Have you ever felt marginalized as a cat person? The DTC pet space is booming, with fresh and nutritious dog food options that look better than some menu items at Sweetgreen. Cats, however, have been notoriously left out of the special place dogs have in the mainstream - and they like it that way. Sick of cats being the underdogs, Matt Michaelson created Smalls to bring healthy, real food to our smarter (and harder to please) furry friends.

We talked to Matt about his journey as a young entrepreneur, through the DTC growth hacker world, to starting something on his own for the snarky, aloof outsiders in us all.

“It was always part of the family culture to look at the world through numbers and look at the world through money.”

Matt grew up in Portland, Oregon, with parents who empowered him to see life through a business lens. Family dinners were spent discussing the efficiency of the restaurant, from staffing to traffic flow. At 15 he was looking at Excel models with his dad, seeing how money moved around (what kid wouldn’t want a peek at that?). With the mindset that bending the rules yields the best results which most disruptive founders share, Matt’s earliest scheme involved offering private lessons under the table to patrons of the sailing school where he worked as a teenager.

His first stab at an entrepreneurial venture was in college, where he was in the Northeastern University entrepreneurship program. The highly institutional “Boston Mindset” didn’t exactly spark Matt’s joy, so he started up an eCommerce business.

“There were these people who were building bikes out of bamboo and selling them for heaps of money to hip cyclists in the United States, but they weren’t really building a brand,” Matt said. “So I started buying a bunch of bikes, shipping them over and had a little eCommerce business selling these frames.”

Matt’s meant-to-be-a-founder ambition and wit didn’t always jive with his entrepreneurship co-op at Northeastern, and he was actually pseudo-fired from several placements during the program (*ahem* WeWork). Thanks to his tenacity, Matt met the founder of period-underwear startup Thinx (also previously featured on RADICHE) through a mutual connection at the MassChallenge accelerator, and pitched himself as an “unskilled general smart person with the energy to make stuff happen.” He ended up becoming Thinx’s second employee, an unpaid intern, and left two and a half years later as Head of Growth, having taken the company from zero to $30 million in revenue.

While at Thinx, Matt redefined their eCommerce strategy and made them one of the first brands to drive traffic to press articles versus a shop page. Smart! When it comes to digital marketing, he defines it as “a fun game. It was like a casino, but also an opportunity to beat the system.”

Matt became very skilled at predicting how much money would come out of ad spend and was able to find an ROI-positive strategy by breaking the rules and experimenting.

The Aha Moment

“I went into this internet wormhole like any entrepreneur, on page 10 of google search looking at weird blogs that haven’t been redesigned since 1999, and subreddits you’ve never heard of. I discovered this whole world of people who were feeding their pets home-cooked food, and raving about the difference it made.”

After leaving Thinx and freelancing for a few years, Matt was frustrated with the lack of opportunity to expand his skills once he moved from growth hacking to more general consulting. He knew it was finally time to dig in on starting something of his own. In late 2015 Matt barked up the right tree and began to consider the pet space - something ripe for eCommerce purrfection with a high lifetime value customer.

“When you look at the pet industry, there are whole micro-industries and micro-influencers for homemade pet food. Flags start going up - these products are genuinely healthier.”

Matt realized that this was the yard where he was going to play, and he immediately had his family switch to feeding their pets home-cooked food. “I don’t think I'm the right founder to start the millennial brand for ‘X’; I needed something that I could feel good about bringing into the world, outside of it being better designed and cool looking. With food you could see how it really made a difference for people,” Matt said.

Matt worked with a recipe developer who was selling home-cooking recipes to people with sick pets and began sending his batches to friends with both cats and dogs. He got positive feedback from their first testers, with previously incurable health issues disappearing in several pets. Having grown up with both cats and dogs, Matt’s decision to focus on cats came from a place of appreciation for their misfit attitude, critical thinking, and independence.

“Dogs tend to get all the love in the startup world, and societally we consider them the norm. I always liked being a nonconformist, and an outlier,” Matt said. “It just felt right to go the other direction.”

The Name

“The first kitchen we were working out of was in the Marcy Projects which is where Jay-Z and Biggie Smalls came up, and we also see cats as our smalls. They’re the little small weirdos that inspire our inner weirdo to come out more. So ‘Smalls’ felt like it hit those two things.” Matt said.

On Finding a Cofounder

From his experience in the startup world, Matt wanted a cofounder that he knew and trusted. He brought on Calvin Bohn, a childhood friend from Portland who would often help bounce ideas around and join in on brainstorming sessions.

“Calvin is someone who whenever we had disagreements we were great at conflict resolution. Our responsibilities started with me being on the demand side and him being supply side. I brought the customer and he brought the product - he even cooked it for a while!”

Over time Matt’s role has transitioned to managing people and being a sounding board, as many founders do.

Challenges

With an eye on customer economics, Matt realized that Smalls was initially missing out on a key opportunity to be more efficient. At first, the company sold just a frozen wet food option, and while 20% of their customers exclusively fed that food, the rest were still buying dry food from another source. Smalls decided to hit “paws” on any big marketing initiatives while they developed the right product mix.

“We went out and developed all these dry food products and now we have a full range of budget-friendliness, dry food, and wet food,” Matt said.

When talking about future product line expansions, Smalls wants to lean into cats’ behavior and evolution of feeding in the wild, where cats are hunters and will eat 6-12 small meals a day.

“We’re likely to come out with some toys that you can put dry food in and hide around the house so cats can go and hunt for their food throughout the day, stimulating their hunter nature,” Matt said.

For now, Matt is focused on building a brand that celebrates and dignifies the feline way of life.

“I don't think anyone has really elevated cats or explored the idea of what cats stand for. You see all these kitschy things, but there is something really inspiring about cats. If Smalls can inspire you to celebrate your weirdness a little bit more and take the path less traveled, that's a cool impact to have.”

The Advice

From delivering baggies of cat food in a Zipcar to raising over $5 million in venture funding, Matt knows the bumps in the path to growing a business in the pet space. See his advice below:

Be exploratory and open-minded about what your product should be.
Hire a small team of quality people with experience in your industry or business model.
Starting your own company is supposed to be hard, so don’t get discouraged or be afraid to reset!

Want the best food for your best friend? Visit Smalls and use the code “Radiche” for 50% off.

Photo courtesy of Smalls.

Written by Kendall Embs.