Hey everyone, we're super excited to announce the launch of our slack community for D two C pod. This is a space exclusively for D two C founders and operators to connect, share ideas, ask questions and support each other. You'll be able to engage with the best minds and operators and consumer. And currently we're on a waitlist and it will open up the community once we reach 150 members. So apply using the link in the description and we hope to see you on slack. So before we kick off today's recording, I've got one more for you. Keeping up your momentum this year starts with the right selling tools. And if you're looking to increase revenue, grow faster, build more pipeline and close more deals, check out the all new sales hub from HubSpot.

You'll be able to manage your whole sales process. Plus my favorite part, the reporting. It's super intuitive, powerful and customizable. Plus, the whole thing is powered by AI, so your teams can spend less time on tedious, time consuming stuff and more time on developing relationships. Also, no one likes a clunky platform that takes months to onboard onto. But getting set up on saleshub is really quick and easy. It's free to get started. The pricing will scale with your business, and with more than 1300 integrations and add ons, you can tune it to your exact needs.

Visit HubSpot.com sales to start selling with sales hub what is going on? DTC pod today we are joined by Rob Schutz. Today's conversation is going to be really epic because Rob has served across D two C in a variety of growth and co founder related roles. He was the vp of growth at Barkbox before joining as co founder and chief growth, the officer at Roe, and now he is the founder of Snag. So, Rob, you've kind of had a lot of experience and success over some of the most popular brands in the d to C space. So why don't maybe we start with your personal background and kind of how you got involved with Barkbox, which is known as bark these days. But yeah, why don't you just kick us off there?

Awesome. Yeah, thanks for having me, Blaine, everyone, it's awesome to awesome to be on the pod. Yeah. Excited to chat. DTC. I mean, when I kind of got my feet wet in this space, there wasn't really like a DTC mafia, if you will. I got my start, actually started in healthcare consulting out of college. I did that for about five years and we'd work with like, big hospitals and I would help sell them systems and it was a very long sales cycle and became very boring.

And I think that's actually what pushed me more into like d two C is like it takes a year to sell a deal versus as you learn more about the Internet and you get into this world, it's like, I could spin something up today and see someone buy it later today. Like, that's pretty addicting when you come from a world of long sale cycles. So I wound up starting a daily deal company that was my first foray into the marketing world. When daily deals were hot, Groupon was like riding high. Living social launched. Groupon like turned down a $5 billion acquisition offer from Google. And I started like a little tiny deal site. It was called what's the deal? We get funding from my parents who I begged for twenty k.

And it was really just figuring out the Internet. It was like Newsfeed ads weren't live yet. We had to put a lot of sweat in to figure out how to grow. And so we did a lot of non traditional growth on the deal side to build up our list. And then the deal space got super hot. Groupon said, hey, we're going to go public. And I really didn't know what I was doing. Like, I had been in healthcare and I was like, okay, I'm kind of doing this deals thing.

But then things got really like hot to a point. I was like, I don't know what I'm supposed to do. Like am I supposed to hire more people? Am I supposed to like meet investors? That's when I got some good advice and I wound up selling the company kind of at the peak, which was really, really fortunate. I sold to a competitor in New York and kind of worked there for a year and then did a bunch of different projects, kind of thinking I was the smart entrepreneur that could like build all sorts of cool stuff that people had won that they did not, and then got married. I was like, I need to get a job. And so I wound up, you know, re, I would say, reformatting my experience and resume to be more marketing centric. I was a general asset at the deal website. You know, it was like four of us, you have to do whatever.