On this episode of Honest Ecommerce, we have Rob Schutz. Rob is the founder of Snagged.com + co-founder of DTC health platform, Ro. We talk about establishing trust with high-value domain names, balancing confidence with product market challenges, meeting co-founders with complementary skills, and so much more!
Rob Schutz is the founder of Snagged, where he helps entrepreneurs, startups and established businesses acquire premium domain names.
Rob is also co-founder of Ro, the DTC health platform, and employee #7 + former VP of Growth at Bark, where he helped grow the company from $0 to a $100M in run rate. He started his career in healthcare consulting, helping hospitals transition to digital EMRs.
Rob then started a daily deal company called What’s the Deal that he sold to kgb, where he transitioned to his career in marketing and user acquisition.
To date, Rob has snagged domains for Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Lyft co-founder John Zimmer, Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan, ex-Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, Pinterest co-founder Ben Silberman, Capser co-founder Philip Krim, and many more.
In This Conversation We Discuss:
Resources:
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Rob Schutz
You don't want to spend so much money out of the gate before you even know if you have something. Because great marketing, great domain name, great brand, whatever, that doesn't fix a product market fit challenge.
Chase Clymer
Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game.
On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating real results.
I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.
Let's get on with the show.
Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce.
Today I'm welcoming to the show an amazing gentleman. You've got maybe the best resume I've had on the show quite so far. So let's just read these off before I let people know your name.
You are one of the early members or team members over at Bark. You then were one of the co-founders of Roman, which then shortened the name to Ro. And now you're obviously launching your new endeavor Snagged. Rob Schutz, welcome to the show.
Rob Schutz
Thanks for having me, Chase. Appreciate it.
Chase Clymer
Oh, I'm excited. So how does one just jump to the big leagues and start working at some of these crazy startups that have such explosive growth? What were you doing before you got that opportunity at Bark?
Rob Schutz
Certainly didn't feel like a jump to the big leagues at the time. Hindsight 2020 here. But no, it was very fortunate.
Prior to jumping into the startup world, I started my own. So I was doing healthcare technology consulting for many years, for about five years out of school. And then that got very boring and I was kind of looking for a way to get more involved in the startup marketing space.
And I kind of fell into the daily deals world back when those were a thing, Groupon and LivingSocial were running rampant. And I was like, we can, I can do that. I can go talk door to door with a spa owner.
And so I spun up a daily deal website called What's the Deal. We were based out of Washington, D.C. and ran that for a few years. That was kind of my initial foray into marketing and kind of like the digital landscape.
I was able to parlay that into an acquisition from a competitor and then from there kind of had to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up.
I wasted a bunch of time and money on projects that did not work. I was like, “I should probably go get a job.”
I wound up meeting the co-founders of Bark when it was still... I think it was a 4 or 5 person company at that time. I met them at a career fair. And as a big dog lover, I was like, “I should get involved with this.”
So yeah, kind of hit it off and was the first marketing hire there and got the opportunity to really get a view at the ground floor of kind of just this emerging growth marketing performance space as it really kicked off.
Chase Clymer
What year was this?
Rob Schutz
It was 2012 when I joined Bark.
Chase Clymer
So what, as the VP of Growth, what were the acquisition channels back then? What was the landscape like?
Rob Schutz
Yeah. Well, I didn't join as VP of Growth. I joined as a marketing manager or user acquisition manager, I think is what negotiated my title. They're like, “We don't care. Just figure it out.”
Chase Clymer
When the team is smaller than a pizza, you can pick your title.
Rob Schutz
That's right. I mean, at the time, there was paid search, there was Facebook, right hand rail. Do you remember that? That's where the party was at for a while, right hand rail.
Chase Clymer
I do remember that.
Rob Schutz
You know, Bark was also… It's treats and toys for dogs. There was a lot of great creative and video around dogs. Pictures and videos of dogs are one of the big reasons why I took that job. It's like, “That's what the internet is looking at anyway. Now we can put a CTA against it.”
But I remember being in my seat the day that newsfeed ads launched on Facebook and I started poking around with that. That was one of the big unlocks early on. Being very early to that type of channel that had so many people on it, but not a lot of advertisers and so the costs there were just very, very reasonable.
I got the opportunity to push that pretty hard before I mistakenly went on to see if I could explore and find other channels like Facebook, only to come back years later realizing I probably should just spend all of my time and money on that channel versus looking for others.
But yeah, it was kind of Wild West. We also had all sorts of wacky marketing channels, things you can do when you have dogs as your subject matter.
We had an affiliate group we called the Bark Pack, which was like 500 dogs on Instagram that had big followings, they had no idea how to monetize it. I basically just gave them all affiliate codes and said, “Every time you get a BarkBox, just post it and use #BarkBoxDay.”
And so all of a sudden, we were able to kind of flood the zone with all these dogs showing up at people's feeds on Instagram talking about BarkBox.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing. I definitely think that maybe a hack is if your product lends itself to acute subject matter, it's a little bit of a growth hack.
Rob Schutz
That's true. Babies and dogs have a built-in inherent advantage there.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing.
Now, with BarkBox, how long were you there?
Rob Schutz
I was at Bark for about 5 years. We actually had a policy work. We were there for 5 years, we got a 3-month paid sabbatical. So I remember coming up on that and I was really excited to not work. And that was around the time we were actually having our second child, my son, we bought a house and moved to New Jersey. So I was pretty excited about that sabbatical.
That's right around the time I also started talking about starting a company with Z and Saman, who became my two co-owners at Ro. So I wound up not taking that sabbatical and just jumping right over to Ro, which, in retrospect, was good. But at the time, boy, did I want that break
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
So let's talk about where you are working for a rocket ship, let's be real. It had some pretty crazy growth.
Where did you come up with this idea? Where did you and co-founders kind of stumble upon the idea of what you wanted to do with Ro?
Rob Schutz
Yeah. Z... Saman, I had actually met through Bark. He was doing some early work through a venture studio called PreHype that was connected to Bark. He introduced me to Z, Zechariah Raitano, and we all kind of just really liked each other and worked with each other.
And I was very excited because while I had some good experience on the marketing side, I didn't know how to raise money from investors. I didn't know how to build a technical product. I didn't know how to talk to doctors.
They have very complimentary skills. We all have very complimentary skills. We met because they were incubating products and they would always come down to my desk at Bark and be like, “How do you run a Facebook ad? How do you optimize conversion?”
And so it was very clear to me early on that like…I didn't even really care exactly what type of business it was, but I wanted to work with these two guys because of the complementary skills.
And they're both very successful in their own right. Saman is a co-founder of a company called Managed by Q, which is a smart office cleaning company based out of New York that was eventually acquired by WeWork. Z had a company that went through Y Combinator and had a lot of really good contacts and was incredibly smart. So again, I knew this was a good complementary founding team.
They kind of had been taking around ideas in healthcare, partially because Z has a pretty powerful story around his challenges of being a really young man and dealing with erectile dysfunction, which is not a typical story, but he's very open about it.
His dad is a sexual health doctor that is very well known nationally and internationally. And so, as we started talking about this, I was like, “Man, if you're willing to talk about it, if you let me put you on TV and you tell your story, this becomes pretty compelling.”
And he was like, “I will do it, but you have to promise me that it works.” And I was like, “Oh yeah, it'll definitely work.”
And he followed through and we were able to get things off the ground, but we had toyed with different ideas around men's health, if it was starting with hair loss, starting with erectile dysfunction, starting with smoking cessation, whatever it was.
But we settled on ED because of Z's story, but also because we really liked the idea of taboo busting and taking this thing that had traditionally kind of been a snake oil billboard by the side of the road, behind the counter at 7-Eleven type of thing, and adding like a lot of trust with well-known doctors and the best, most qualified neurologists in the world kind of talking about these treatments.
And so that was really exciting. And for me, I felt particularly lucky because I found these folks who added all these complementary skills and had complementary knowledge in areas that I just didn't in the past. So it was really exciting to kick it off.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing.
Now, obviously, you had your co-founder that would star in these ads. But what was that flywheel… Or how did you first start to acquire these customers? Was it the same toolbox that you used over at Bark, which was just lean as heavily into Facebook? Maybe it might have been turning into Meta at this point?
Rob Schutz
Yeah. Who knows? Who knows when that transition began? But yeah, there were a lot of similarities early on where I had built out this playbook at Bark and got a chance to really put significant money and resources against all of the major channels.
And then kind of took that over on the roadside where it was clear out of the gate. We were going to run a similar playbook as much as we could and see what worked.
Interesting thing, like say one, this was not like a new product, especially for ED. It was one of the most popular profitable drugs of all time. It was more about whether people would adopt this method of talking to a doctor online and answer questions and to save an appropriate gift, get something shipped to your door.
So it wasn't completely new. So we had conviction that it would likely work, but it was a question of channel fit.
And then two, you know, I knew where we would start in terms of channels, like, “Let's get search running, let's get paid social running, let's get set up with email.” What we didn't anticipate was how difficult that would be right out of the gate. The platforms did not know what to do with us.
Google was like, ED, erectile dysfunction, viagra, all of the spammy keywords basically are things that were relevant to us. And we got kicked off their platform many times before we got a chance to actually sit down with the reps and discuss with them and bring doctors and talk about the legitimacy of what we were building.
We weren't a pharmacy, we weren't a health system, we weren't a doctor. They didn't know what category we'd even fit in. And the same was true with Meta. We got shut down there all the time and it was really a struggle to get reps on the phone and actually explain this stuff.
But once we got humming there, there was good traction, there was opportunity to really scale. And we also benefited early on from a lot of press and just kind of organic and people talking about this, people telling their friends, not necessarily like a referral program, tell your friends, but you tell a buddy and they would wind up coming to the site.
So we saw good success out of the gate. But then once we unlocked those scalable channels and got them to be more consistent, we really started to see the growth.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. And obviously, you said this was just kind of not a new product, but you were approaching it in a new way.
Rob Schutz
Yeah.
Chase Clymer
How often do you see outside of your portfolio of companies that you've worked with or helped build, do you see that sort of differentiation being enough for a founder to build a successful business?
Rob Schutz
I think that if there's a proven fit from a product market perspective, and you're seeing a history of people who are willing to pay for a product or service, it certainly builds conviction around, “Will this work or will this not work?” But it doesn't mean that it will always work.
I'm trying to come up with good examples of where it does not.
But I think as a founder, you're always trying to figure out, in terms of this idea, “Do people want it? Will they buy it?” All the different variables that go into “Will someone actually come to your website and pay you money for your product and service?”
That does make you feel a little bit more confident than, “Hey, from a desire standpoint and from an intent standpoint, people do want this thing.” You can reduce that on your priority list of things you need to spend all of your time on and focus on conversion funnel, messaging, the product experience, etc. Because you need all those things to work in order to build a successful company.
Chase Clymer
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Chase Clymer
Speaking of the experience, Telehealth was very, very new when you guys were building this out. Can you talk about the technology hurdles and the limitations you're running up against with privacy and just that whole healthcare giant that you're battling against to try to build this out as a seamless experience for your customers?
Rob Schutz
Totally. Yeah.That was probably one of the biggest transitions coming from Ecommerce into this healthcare world was, all of a sudden, there's just so much more regulatory scrutiny. There's the FDA, there's 50 individual states that are certifying pharmacies, you have to get licensed instead.50 states where you have to have doctors that are licensed.
There's a lot of regulatory red tape that you need to work through, and I actually think about it similarly, Ecommerce in the sense of when we started, when Barks started, there wasn't a Shopify platform where you can just like kind of plug in and get going and everyone's kind of do the same thing to build a lot of your own tooling from scratch.
A lot of folks that got started in the 2010 to 2014 range, had to build their own technology. Same is very true on the roadside. There weren't platforms that let you seamlessly tap into a national physician network or a national pharmacy or fulfillment center. There was no true pill.
So we had to build all that ourselves. Our very first office in New York was half office space and the back half was a pharmacy. And it had to get licensed. We had to have pharmacists in there, and had to be locked. There were all sorts of different things. And so we had to physically build out the pharmacy infrastructure across the country.
I think it got up to 10 different physical pharmacy locations at one point that we had to build out.
But yeah, a lot of structural pieces that had to be built from scratch. Now I think there are more built-in white label tools that people can use but in the early days, there's just not enough demand where people were going to go out and kind of build the pitchforks and shovels the same way that they do once it's an established industry.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
And obviously, Ro has grown and done some crazy things there.
But now you're kind of... You've moved on from there and you're over working on your third venture. Let's talk a bit about Snagged.
Rob Schutz
Yeah, I would love to. Snagged is a bit of a different flavor of venture. It is not a VC-backed startup that has aspirations of IPO. This is a little bit more of a… kind of a side project that's grown into something more substantial.
I've always just been a nerd for domain names and social handles. And those have always felt to me, like the original NFTs, “How do you get access to them? They're very rare, they have value, et cetera.”
And so I always got them for myself, for my businesses. Then my friends would ask me, “Can you help me with this domain name?” Then I had investors come to me, “Could you help my portfolio?”
And so when I stepped back from Ro about two years ago, I took a very mindful and thoughtful break from kind of just traditional marketing work. But domain is the one area I kind of let myself go deep on, just because I've always loved it, but I've never had the time for it. And it's been really interesting.
So I get an opportunity to work with smaller stage companies, people coming out of YC that are picking a brand, that are picking a domain, and then really big companies and really well-established entrepreneurs as well.
So I have worked with Punit, who's the ex-CEO of Twitter, worked with Ben, one of the co-founders of Pinterest, and John Zimmer, one of the co-founders of Lyft.
Because there's actually an interesting problem that exists where people don't know how to get a really good domain name that isn't not already for sale. It's hard to figure out who owns it. It's harder to figure out how to get in contact with them than how you negotiate structure and transfer process, et cetera.
So I've realized that as an entrepreneur or as a founder, you may go through this two or three, four times over the course of your career. But now that I'm working with all these folks, I've had hundreds and hundreds of reps to figure out like, “How does this work? What are the best practices?” et cetera.
And so it's been really exciting. And again, a very different type of business. But something I get a lot of gratification around when I help close these deals. Some take weeks, some take years. But those ones are particularly gratifying ones. When we finally get across the finish line, you see that website launch on the new domain.
Chase Clymer
Can you talk about the power of a premium domain name and the impact that it can have on a business?
Yeah, totally. I think the reason people will invest in a one word dot com is it really gives the company more immediate legitimacy, and there's a reputation that's assigned to it.
If you launch or you see a company for the first time and it's got whatever, headphones dot com, you're like, that feels legitimate. That feels much more legitimate than if you saw triheadphones.net. There's just a premium because it is expensive.
People understand that that is probably a more reputable company that I can trust. I kind of equate it to the same thing as like, if you see an ad on the subway or like you see a TV spot, you're like, “Okay, those are expensive enough,” where like a run of the mill company probably isn't going to be able to afford to put that up and disappear overnight.
And so when founders come to me, the first thing we do is we talk about, “What stage of business are you at? What can spending money on a domain actually do for your business?” And then, “How much can you realistically afford where it doesn't put your runway or the trajectory of the business in danger?”
And sometimes people come to me and they want to get a really expensive domain name and I'll actually push them off. And I say, “Let's find a $12 option. That's good enough. And then earn the right to go spend more money by making sure your product works.”
You don't want to spend so much money out of the gate before you even know if you have something. Because great marketing, great domain name, great brand, whatever, that doesn't fix a product market fit challenge. And so you wanna be mindful of that.
But a lot of folks who come to me have kind of already started to get over the hump in terms of fit and they wanna figure out like, “Hey, how can we start to supercharge this? We're gonna start doing more top of the funnel. We're gonna do billboards. We're gonna do out of home. We're gonna do TV.”
It's nice. It builds trust to have that premium domain name. And so that's where I've been able to help in a bunch of different ways.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
Top of mind for me, I saw this the other day on Twitter... Well, X.
Rob Schutz
Hmm. Good. Yeah. Good correction there.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. It was a funded startup that spent a million dollars on a domain name. They raised $3 million.
Obviously, I don't know anything other than that. But I'd love to get just your candid thoughts on that.
Rob Schutz
Yeah. So you're probably talking about friend.com, which there's a whole hub on social media about that a few weeks ago. And I did a thread. I did a thread about that on X to give a little bit more context.
What's interesting there is yeah, they raised something like $2.5 million and they spent 1.8 on this domain, friend.com. I think what people don't realize is also there's a lot of creativity and flexibility around how these deals are put together.
It was pretty clear from the screenshot that got shared, they didn't pay $1.8 million cash day one for that domain. They split it up over a payment plan that was probably three to five years. So they're paying monthly. They're paying anywhere from 30 to 50K a month for that.
But what that structure allows you to do is understand, “Is this working or is this not?” If it's not, you can walk away from those deals. You surrender the cash that you've paid and the domain goes back to the seller, but you're not necessarily on the hook in many cases for that full purchase amount. So it was a really interesting way.
And that's not for everybody, that strategy, but I like what Avi did. And I think that it's an interesting way to test out, like, “Does that buy you the reputation and legitimacy that you want? Does that actually help accelerate it faster than building it on your own by launching with a premium domain like that?”
So it's a really interesting strategy. Not a lot of people have done that out of the gate. But when it comes to negotiating these deals, there's all sorts of interesting creative ways that you can structure it where it doesn't necessarily put the entirety of the business at risk.
Chase Clymer
That's a great way to present what happened in that unique scenario.
Now, if I'm listening to this podcast and I'm picking up what you're putting down, and I think that premium domain names are in the future and in the best interest of my business, what should I do? How do I get a hold of you?
Rob Schutz
Well, you can always just go to snagged.com and you can fill out the contact form. Or you could DM me on Twitter, I'm just @rob. Or you can email me. I'm just hi@rob.com. Always available to jam.
Chase Clymer
Getting those three-digit domains and handles everywhere.
Rob Schutz
No big deal. I mean, it's kind of important for the business, Chase. Gotta protect it.
The last point I'll say is it's not always premium one word domains that will work with people on. It's usually just assets that are hard to acquire.
And sometimes they're made up words. Sometimes they're longer or multiple words. Sometimes they're dot orgs or dot net. Sometimes it's people who've gone through a bunch of different hoops and have tried a lot of different services.
They're like, “Could someone just figure out how to get me this goddamn name?” Because what I do that is different than most is like, each one of these, I kind of take on as a personal project. And if I email the owner and they don't get back to me, I'm going to try 100 different ways to get them to respond over the course of time, and can get very creative in that process.
So I take a lot of personal pride in being able to make contact and see if we can get something done.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing, Rob. Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all your insights.
Rob Schutz
Thanks for having me, Chase.
Chase Clymer
We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes.
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