Jacob Zuppke: CEO of Whisker

Episode 486

In this episode, Jacob Zuppke, CEO of Whisker, shares his journey and insights into building a successful brand in the cat industry. Whisker is the international leader in pet tech, known for its innovative products like the Litter-Robot and Feeder Robot. Jacob discusses the strategy for direct-to-consumer, emphasizing the importance of a blended approach and reaching customers through various channels. He also highlights the power of customer testimonials and engagement in building a strong brand. He encourages taking chances in advertising and staying true to the brand's voice and values while providing automated solutions for cat parents and creating a connected pet care experience.
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Transcript

Kara Goldin 0:00
I am unwilling to give up that I will start over from scratch as many times as it takes to get where I want to be I want to be, you just want to make sure you will get knocked down. But just make sure you don’t get knocked down knocked out. So your only choice should be go focus on what you can control control control. Hi, everyone and welcome to the Kara Goldin show. Join me each week for inspiring conversations with some of the world’s greatest leaders. We’ll talk with founders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, and really some of the most interesting people of our time. Can’t wait to get started. Let’s go. Let’s go. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Kara Goldin show. I’m super excited to have my next guest. Here we have Jacob up key who is the CEO of whisker, that is whisker without an S. So if you’re going to go online right now and check it out, don’t put the S on the end for sure. Now I’m just kidding around. But seriously, if you have not heard about whisker, they are the international leader in connected pet care and pet accessories. With an innovative portfolio that includes products like the litter robot, the feeder robot, and litter box primarily focused on meows today, cats. But I would imagine that in the future at some point that will expand but the products are enjoyable and intuitive to use and deliver super meaningful insights for pets and people alike. And in the lovable world of cat care. Building a successful brand takes more than just a love for cats, I would imagine that there are many cat lovers, listening today. And definitely many cat lovers within Wesker, for sure. But Jacob is definitely somebody that we can all learn from his journey to success is pretty awesome. And I can’t wait to hear a lot more about it. So welcome, Jacob.

Jacob Zuppke 2:05
Thank you for having me. I’m really excited to be here. And I look forward to sharing more about whisker and my journey here.

Kara Goldin 2:11
Absolutely. So I’d love to get started with your backstory. So you joined the founder, and you were not the founder. But you are the CEO of whisker. How did that happen? It’s been

Jacob Zuppke 2:28
most fun, almost nine years I could have ever imagined. I out of college started a small internet marketing agency, which grew to be about 25 people, we hit a point in our journey where I was able to take a buyout from my former business partner, as I realized I hit a point in my own career where I started to realize what I wanted to do, which was to be on the brand side, what I kept finding with all my clients is that I would want to spend so much time in their business in other areas of their business, not just in marketing, but across how they operate in. It was almost that that kind of aha moment for myself, where I realized I wanted to be on the brand side, not the agency side. And I wanted to touch everything, not just the marketing. Of course, that’s in reflection, didn’t see any of that in the moment, I got recruited by an individual that I had pitched in a previous life. And then I got to know in a previous life, Dave, a marketing manager here at whisker, and he brought me in to see this cat company who I showed up at the office, and I thought I was at the wrong building. And I called the 877 number and said, Hi, I think I’m here. She responded, this individual who’s still with us, yeah, you’re here, if that’s what you’re asking. And I walked into a building, they put me in the back lunch room, where our cat jumped on the table and greeted me right in my face. And I just couldn’t believe where I was what I was doing. And I every thought in my mind, you know, just came about. And then I started talking to the founder who just cut through all the noise of the office and what they were doing. And he told me how much they were spending on marketing and I couldn’t believe that. And I got really excited and as an SEO geek by trade, I started to look at it as an opportunity within just search at first as to what I thought I could do with this brand. What I thought I could do with this product from a marketing standpoint, and I took the plunge showing the company and man am I happy than I did. Early in my journey 2015 We are getting ready to launch Gen three of little robot and we worked all year to get ready updating our brand and then in about September, I started to see this trend of this social celebrity now with a big category name called influencers on but not yet with a name at the time seeing all these famous cats with these giant followings on Instagram and decided to launch a big campaign, we would give away 25 Free little robots. One each day in the month of December called 25 Days of Christmas, the litter robot launch at December 1 2015. And we just accelerated overnight 10x, our website traffic, our revenue hit a certain milestone we had never seen before. And it was kind of that aha moment for myself where I realized moving from agency to in house that could really deliver on what I thought I could go into 2016, we grew significantly for a 15 year old brand. Going into 2017, he had a bonus structure. And it’s something I tell all of our new team here at whisker in a bonus structure of Brown, that if we hit this milestone, it’s our 2020 goal. And I said I could hit it in 2017. And we ended up exceeding it. But at the time we didn’t recognize Well, we still don’t we recognize revenue when we ship it out when we sell and we didn’t ship everything out. And so I was really excited that I exceeded my goal, and I was gonna get this meaningful bonus. Brad’s sitting there thinking we didn’t hit our goal. I don’t know what you’re talking about. And I channeled my level of frustration that I had in the moment at something that maybe I didn’t fully grasp and understand. And they gave me an appreciation for all the rest of the business, operations, finance, manufacturing, and everything else. And in 2018, took it upon myself to say, well, I don’t want to be beholden to ultimately where we were. But I want to shape where we’re going. And I informally became our CFO started to take over operations take over how we were getting to where we wanted to go. And in 2018, was able to successfully not only far exceed our goals again, but also to ship everything out that year. And at that time, more favorable, formally became our Chief Operating Officer, which was formalized when we brought on a family office in 2019. And then my role continued to evolve. In 2020, I became president and in 2021, at the end of the year, became president and CEO. And along the way, I was employed 25, and 2015. And whiskers now probably employing about 575 people here in 23.

Kara Goldin 7:25
Wow, that’s amazing. What a great, great, great story. And obviously, you are a direct to consumer company, initially, at least. So a lot of your experience was awesome to be able to really grow from where they were at. So what are the prob I guess I should back up? How would you describe whisker to people? Like your friends are like you work for a cat company? What do you guys do? Exactly?

Jacob Zuppke 7:56
Yeah, so whisker, I think you said a while we’re the international leader and pet pack right now. We are most notably known for the litter robot, we also have the feeder robot, and we have a slew of other really exciting products coming out. We believe that we are able to help identify patterns in your cat’s behavior. So we are moving more into the sciences side of what we do, and our capabilities within software as to what we’re learning about your pet. So we can proactively identify maybe an anomaly in their litter box usage, which is often cat’s case, may be a sign of a UTI, or some other infection or experience that they’re going through that unfortunately, you can’t can’t speak up and tell you what’s going on. And we’re able to start learning from that data. So we are connected pet care company. That’s what we do at our core, we believe that are focused on cat is really where our focus should be. The opportunity for us to be the leader in cat products right now is profound. Food, water and waste is where we want to focus our time and energy. While some of those products aren’t on the market yet, that’s really how we see core problem solving for the cat parent, we want to make sure that we can deliver an automated household for the cat parent taking away well, we would define the unnecessary chores of having a cat like the litter box or maybe making water more appetizing for your cat which oftentimes they don’t want to drink enough water or delivering food in a new way that hasn’t been done before. We believe here at whisker we have the opportunity to do all of that and our team of 60 plus engineers are working really hard to deliver for pet parents around the world.

Kara Goldin 9:43
Very cool. So what is your your kind of Halo killer product that most people are starting with? Do you have one that is illiterate leader? Yeah,

Jacob Zuppke 9:55
yeah, the little robot we mobiles public figure that we’ve shared With, from our website from our communications that we’ve sold over a million little robot units, that number has grown significantly since the time that we share that last December. And we have continued to be able to deliver for cat parents in that way. And the litter box, followed by that our feeder robot has been a really great success for the company. It is the highest rated feeder in the litter robot, the highest rated on radical OtterBox. For cats, we continue to try and bring products to market that are going to truly solve a problem for the pet parent. And as you look to the future of whisker, I think you’ll see a lot more of that.

Kara Goldin 10:36
So you’ve spent a chunk of your career on the ad side, and a lot of direct to consumer today has has really shifted from even where it was at the beginning of 2020. How would you say how do you think about spend today in marketing? Obviously, it’s in a perfect world, we’re follow organic, we’re able to not pay for any traffic coming in or to any type of advertising at all. But how do you think about the state of direct to consumer today and how you actually get consumers to really come in and try your product?

Jacob Zuppke 11:15
It’s great question. From the western side, we’ve looked at it as a blended model for a long time. And we’ve continued to view our marketing dollars in that way. So we target a percentage of revenue as what we’re willing to spend in advertising. I try not to look at any one channel too closely, because they all feed each other. If I individually, look at what I’m spending in high funnel, which is where we spend the majority of our budget is in high funnel trying to educate our customer tomorrow, today, and an effort to get them interested in western products. And when you’re doing that, it doesn’t always come with an immediate conversion. And if you overanalyze what is a two day conversion versus a tomorrow conversion, you can be a little short sighted in that you may cut something off, that’s really educating a customer who’s 90 days away, and you’re starting their funnel to get them in there. And so we’ve always viewed it as a blended rollouts model where we’re able to look at our media holistically. We’ve been doing this, since we had a really small budget we are doing this now is we have a really big budget. And we’ve continued to look at it that way. Because really every channel works together. As a consumer and I go through my own journey, I see something on TV, I see something connected TV, I see something on a billboard, I see something somewhere else, I’m going to go to Google and I’m going to look up that name. Whether it be whisker or litter robot. In our case, we believe that a lot of people are going to start their journey in different ways. It could be from a Facebook ad, it could be from a friend of their saying, you have to get the letter robot, it’s completely changed my life of cats, you’re still gonna go to Google and you’re still going to look it up. So if we’re not playing in that space, and we may lose a customer to a competitive product, that that’s trying to conquest against people seeking a litter robot versus that of seeking a generic automatic letterbox. So we need to be in that space. But that’s only part of the journey. So if we look at that independently, Google is probably one of the highest performing channels independently. But oftentimes, that’s an assisted conversion, because we did something somewhere else. So we really try and look at it from a blended row as standpoint. And we don’t necessarily look at just in channel performance. But we look at the blended performance across everything. And we use a mixed media model to measure everything that we’re doing. So that ultimately will align with our coal core KPIs a company, which is how much we’re spending as a total percentage of revenue against the total media buy. But we are playing on all the channels, we are in all the meta meta platforms. We are in all the Google platforms, we’re in connected TV, we’re in linear, we’re on tick tock, we’re starting to look at out of home, we’re leaning more into podcasts, I really you need to be where the consumer is. And in our case, we’re educating people about a product that may not have ever thought of an automatic device to their cat, which I think in 10 years from now, people are gonna have a hard time looking at the letterbox and saying I believe truly, that in 10 years from now, if you’re still scooping, I’ve got a question why you’ve made that decision. When there are great solutions, like little robot on the market that can solve that for you.

Kara Goldin 14:26
That’s awesome. Do does the average person if they have more than one cat, do they have more than one box?

Jacob Zuppke 14:33
We had a fun conversation about this yesterday, we probably don’t do a great enough job helping people appreciate that you only had one litter robot for forecasts. And so you one of the jokes that we have internally is that oftentimes people want to get another cat because they can. They don’t have to deal with the number one chore of cat parenting, which is the litter box. And the reason that a lot of people have multiple litter boxes is there’s like an N plus one number. If you have one cat you should have at least one letterbox if not two of you have two cats should have two to three letter boxes. So there’s an N plus one number. But often that’s because the litter box the cat doesn’t want to step into a dirty letterbox, we’ve played some fun into this and some of our advertising about your cat is stepping on poop to go poop when they’re using their brother or sisters litter box in the home that hasn’t yet been cleaned, or even their own litter box. And so with the litter robot, it automatically cleans after each use. So you don’t need multiple litter robot units for multiple cats. If you have multiple floors in your home, you have a larger home, I mean, we would tell you to start with one, as much as that’s counterintuitive to our sales strategy. Start with one, we have free shipping on all of our robots. And then if you ultimately want to buy a second, because you’ve chosen to do that, we will happily allow you to order a second one. But we do not recommend it. You need one for up the forecasts. Interesting.

Kara Goldin 15:56
So I saw something and in the research that I was doing that you’ve changed your channel strategy a little bit for, for selling, I should say. So you went initially direct to consumer, I believe you were also Amazon and you’re looking at some different retail placements. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Jacob Zuppke 16:16
Sure. We’re, if you if you rewind about nine years ago back to my SEO core here, when I joined the company automatic Otterbox searches were about 14,000 searches a month. And litter robot our brand was about 7000 searches a month. If you fast forward nine years, we are a little over three times out of the category search volume. Now we are about a quarter million a little over a quarter million 275,000 searches a month, give or take across primary search engines not including our shopping search engines. And whereas automatic and self cleaning litter boxes are about 75 to 80,000 searches a month. So we have been able to build a brand through education around litter robot and our high funnel marketing. Well, when you’re working with retailers, there’s a huge opportunity to demonstrate your product in a way that hasn’t been done before. Not every retailer wants a large automatic letterbox on their shelf. And so at the time, they were willing to lean into their e commerce channels, but they weren’t willing to lean into ease. In store. For us, it wasn’t of interest because we really were educating a future audience about the litter robot. And so we wanted to spend our money where it made sense. And what we found is a lot of the marketplaces that a lot of the retailers at the time, were essentially just bidding on our branded search and redirecting people already looking for litter robot to their respective platforms. And so we got to a point where we realized this in later 2017, that we were ultimately losing our own conquest buyers, to other marketplaces and channels. So at that time, we had added several other payment plans. We added the firm, we added PayPal, we added Amazon pay, so gave us the confidence that we can pull from Amazon at the time and see if it was going to be cannibalistic. Or if it was truly additive, in 2017 2018. At the time, it was cannibalistic, we pulled out of Amazon, our revenue didn’t change. It all just went to our website at the time, we drove Amazon pay sales like crazy, it was a huge success for us with Amazon pay as a payment channel. And in 2018, we we took the chance we pulled out of Amazon. Fast forward a couple of years, we continue to grow our brand awareness. And now the search volume as the consumer started their search on Amazon. Now we are on a different landscape. So now people are starting their search on Amazon. And you were seeing these products come up from all over the world that looked a lot similar to the litter robot. And so at that point, we had to be there. Because if we weren’t there, that consumer seeking litter robot, they may have tried another brand who looked eerily similar to the litter robot, not knowing or even knowingly. And at that point, we decided we needed to be present. So in 2021, we went back on Amazon. And we went back on other strategic channel partners that one of the things that we were very intentional about is what channel partners would allow us to advertise and reach new audiences. And so that was a big focus for us. And we were very fortunate to partner with chewy, who was an absolute really great partner. They have allowed us to grow our awareness for the chewy platform through their new advertising tools that they have, and through a lot of what they’re able to bring to us with their own pet parents. Then we expand into Best Buy and Petsmart who have both just been phenomenal partner Is with Best Buy. And with PetSmart. We have a omni channel strategy both in store and online. We have a buy online pick up in store strategy. And we’re able to also reach new eyeballs through their advertising tools that they have. And they’ve both been fantastic partners. And I think the brands that they both bring as well brings credibility to who is Chris today. And on Amazon, we’ve doubled down on the advertising opportunity to reach people that are already buying Catlett or on Amazon trying to go for relevantly, I’ll say lateral consumers who are already we know in market, we’re already seeking cat products that we can target using those tools. So as we’ve looked at omni channel, I think the biggest thing has been how do we make it additive? How do we grow our awareness? How do we treat it as an advertising tool, not just a marketplace for sales? And if we can find that just position between? How do we give them something, ultimately, they’re getting a revenue driver through our product? How do we get something and we find that true mix, we have a great new partner that we can continue to grow with. And as we look to 2024, we are looking forward to doubling down on those partnerships with those respective retailers and making sure that we are best positioned to continue to reach new cat parents around the globe. Really, really

Kara Goldin 21:23
smart. So customer testimonials, I always say are the best, right? You’re, you know, when you’re having a everything’s breaking day, and nothing’s going right. And then all of a sudden, you go into that inbox or or, I mean, as as crazy as this would sound I’d get on the customer service lines. And I just like start listening, start answering people’s questions, because I felt like when you start to hear from your consumer, how much they love your product, it really, really makes your day right and makes you know that you’re doing something that can be hard and frustrating at times, but definitely worth it right. I’d love to hear if you have any consumer stories that made you inspired, made you laugh, anything above.

Jacob Zuppke 22:12
So in March of 2015 when I sat down in that office, and I walked out thinking, wow, I can’t believe they did this is this something journey that I want to go on? I started reading the customer reviews now this is an almost nine years ago Am I remember one specific review can’t remember the person’s name. But I remember what they said. And it was at the literal about save their marriage, it was a couple who the husband moved in with the wife at the time they were dating. And the he was on a cat person. And at the time, I could relate to that I had never had a cat before. my now wife, then girlfriend who I just started dating had a cat, I never lived with the cat before. And now I’m a total cat person, I also have a dog, but I definitely would call myself a cat first and but I just remember reading this testimonial. And it was my aha moment for the power that litter robot had in the consumers home and what it really did for them. And essentially, the testimonial was talking about how this litter box in his open litter box in their house was such a point of contention between the couple, that they ended up buying a litter robot. And that contention went away. I just wasn’t a thing that they had to think about anymore. At the time they were talking about. One of them was saying you’ll need to get rid of your Pat. And that other person was saying no chance I’ll have to unfortunately, this isn’t gonna work out. And they talked about how the literal would save their marriage. And I’ve read so many of those stories. Now. There’s about 80,000 reviews on literal buy.com and 1000s more reviews across other omni channel marketplaces and I still read as many as I can. I still personally answer customer emails every single day. If you go on Reddit, I am proudly cat poop man. And I am on Reddit every single day in this subreddit, with our little robot customers, learning from them talking with them, and understanding what their pain points are for new and existing customers. People that have feedback on the product people that I can learn from people that have challenging feedback, who maybe we let them down in some capacity, whether it be by customer service on the product itself. And those are fewer than there are very happy customers. But those are the ones I get to learn the most from. And so I reach out to them individually, you can find my email very publicly on hundreds of subreddits I post my email everywhere with my title, because I want people to be able to reach out to me, it is in my best interest for people to reach out to me and tell me what we’re doing well and tell me what we’re not doing well, and so I still every single day talk to customers, because it’s what keeps me close to what really matters, which is how are we really performing. How are we really delivering I See one version of that through our company growth in sales. But I see another through how people feel about our brand. Because the second that changes, I know that the other is going to change as well. So I have to say near and dear to the customer. And I think we proudly support that with over 80 customer service agents as well, full time. That’s

Kara Goldin 25:20
awesome. So what surprised you about building a brand in the pet industry? Is has there any been anything that I would imagine that most of your friends are, are not necessarily building cat companies? Right. So there, there’s not a there’s not a playbook that is specific, although I always say you can learn from any industry and and there’s lots of components, certainly there. But what what is it that has kind of surprised you along the way? Or has there been something that you thought would be a huge success? And then you’re like, No one cares, or something along those lines?

Jacob Zuppke 26:05
Yeah, great question. Got me credibly thinking about my journey here. I think the finding what you want to build is important. And I think in our case, it was a brand that was relatable, that took its own very seriously in the work and the products that it delivered. But that had a lot of fun in the way that it communicated with its consumer base. We’re in cat, and we’re on poop we were made for the internet. And if we can’t have fun with that, then what are we doing? And so if you look back to 2018 is really when we started in housing, all of our own advertising. And we have just built a brand that is known for its funny advertising. And I think that’s great. We take yourself seriously and how we operate, we take yourself seriously and how we build and invent. But in our marketing, we have to have fun, and we have to connect with the consumer. So I think from a brand standpoint, what maybe was an earlier, let’s build something that looks like Apple, you know, I think that’s everybody’s aspiration when you get into hardware. We had to we never actually executed on that. But we talked a lot about that in the earlier days. And I think now it’s let’s build what we think is cool. Where do we want to shop as Cat parents, what kind of Brando we aspire to be a part of, and what’s gonna get us intrigued to be to be following a brand like this. And we just hired a new head of marketing who starts in a couple of weeks. And I was talking to them yesterday, after we did an internal marketing session with the leadership team. And he said something to me that I thought was so cool. In reflecting on the team that we’ve built here, we’ve got about 30 people in our marketing team. He said what I took away from today was that everybody is influenced and part of pop culture. And I said, What do you mean he goes, everybody wants to be entertained. He said, When I was listening to everyone, talker, we were all talking about relevant things that have caught our attention recently. I think the biggest one that I couldn’t give enough props to is John Maris and the team at solo brands, who just did the collaboration with Snoop Dogg who caught the world by storm at Snoop was giving up smoke and it just to find out that he partner was so low brands, it was pop culture at its finest it played into influenza, it played into PR it played into everything that you could want out of a brand campaign. And I think that that’s what we all aspire to do. So when I think about our brand here at whisker, it’s how do we get people’s attention? And in 2019 The biggest thing that I was following at the time was the Harmon brothers are 2018 2019 Harmon brothers who shot the PooPourri commercial, the Squatty Potty commercial, who wrote a book called from poop to gold, phenomenal book for any marketers listening to this absolute must read. And I had already started drafting this idea that we wanted to go on a marketing retreat, and go and write our commercial and do something different just because it sounded fun and creative, that I read their book. And it’s a version of exactly what they did. And when I saw that I was thinking in the minds of people that I really respected. I wanted to double down on that. And we did that and we wrote our campaign called Don’t be a scooper, which was our first big hit and went on to have 25 plus million views on the video, we counted up a bunch of different ways. We put it on TV, we put it on Mata we put it on YouTube, and it was just a huge success. And that was our moment of realization of let’s build our own playbook. Let’s figure out what works for whisker. And we told people that they were scoopers and we made a mean word and kind of a fun light way. And we called you a scooper if you didn’t have a litter robot, and it was just fun. and people that had a catalog that people that didn’t have a catalog that because we did it in our whisper voice. And so we’ve continued to double down on that voice. Most recently with a story of a bunch of kids talking in kid talk about how they need a little robot and we flipped a birthday party where these kids are, they’re in a birthday party to all them just looking at a litter box, and finding a way to find joy in the litter box and seeing it and in the mind of about a seven or an eight year old. And it was the whisker way, we didn’t look at what someone else did, we did it in the way that we wanted to do it. And as we look to our future, continuing to take chances in our advertising, I think even in a market where a lot of brands I think are tightening up and being a little bit afraid to take a chance or bring being very delicate, and what kind of chances we take where we wouldn’t offend anybody. But we still want to take chances, we still want to make sure that we’re leaning in to the thing that someone else hasn’t done before. And I think as a brand, you have to do that. Because the second you stop taking chances, and you go to vanilla. So stove was Snoop Dogg? I mean, is Snoop Dogg necessarily that the maybe the representation? I think so. But maybe others will say differently? Maybe they would say, well, you’re leaning into this or this. I think they took a chance and no one big. And I think they did it in a way that couldn’t I don’t know how anybody could be offended by that. It was just phenomenal advertising. And I think that that’s the kind of chants you have to take. And that’s when you hit a big and they have definitely had a big win with that one. And, and kudos to that team for pulling it off. What a cool see,

Kara Goldin 31:43
that’s awesome. I remember seeing. Yeah, I remember seeing the, I’m not sure if it actually played in the US too much or not, or if it was mostly in the UK, but the Virgin cruise ships. Shortly after that, you know, everybody was talking about the cruise lines during COVID. And some of the challenges and it was shut down. And Richard Branson relaunched his cruise ships. And it was a bunch of kids talking about because he, there are no kids allowed on this cruise ships on on this, I’m not sure if that’s true for all of them, but for certain routes. So if you haven’t seen it, you should definitely check out his commercials, Derrick Hall. And basically the kids are talking about how terrible their parents are, that they’re actually going on a vacation. And they’re they’re trying to figure out how they can actually get on the cruise ship. And it reminds me of something that could be similar in some ways to the to what you guys potentially could do.

Jacob Zuppke 32:52
But again, other great examples Plexi, the birth control who it’s one of my favorite ads, and we were talking about this is maybe a year and a half ago, we were talking about what what was inspirational to us and myself or had a video on our creative director, which in this case happened to be three men all mentioned the same birth control spot. So we’re not even the buyers of it. And yet we were all obsessing over this app. And you know, I never bought a Squatty Potty I probably talked about the Squatty Potty more than almost any other consumer product, because their advertising was just done in such a way that goes from advertisement to pop culture to a conversation piece. And I would put Dollar Shave Club and Old Spice and so many others in that bucket where I may or may not be a consumer of those brands, but I’ve talked about them probably more than most products I even use because they’re advertising is just broke through the noise so well. And that’s what we’re trying to do. And I think we’re seeing that show up in the pet space in a really positive way. I think we’ve been able to break through the noise of the traditional, you know, show a really loving Pat that’s being you know, fluffy and cue that’s using a product to make it about the humans problem that they’re facing. And how do we as whiskers solve for that and do it in a way that catches your attention that breaks through the noise. I

Kara Goldin 34:24
love it. Well, Jacob, thank you so much, Jacob subkey, who’s the CEO of whisker, we appreciate everything, all the lessons and wisdom for sure. And everybody. It will have all the info in the show notes too. But thank you again. Appreciate it.

Jacob Zuppke 34:42
Thank you for having me. And for those that are listening. If you have a cap, please go to cap whoop.com You’ll enjoy.

Kara Goldin 34:50
Thanks again for listening to the Kara Goldin show. If you would please give us a review and feel free to share this podcast with others who would benefit and of course Feel free to subscribe so you don’t miss a single episode of our podcast. Just a reminder that I can be found on all platforms at Kara Goldin. I would love to hear from you too, so feel free to DM me. And if you want to hear more about my journey, I hope you will have a listen or pick up a copy of my Wall Street Journal, best selling book undaunted, where I share more about my journey, including founding and building hint. We are here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Thanks for listening and good bye for now. Before we sign off, I want to talk to you about fear. People like to talk about fearless leaders. But achieving big goals isn’t about fearlessness. Successful leaders recognize their fears and decide to deal with them head on in order to move forward. This is where my new book undaunted comes in. This book is designed for anyone who wants to succeed in the face of fear, overcome doubts and live a little undaunted. Order your copy today at undaunted, the book.com and learn how to look your doubts and doubters in the eye and achieve your dreams. For a limited time. You’ll also receive a free case of hint water. Do you have a question for me or want to nominate an innovator to spotlight send me a tweet at Kara Goldin and let me know. And if you liked what you heard, please leave me a review on Apple podcasts. You can also follow along with me on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn at Kara Goldin. Thanks for listening

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