Danielle Sobel Launched, Scaled & Sold Her Business in 2 Years

Danielle Sobel launched her personalized dog supplement startup Dandy in 2020, raising around $1.2 million before being acquired by Fuzzy two years later.

“It all started with my rescue, Zoe. My rescue dog had horrible allergies, so I started researching supplements for her and thought, why is this so confusing? Why is there so much friction?

I explored the idea with my IG community. I did a poll on Instagram and asked whose dogs took supplements and which ones. Everyone was saying they were giving their dog [multiple] different supplements, but nobody could remember a brand name or say if they worked”

“I found a couple of vets, brought them on board, and hired a data scientist to build out a personalized recommendation engine that would look at everything like breed, age, diet and lifestyle.

With more data, we were able to make better recommendations and products. Now we start getting insight into what people are really struggling with. Like, are more dogs in New York anxious and do more dogs in Texas have allergies?

Personalization is super important. And the ‘humanization of pets’ as a thesis was also really interesting to me.

We were right: Trends in pet wellness follow trends in human wellness.

Personalized health is not a very new idea on the human side. But animal or pet trends tend to follow about five to seven years after human trends. And so it turns out we were early.”

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