenue in, so maybe we should just stock other products that we like? That didn't sit well with us, because it wasn't ours. We weren't doing anything better than anybody else. It was just another. Then, to make that profitable, you then had to cut corners a little. You had to skin it all down to make it work. That just didn't seem right somehow. We abandoned that, and stuck to what we do, really. Leili: I think also in the genesis of our products, there was a point, I suppose, when we first started Supakit, we never set out to be a luxury brand. I think that's where we sit at the moment, but that was very much born of every point where we sat down ourselves, or later with a manufacturer, and we had the choice of something amazing or something that was good enough. There's loads of points where an accountant would say, we should have made choices for the cheaper material, the faster process. As cat owners and lovers, we made a decision we'd want for our own pet. The result of that is our products are expensive. It also means they last a long time. There's an alternative business model where we made the opposite decision and probably would sell a lot more volume, and potentially have a high turnover. For us, it's got to be the decision that's right for us. Kevin: Yeah. That comes with the people that we outsource to. We have a manufacturer now, we don't make them ourselves anymore. We have a manufacturer who makes them far better than we ever did. They're amazing. We have a really good relationship with them. We probably could go and have it made cheaper somewhere else, but I don't think their heart would be in it in the same way. It's worth it to us, to keep that manufacturer and just keep that quality really high. The same as our fulfillment as well, in that we use the same fulfillment as other people. We haven't got a great deal of control over it, because obviously, they're a large company and they just do it one way. We supplement that ourselves, to give the customer a better experience, so that there isn't really any quibbles. If anything's wrong, we fix it. That costs money, but it's worth it, because the customer gets better service or gets the best service. That's something we have to add on top of the basic service that a 3PL can give you. I think that's pretty much it. Leili: Yeah, basically, now that we're saying it out loud, it's essentially, we design the service or the product that we think we could be proud of. Then, the price is set around that. That's secondary to the initial development. Felix: During this process where you are exploring other opportunities, you mentioned stocking other third parties or making decisions about what to include in your scope, you mentioned that one of the founding principles is making sure that you both are happy, as well as delivering value to the customer. Do you have guardrails in place to make sure that these things are always respected, or do you ... Not bank on, but just rely on both your intuitions, that you are saying yes to both these questions about your happiness and your customer's happiness? Leili: I think we have oversight over all of the business, though. We're constantly asking these questions. I think it's something we really instill in our team as well. When they join, we give them a manifesto which explains our core principles with the view that they'll bake them into their decision making as well. We're not perfect. We don't always get it right, but we do, I think, know when we've got it wrong, like when we're stocking third parties. It just didn't feel right. I think we are quite receptive to those gut feelings when we have them, and not resistant to changing our minds if it doesn't feel right. Kevin: We're pretty flexible in that way aren't we? I think we're ready to make a change quite quickly, if something's not working. Felix: Yeah. I think that's something also, a skill that is worth exploring, about being agile. More specifically, being able to say, you know what, I invested in this, whether it be time or money, for example, using this example again, of stocking third party products. You invested time into it, you might've invested money into it, energy into it, and then just cutting your losses, I think can be hard for a lot of entrepreneurs, and just saying, let me just try it out some more, stick it out some more, and have this sunk cost associated with the time and effort you put into it. Tell us more about maybe your thought process or how you think about recognizing that you have this intuition, this feeling that this is not the right thing for my business, and being able to act on it. I think that's a much bigger step than just recognizing, but actually being able to act on pulling back or changing direction. Kevin: Yeah. I think a lot that comes, it comes from us in ... We're happy to have lots of ideas, and we're very happy to let those ideas go. There's no pride in it, if you know what I mean. You don't become proud of your idea and then stick at it belligerently, and keep going to make it right, to make it ... I will prove that I was right. Sometimes, an idea comes, and it's a good idea, and you try and it just doesn't work for us. It's a nice idea for somebody else. We have that a lot. Leili: Yeah. Oh, gosh, yeah. Kevin: We always come up with things and go, oh, should we do that? We go, yeah, that's good, probably for somebody else actually, not for us. Then, we'll just write it off. One of us will come up with an idea and the other one ... We'll cross examine it. We go, not sure if that's going to work. We go, yeah, okay, fair enough, and then move on. I think you just don't have to be too proud of your ideas. They come and they go, and it's letting go of them very quickly, and then go, right, that's gone, move on with something else. Leili: I think that comes partially, I'm sure there's other disciplines, but for us, I think that comes very much from our television backgrounds, and that we worked in creative industries, where your ideas would be shut down all day. That's the process. Not all of them, but you would get quite used to pitching things or suggesting ideas, and then immediately emotionally divorcing yourself from them. If you went home hurt at the end of every day, where your ideas have been shut down, you wouldn't last a week. You develop quite a thick skin. I think that's been useful. Kevin: Yeah, totally. Then, you're ready to come up with a new idea. You go, hey, try this for size, and you try on, yeah, it didn't work. Okay, let's try something else. That's how good ideas come, by being brave enough to be able to vocalize them, think them through and then go, oh yeah, that's crazy, doesn't work, you move on. Then, it's finding those diamonds in the dust, if you know what I mean. Then you have to be quite picky and go, yeah, that's got something. When we both agree on something, we try it out a little bit further. Felix: There's an aspect about how in the brainstorming phase or very early days of an idea, that there's a quantity that matters, that there's a volume of ideas that you discover or you present to your team, that makes a big difference. I think there's also this trust that you need to have in yourself, that there will be more ideas. This is not your best idea ever, and just feel like you're stuck to it. Kevin: Yeah. The pot overflows. It's constantly flowing. That's the thing, is that, just because you ... It's an inexhaustible supply of new ideas, and there'll always be new ideas. Leili: Yeah. It sometimes feels like a tsunami of ideas, and it's just trying to keep your head above water, is the issue. Also, I think, it's important not just to generate ideas and quantity, but also to iterate on them. I think I drive our team crazy, but I'm always saying, I just need to let that idea percolate for a bit longer. What that really means is, it just needs to swim around my brain while I go for runs, walks, see friends. Then, it's all the time brewing away, and we're having conversations about things. I think that the iterative process where the initial germ of an idea becomes something richer and deeper, and more important, more intrinsic to the business, is an important process. Felix: Yeah. What I'm hearing is that there's a balance between an idea and action, right? I think there's this belief maybe, in entrepreneurship, where everything needs to be action, needs to be driving at 100 miles per hour, whatever the max speed you can go. What I'm hearing you say is that, there's a timing, there's almost, like you mentioned, there's a brewing or some kind of marination phase, that needs to play out with an idea. Kevin: Yeah. Leili: Yeah. Kevin: That idea ferments over time, and develops into something that takes a different form from what it started. By giving it the time to grow, sometimes, it turns into something different, but it never would've happened unless you have the germ of your idea in the beginning, that you let expand a little bit. I think we were saying earlier that the things that you don't do are equally as important as the things that you do do. When we used to work, we worked on TV, and people would talk about framing up shots. I always said to people when they were saying, how do you frame up a nice shot, and you go, exclude everything you don't want in there. Then, usually, you're left with something pretty good. If you think about it, what's good? You go, what isn't good? What you don't like is as important. What you leave out of the frame is more important sometimes than what you put in it. I think that's for us as well, what we don't do is more important than what we do sometimes. Leili: Yeah. We're so small. Now, we have four people in the team, and we don't have huge aspirations to have 200 team members. We have to be really selective. Our business manager, Becky, is always saying, we don't want to be busy idiots. You don't want to just be around doing for the sake of doing. It's got to be a coherent journey in a set direction, with the option to change direction if it's not working out. We have to be so selective, as to what we do. Felix: Yeah. Not just selective, but then also selective so that you also have this breathing room or margin for error, or margin for being able to think about what you should be doing. What about that? How do you make sure that that's ... Because you have extra space, you don't just fill it up with more things, but just to have some more, I don't know, boundaries or a wider border between what you're working on, and then all the things that are asking to be worked on. Leili: I think that we've cracked it, is the first thing. We have tried to build breathing time, for instance, into our year. We know that for us, August is not a busy month for sales. We try to encourage the team to take their foot off for gas in August, and not start new projects, but finish off things from earlier in the year, the little bits of administration that don't get done when we're all planning our next big launch or whatever. Kevin: Tidy up at the end of the year, and then September is back to school. Then, that feels like, into Q4, and it's all busy, busy. We make rules that we sometimes break, but that we're not going to make any big, major decisions or do anything until a time, until, say, January, till the new year, February, that's when we'll do something new. I think we started, we got better at that, haven't we? Last year, we took on too much. Leili: Yeah. Kevin: Last minute, trying to rush things through. We learned the hard way, because it was pretty spectacular failure, that we spent a lot of energy and money driving something forward that essentially failed, lost us money, and lost a lot of time. Whereas, if we concentrated on what we did have already, we would've probably done better. I think this year, we've learned from that. That's what we're doing. We've put a line in the sand and said, nothing new until spring. No more big ideas, as far as products go, or major changes to products. We'll just concentrate for the next few months, on getting the business in good shape. Felix: Yeah. Kevin: Keeping it on your tracks, building it up and driving it forward, but with what you've got. Felix: Yeah. I don't want to be too overly dramatic, but I could imagine that other than you two and the small team you have around you, everyone else, everything else wants you to do more. How do you make sure that that's respected? It sounds like some of it snuck through last year, but what have you learned about how to keep those boundaries? Leili: Yeah. That is very apt. It did sneak through, because we got overexcited- Kevin: Excited. Leili: ... and we broke our own rules. We just say no a lot, don't we? Kevin: Yeah. Leili: That is the reality of it. It's really hard do. Kevin: It's funny what you said actually, about other people wanting you to do more. That's something that we've found is that, there's a lot of people in this business world that we've found, that want us to grow. Too quickly, and to be too big, if you know what I mean, too fast. For us, that's not the goal. I know it doesn't sound particularly great for business, but it's not the goal, you know what I mean? You could be pushed into doing more than you really want to. The problem with that is, it pushes the business out of the shape that you want it to be, from outside influences. I think we've found that, where there are offers of funding, or there's offers of investment or offers of financial help from governments, all sorts of things, that you think, oh, that's attractive, yeah, we could do that. Then you look at it, you go, do we really want to do it? It's nice to have extra money in investment, all the rest of it, but you just think,, actually it's not the direction we want the business to go into, so let's not. Leili: Yeah. I think we spend a lot of time imagining future Supakit, and wondering if we would want to work there. That's our temperature check, and those sort of ideas. Felix: Yeah. One thing that you mentioned too, was about how ... A big lesson that you learned this past year was around concentrating on what you already have. I think this is a really important point about how I think, when people start business for the first time, they might think about launching with a bunch of different products, or even, they launch with just one product line. They're quickly thinking about what's next. Tell us more about what it means for you and your business to make sure that you are concentrating on what you already have. Kevin: Yeah. I think the reason we got excited very much, like you say, is we were looking for the next thing. You say, okay, we've done that, what's next? What else? How do we build up our repertoire of products? Without realizing that the products that we were selling already have nowhere near maxed out. We really had, because we sell worldwide, we thought, right, the way to build this up is to have extra products to sell to the people that have already bought something from us. Our products are really well made. Leili: They last forever. Kevin: They last a really long time, and they don't get lost very often, which in resale values, people aren't coming back and buying collars every week. The harnesses last a long time. I think we thought, we need to have new products, or develop new things that those people can buy. I don't think we fully realized that, the potential market was much greater than we were selling to. I think that's where we changed direction. We said, let's concentrate our efforts into spreading ourselves out across a wider market, and selling to more people, rather than making more products and selling to the same people. I think that's where the shift went. Leili: It's worth mentioning that we have also existed at quite an interesting time in our niche, because when we first started. We've talked about how collars came about, but we also sell harnesses, which were just a straight up request from our community. It was a niche community, mostly in America, in California, and a little bit in Australia. It wasn't a big market when we created the harness, and we have grown, but we have grown with that market. Now, walking with cats on harnesses is a much bigger phenomenon than it was three years ago, when we developed the harness. We've also been given a bigger playground for that product, which we had by no means fully exploited. I think when we developed our harnesses, we felt like, oh, it's probably not a very big market. We need to develop something else. Fast forward two, three years, I think we had this moment where we were on a super niche specialist, private Facebook group for people who go exploring with their cats. We were looking at the photos, and we were like, I think naively and probably big headedly, we expected to see a lot of our harness. We didn't. We were like, oh my God, there's all these cats out there, and they're not wearing our harness. It's both a shock, but also fantastic opportunity. Kevin: We were gutted and thrilled at the same time. Leili: That the market had suddenly just blossomed, and that there was this whole new group of people to talk to. That had also shaped quite a bit of our decision making, I think. Kevin: Yeah. I think we realized, it's a much bigger world than we thought it was, and that it is slightly arrogant of us to think that we've covered everything now, let's make more stuff. Leili: That's the problem is that, when you are engaged in eCommerce, obviously, you speak to your customers and you probably speak to people on social, and by email, and any other way that you can, but there's an echo chamber effect where you don't know how many people you're not speaking to easily, and it's hard to get a temperature check on that. Yeah, for us, it was really eye-opening, actually, just seeing that that whole market had blossomed while we had had other things on. Kevin: That's what we've been concentrating on. I think that's what we're concentrating on moving forward, is not developing new products, but developing these new markets, to find out how we get in touch with these people, how we can talk to them. Because like Leili says, it's a bit of an echo chamber. The internet, it only bounces back off what you hit. You only get feedback off what you're hitting. You don't know what else you're not hitting. You have to go out there and search for new places. That's what we're doing now. It's a good move. Felix: I think you both summarized up the answer to about, what should you be doing then if you're not creating new products, which is looking for new markets for the same product. I think this is a nuance, veteran entrepreneurship thought that you've had. Tell us more about what the difference is between the effort that you might put into finding more products to sell to your existing customer base, versus finding a different or larger customer base to buy your existing products. Leili: One thing that we recognized is that, in the early days of offering a cat harness that you use to walk your cat, is that we developed a product, I'm really proud of it, I genuinely think it's a fantastic cat harness, but over time, we discovered that it is not sufficient to simply put it on your cat and then walk your cat, who maybe has never been outside before, out of the front door. There is a huge amount of training that has to go in. The early customers we attracted were already harness training their cats. They were tapped into blogs and forums and community leaders. They were getting this information themselves. They've trained their cat, they probably used another harness before us. Then, they had the headaches that other people have experienced, and they came to us. We had creamed off the very easiest customers who were just looking for the physical product. As we've expanded our reach, and we're attracting customers who are just curious about whether they could take their cat outside, we've discovered that it's no longer sufficient to simply offer the physical product. For, I would say, a period of maybe two years, we offered, and still do offer, really enhanced customer support around the process of harness training. Then, in the last year, we've actually taken that to the next level, and created a course that we sell through the Shopify platform, through an integration with LearnWorlds. We went back to our old TV roots and we recorded a full video, interactive training course, so that people can train their cats at home, and then put the harness on them and have success. I think that journey from just having the easiest customers in the world, those lovely early customers, to going through, I would say, a potential pain period of having to do huge amounts of education, and actually undoing some bad training with customers, where it had not gone right, to being able to formalize that into a product, has been a really nice process for us, ultimately. Felix: That's interesting, the observation about how the larger your market, the more it grows beyond your die-hard core, original customers, is that there's just more training involved, because they're just maybe less aware, less aware of the problems or the solutions that are available. While you are creating either the customer support, I definitely want to talk about the course in a bit, but when you're creating customer support, the education that is accessible, when is that most important? When is it most important to introduce them to the education? Is it before they buy, after they buy, when do you find that the education is most valuable? Kevin: I think it's all the way through, really. We found that at the beginning, before people buy, one of the most important things that we found was getting the correct fit for your cat. Cats are all sorts of different shapes and sizes. We make a harness that's very adaptable across three different sizes. Making that choice is really important. We really worked hard on that, at the beginning, because we found that people were either not having success because the harness was a bad fit, which is pretty key to a cat not being comfortable in it, and wanting to walk in it. Also, then you also get a lot of returns as well. People would be returning the product, and trying a different size. We realized that it was such a key thing that we put a lot of energy in before purchase, to educate people in why it needed to be the right fit. Not just think, oh, my cat's medium, I'll get a medium. That, you really do have to measure your cat in different dimensions, and work out which of these harnesses, which of the three harnesses you need. Leili: We also massively manage people's expectations before they buy the harness, which seems a bit counterintuitive, because it's a little bit of a downer. We do a lot of work to explain to people that you can't just pop your cat in a harness and walk out the door, and that you will have to train them. It's not like it looks on Instagram. Set people up for success down the line. If they hear all of that and they really want to go for it, then it's the perfect fertile ground for success. We deliver some of that up front, so that people know what they're getting into. Kevin: Then post-purchase, we follow that up with, especially before the course, quite a lot of detail of how to put your cat into the harness to start with, and what to expect. Because, you can be quite different when you put a cat into a harness for the first time, you put the harness on, they tend to drop to the ground quite quickly, because it's an unusual experience for them. Then, when they do start to move, they start to do these really unusual walks, which you might think was ... A lot of people would take a harness straight off again and think, you can't do that, they don't like it. Then, you realize that it's just like anything. If you start to learn to do something new, you're not very good at it at first, and then you just get better and better. Leili: Yeah. We take people through that process of a gradual introduction. We do that in email, and then we have video content that breaks out from the email. There's also instructions along with the product, about doing everything at your cat's pace, and doing a phased instruction. We also offer advice about, we've come up with whole phrases for things that didn't really exist before. We, I think, invented the concept of a safe leash position to try and get people to understand how to hold the leash when they're walking with their cat. That's all unpacked in email sequences and printed materials with the harness. Felix: Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. Post-purchase, you're hitting them with email or inserts with the package. What about when you are managing their expectations, or helping them choose the right product, where does that present? Is it on the product page? How do you make sure that you're guiding your customer into the right product and the right expectations? Leili: I think, we start that right at the beginning. Very often, people come to us through social. We work really hard to show the reality of training, or introductions, or very modest cat walking as well. Although, if you look at our Instagram, you'll see cats on mountains. We also celebrate cats who sit on their balcony, or in their back garden, or just on their back doorstep, and try to manage people's expectations about what their cat will and won't achieve. Then, we've got videos that just say it straight out, your cat might be the next canyon adventurer, but they might just want to sit on the back doorstep, and either is cool. If people hear that and say, no, that's not cool with me, then they probably won't end up being our customers. If they nod along and think, actually, I want what's best for my cat, and if that's what my cat is happy with, then that's fine by me. Then, those are the people that our message resonates with, and end up becoming our customers. Kevin: We put a lot of stuff on the product page as well. It's a lot of sign posting, to really, really get home the idea that the choice is an important choice, of which size you buy. I think that's been pretty fun. We've built that, and we built it, and we built it. We started off being subtle, and then we're not subtle in the slightest. Now, we realized that the stronger that messaging is, the happier the customer is, because they want a good result, obviously. They also don't want to return a product and buy another one, they want to get it right first time. It's good for them. I think that at the beginning, we were probably too subtle thinking, we don't want to preach to people, we don't want to keep hammering on with this. Now, we do. Every opportunity we get, pretty much, we'll make sure that people have considered it before they check out. Felix: Now, let's talk about the course. At what point did you recognize or realize that this was a important thing to add to the business? Leili: I think it came through customer service. We discovered people asking for help with introductions, that would get messages like, I put the harness on my cat, but they don't like it, what do I do now? We would be providing advice around that. We built blog posts with a process that we would suggest for an introduction. Also around this time, we realized that we needed to level up our skills, to be able to provide this advice. I went off and did a course in feline behavior. My original degree was in biology. It was a additional feline behavior qualification, so that we weren't just ... We'd developed a lot of on-the-job experience, but also wanted that to be built on a bedrock of very rigorous scientific principles. Yeah, we started offering this customer advice, but we realized we were doing it only for the customers who would reach out to customer service. They would get, I think, an amazing experience, where email, sometimes for weeks on end, with advice and feedback, and look at pictures or videos. I guess we felt like it was a shame that not everyone could have that level of service. Kevin: Because you know that for every person that gets in touch and wants to be in touch with customer service, and gets that service, there's probably three or four that haven't bothered, and that didn't feel like they could ask, and haven't had a good service. You think, it would be great to enrich those customers as much as the ones that reach out. We also were doing it piecemeal, which is not very effective, not very efficient, in that you're delivering a small piece of information here, and a small piece of information here, but they didn't necessarily tie up. You're fighting fires, as opposed to creating a fire break. What you want to do is start again, and go right from the beginning, if you start well, you'll have a really good progression through this. We wanted to get something that was a bit more of a holistic approach, right from the beginning, right through to the end, to tie up all these little nuggets of information, small videos and bits of information that we put together in charts and stuff. We said, let's put it all together in one strong course. Felix: Was it something that was easy to put together, given your experience, and you needed some place to put it down, or what was the process behind creating it? Or maybe first, how large this course? Talk to us about the process behind creating it. Leili: It was quite a lot of work. It felt great to do, because it was like you say, just getting it down formally, for the first time. It's quite a detailed course. It has six modules, and actually, we debated a lot about. It includes two skills that actually are not directly related to harness training, which is recall training your cat, and then getting them happy in a safe space, like a carrier or a backpack, before you even start harness training. Which, I know is frustrating, because you want to get on with the harness training, but it does mean by the time people ... That they can interlace the training and do it all at the same time. It means that by the time we're sending our cat graduates across the threshold, out on their first trip outside, that they've got all of the range of skills they need to have a rewarding and safe and fun experience. It's really fundamental training. We built it through a convergence of two things. One was the animal behavior processes of counter conditioning and desensitization to the harness, so that your cat will build positive associations of the harness, and isn't afraid of it. Then, we also pulled in basically every question we ever got, in customer service, so that we were actually targeting the real-world questions that wouldn't otherwise get covered. It was a bit of a pincer maneuver. Kevin: Yeah. I think the main thing, it is quite a long course, and there's quite a lot of content in it, because it moves quite slowly, which is the way that you have to move when you're training any animal. It's small increments. If you rush it, you go too fast, and you miss it. Then they fall off the wayside. I think it's a very small, tight detail all the way through, which makes it quite a heavy course. Yeah, there's lots in it, but it's not difficult, if you know what I mean. We kept working on it and working on it, and making it more and more detailed, I think. Leili: It really grew of our experiences in customer service, that we were aware that there are principles that, if you apply them to this question, will give you the right answer. If you learn how to read a cat's body language, you'll know when they're happy and when they're not, so you'll know how your training is going. We were doing this behind the scenes, and then we were doing the math, and then delivering the answer to the customer, and what the course does is let the customer do the math themselves. They learn to read their own cat, so they know how to proceed. Yeah, it teaches them to fish, I guess, is the analogy. Felix: Yeah. I think one of the big questions for anyone that is looking at creating digital content, like a course, for example, is, what should I put in there? I think you touched on a really important gold mine for you, is if you have a business already, you have some way to find out, what are the questions everyone's asking, and maybe the frequency of questions, or important questions people are asking. It sounds like a lot of the course is built around that, just answering the questions that you saw often? Leili: Totally. That was essentially how the framework of the course is built. Then, the coloring in inside is just the behavioral stuff. Yeah, because we'd spent, by that point, two, three years answering those questions, it was really helpful. We had a good grasp on where people got confused, and where people drop off in training as well. Kevin: The sticking points, isn't there. Leili: Yeah. Kevin: Some people can't get past a certain point, and they're going great until they get to this point. They go, I just can't get past this point. Or, the cat will suddenly not want to be in their harness anymore. You go, it was doing fine, why did it suddenly stop? There's usually a really good reason for that, and it's quite simple, and you work backwards, and you can find it. You're just getting that framework, getting that timeline. Leili: The other thing is that, our course can't ... Because cats, like humans, they have personalities, and they're unique, and they have their own life experiences. There are still questions that are not covered, that are specific to one cat's personal experience. Then, we draw on community meeting places, whether it's our forum or private Facebook group, so that people can share their experiences of how they trained their three-legged cat with somebody else who's in that same situation. There's also our community teaching each other, which is a lovely thing to see. Kevin: Yeah, that's great. Felix: With the courses, are these mostly existing customers that are buying, or are there non-existing customers that bought the harness, buying it as well? Leili: What's been really lovely to see is that, a lot of people are buying both at the same time, which, it's the ideal, and definitely sets the odds in their favor for the absolute perfect journey with the harness. Kevin: Because it's a new course that we've introduced after the harness. The harness has been on sale for a few years, before the course. We are getting previous customers that have bought the harness, and then have come back and bought the course. We've had really good feedback from them, that it's really improved their experience with the product, which is great. That's been lovely. Going forward, I guess in time, hoping that people buy it at the same time, but yeah, I'm sure there'll be a certain amount of previous customers that will buy. Leili: Yeah. Felix: What was the process for marketing a course like this? Because it is pretty niche, where customers maybe could all benefit from it, but might not be necessarily seeking it out. What's your process for building awareness and marketing a course? Kevin: That's a work in progress to be totally honest. Leili: Our marketing manager built a really strong influencer campaign. It's how most of our community are finding the idea or getting the idea of walking with their cats, if they're seeing other people doing it and thinking, I'd love to try that with my cat. We teamed up with, we informally call, I don't think they know they're called this, but we rallied the friends of Supakit, which are the influencers that have been instrumental to our company for a very long time, who're super loyal contributors, and we have a great relationship with them. We set the Bat Signal out to the friends of Supakit, and they posted content around the launch. They were really excited to do so, too, because their Instagram DMs, for example, are just full of people ... They were in the same situation we were. People would be reaching out all the time, asking them for advice. In an Instagram DM, they were not capable of delivering the nuance and detail that they wanted to, to give their community the right level of introduction. For them to be able to send their community somewhere, where they could trust that they were going to get really reputable advice, was great for them, and it obviously worked for us. That was really successful, and it's been a really quite organic launch to the product, which has been nice to see. Felix: Yeah. Want to talk a little bit more about marketing, maybe specifically around the harness and collar products themselves, and one thing you had mentioned to us was that, the Facebook and Instagram visual marketing, you would imagine that a product like this would do very well. It was actually too engaging, the content you were putting out there was too engaging. Tell us more about why this was an issue. Leili: I would say our business started on Instagram. When we finally were at a point where we were big enough, and we were still at the kitchen table, we started to think about pay-per-click marketing advertising. It was natural that the first thing that we would try was Facebook and Instagram. That was the start of a really long road of ... We learned a lot, but to cut a long story short, we were never able to reliably achieve profitability with our pay-per-click on Instagram, Facebook. We ran it ourselves for two years, and we then got an agency to run it. They did a good job, and then we took it back, and we tried again. Ultimately, the problem that we continually ran into was that our product is super niche, super, super niche, but conversely, cats and all of our imagery, our clickbait, we would get a lot of interest and engagement on our ads, but translating that into sales, actually finding the people that we needed to be speaking to, we just weren't able to achieve. Kevin: No. I think- Leili: It just didn't feel right. We were going back to it and back to it. Now, I feel like we've made our peace with it. We really did bottom it out. Yeah, it was a strange issue to have. Kevin: Yeah, we had to send it out, didn't we, to realize that we weren't doing something wrong. We kept thinking, surely we're doing something wrong here. We sent it, and the company that we spoke to, they were really buzzed to be doing this. They're like, great, you mean pictures of cats? Everybody loves pictures of cats. We've got lots of great material. Who doesn't want to be served that sort of material? I think they thought it was going to be much easier than it was. They also couldn't understand why they weren't getting the results that they thought they were going to do. Between us, when we started analyzing, after about six months of doing it with them, we analyzed all the results. We got to the conclusion that we were lost in a sea of cat pictures. There's so much material out there, that finding us in it is really tricky. We've had a different, totally, a bit of a different approach really, to doing that. Then we brought it back again, we tried it again, really, really worked on the funnel, really had a great plan. We were confident. We were sure we nailed it by this point. That didn't work either. Leili: To be entirely clear, we did end up developing a fully pay-per-click funnel that worked. It did find our people, and they did buy, but the cost of acquisition was prohibitively expensive. At that point, we tried it every which way. Yeah, we put it to bed. Never say never. There might be times where we are lured back again in the future, but then conversely, surprisingly, Google Shopping does really well for us. It isn't how I would've predicted, but you have to go with the numbers. Felix: Yeah. I think this is an important point about, especially when you're a bootstrap or much smaller, beginning startup is that, engagement is not really the right metric to focus on. Yes, you can get a bunch of cheap and highly engaged people to come, but a lot of them are just here for the content itself, and not actually ready or looking to buy, which is probably why Google Shopping worked out for you, especially when it's a niche product, people probably have a specific problem they're trying to solve. Tell us more about that. Once you have recognized that, yes, you were getting lots of engagement on a platform, but not converting into sales. What was your approach to launch campaigns on Google Shopping? Leili: That, we actually have always run in parallel. Fortunately, because otherwise we might have been more despairing with pay-per-click, but we knew there were channels that did work for us. Yeah, we run shopping campaigns in our five key territories, and all of those have worked really nicely. We also do some more tech space ads. Far and away, the shopping campaigns are the most effective, and we have separate feeds set up for each of them. They've been really instrumental to our business. I think, like you say, somebody that goes to Google and searches in very specific search terms, has already been on a lot of the journey before. We know from looking at our attribution pathways, they've touched us on social. The pay-per-click is not the whole story, but it is that final hurdle that brings them to our store. They've gone and researched collars or harnesses, and then they're finally coming to us. Yeah, that's worked really nicely. Originally, I think when we started on Google Shopping, I may be wrong, but we certainly weren't aware of much, Google AI around it. We were really manually managing those campaigns. About 18 months ago, the smart shopping campaigns outperformed our painstakingly, manually gardened ones. We've switched everything onto smart campaigns, which is a whole job off our backs. Does make me feel a little bit squiggly about the rise of machines, but I'm prepared to leave that be for the time being, and the results speak for themselves. They do well. Kevin: Yeah. I think that you're right, it isn't everything. Using the AI and doing the campaigns very manually, it rides on the back of a lot of organic traffic. A lot of the work we do, we have organic traffic and people find us that way. The Google ad is the way that gets somebody over the line to buy, not necessarily the way ... It isn't the thing that brings them in the first place. I think it shares a lot of that, doesn't it? Leili: Yeah, it's part of the ecosystem. Kevin: Yeah. Felix: Makes sense. Supakit.co is the website. We've talked a lot about saying no to more things and how that's had such a big impact on the focus and the success of the business in the direction that you want. Tell us more about maybe something that is the most exciting thing that you and your team have said yes to, that maybe you can share publicly. Leili: I don't want to bang on about the courses, but for me, that's felt like the great new seam of exciting stuff that we've unlocked, and that the early feedback is positive enough for us to double down and get really excited about that. Just because our founding ethos was helping out humans and their cats. I think we've realized that you can go so far with a product, but actually, there's this whole world of training to be unlocked, and being able to do that through Shopify, integrating those together has been really exciting. That's what we're buzzed about at the moment, is thinking about what other areas we can help people in. Kevin: Yeah. Through that digital medium as well. A digital product that isn't a physical product, I think it's very exciting for us as well, because it has its advantages. Like you say, you can deliver loads of content in that way and help. I think that's something that's really exciting. I think it ties in with us not wanting to make things for making things. Keep creating physical products, only if people want them and need them. If you can make a digital product that really helps as well, it ticks a lot of boxes for us. Leili: It also, I think, on just a personal level, is reminding us of the excitement of the early days of physical products in Supakit, in that, we produced our course ourselves. It's like, we're back to the kitchen table and now we're thinking, I really enjoy that process of strategy. Okay, we've done something at the kitchen table, how do we scale that? How do we make it repeatable? Do we bring people in, who do we partner with? We're getting to have all those fun conversations again, which feels like a little second honeymoon. Kevin: Yeah. It's nice. Felix: Awesome, exciting stuff. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story and advice, Leili and Kevin. Kevin: You're welcome. Leili: Thank you. It's been great.