How I built Australia's first D2C
personalised pet food company — solo.

A fragmented category, ready for a direct relationship.

In 2015 the Australian pet food market was a lopsided picture. On one side, supermarket brands competing ferociously on shelf space and price — sold by weight and volume, not by fit. On the other, premium brands locked behind vet clinics and specialty retailers, with the gatekeeping markup that comes with that distribution. Almost no one was speaking to pet owners directly, asking what their specific dog actually needed, and delivering the right amount to their door on a repeating schedule.

The insight that became Petzyo was simple: owners don't want bags of food, they want their dog fed well without thinking about it. That reframe changed everything — pricing, onboarding, packaging, repeat cadence, and how the brand spoke to customers. The big overseas D2C players (Ollie, The Farmer's Dog, Butternut Box) hadn't entered Australia. Subscription commerce infrastructure was finally mature. Cat and dog ownership was up. Everything pointed at the same opening.

The personal spark

The market observation was one half of it. The other half was personal, and it came first. In 2016 I was working at the Victorian State Government — Department of Education, in what was, on paper, a stable and enviable role. Then a colleague I worked closely with was let go because of her mental health. Whatever the institution intended, what the moment communicated to everyone around it was: you are valuable here until you aren't. I remember walking out of the office that week thinking, very clearly, this is not the kind of life I want to build.

So I left — and instead of lining up another government role, I gave myself permission to spend the next stretch deep-searching for an idea worth betting on. No cofounder, no runway, no safety net beyond the decision that a rigid institution wasn't going to be where I spent my thirties.

The thing that kept pulling me back was Dollar Shave Club. In July 2016, Unilever had just acquired them for US$1 billion — a five-year-old company whose entire thesis was "men don't want to drive to Target to buy overpriced razors; give us a subscription and we'll send you decent ones." It was the cleanest proof yet that direct-to-consumer subscription, done right, could take a stale, retail-dominated category and re-draw it from scratch.

I spent the following weeks deep-searching the same question in different shapes: what other mass-consumed, category-captured, retail-fatigued product is sitting in Australia waiting for the same treatment? I ran through razors (taken), mattresses (taken — Koala), meal kits (taken — Marley Spoon), vitamins, coffee, contact lenses, bedding, wine. Pet food kept returning to the top of the list: 39% of Australian households owned a dog, the category was growing ~14% year-on-year, over 95% of spend still flowed through supermarkets and specialty retailers, and customers cared about their pets more intensely than almost any other category — yet were being sold to as if they were buying dishwasher tablets.

That was the opening. The institutional side of my life had pushed me out; Dollar Shave Club had given me the model; the Australian pet-food category sat there as the obvious place to apply it. Petzyo started from that intersection — part reaction against a work culture I didn't want to repeat, part deliberate search for the next D2C wave.

Naming & early brand exploration

Before Plan v1 was written, I spent a few weeks pressure-testing names and visual directions. The working name at the time was PetzYo Dining — I was trying to signal the "proper meal" framing as a deliberate contrast to the bag-of-kibble category norm. I commissioned a handful of logo concepts and lived with them for a while. Four of the concepts are below.

01 · Red-circle dog head

Warm and retro; the red circle later echoed into the final brand.

02 · Running dog with platter

Literal delivery metaphor — locked the brand into one service identity.

03 · Beagle crest

Heraldic and premium, but too vet-clinic for a D2C disruptor.

04 · Compact red-circle mark

Stacked variation of 01 for favicons, app icons and packaging stamps.

What I ended up shipping was different from all four. I dropped "Dining" — it was narrowing the category too early and confused people about what we actually sold. I kept the sound of the name (PETZYO, no space), simplified the wordmark to a single confident red brush-script, and let the product and packaging carry the personality rather than the mark doing all the work.

In hindsight the four concepts were useful as elimination, not selection. Seeing them side-by-side made it obvious which direction wasn't right, and that clarity made the brief to the designer who eventually delivered the shipped mark considerably sharper. The lesson I'd draw for any founder: explore widely on a throwaway name first, then commit narrowly on the one you'll actually register.

Plan v1: a 16-page Investor Memorandum, dated 7 December 2016.

Plan v1 isn't a reconstruction. It's an actual document — in fact it's two actual documents. There was a first draft written in early October 2016 as a NEIF funding application (18 pages, title page dated 3 October 2016), and then a second draft — the one I consider the canonical Plan v1 — written two months later as a full Investor Memorandum dated Wednesday, 7 December 2016. The second draft is the artefact I used to open conversations with prospective investors, mentors, and suppliers, and it's what anchored the business's first public identity. Both PDFs are attached below.

The earliest written form of the plan — prepared as a funding application two months before the full IM. Included here for completeness; the document referenced throughout this chapter is the 7 December 2016 version below.

The numbers in this document are forward projections from December 2016 — not actual results. Reality diverged from them in all the usual ways; Chapter 07 shows how.

Mission & positioning

The IM opened with a one-line mission that stayed remarkably stable across the entire lifecycle of the business: "to make excellent quality pet-care a simple process." Positioning was explicit about its reference class — Petzyo was pitched as the "HelloFresh of pet-food", using three 2016-era D2C subscription benchmarks as validation:

The market opportunity (as framed in Dec 2016)

The IM grounded the opportunity in six specific industry statistics. These were the numbers I repeated in every investor conversation for the next year:

The IM also mapped the incumbent field explicitly: Mars, Nestlé and VIP Topco as the dominant manufacturers; GreenCross, Wesfarmers and Woolworths as the retail sellers; My Pet Warehouse, Pet Circle and Wesfarmers as the online marketplaces. All of them were operating on a traditional retail or marketplace model — none had a customer-centric subscription offering — which was the wedge.

What Plan v1 got right — and what it got wrong

Four research tracks, all running at once: market, competitors, packaging, production.

Petzyo was my third venture, not my first — and that mattered. Before it, I'd co-founded Wattson (an LGBT nightlife and events app launched in late 2013 that grew past 8,000 users and connected 5,000+ venues across an international demographic, backed in part by Facebook's FB Start & Accelerate program) and earlier founded NetworkingFitness (a global online directory launched in 2010 that eventually listed 7,000+ service providers across AU, US and UK). Neither had been easy; both had taught me where first-time founders waste money, time, and belief. So this time I came into it with a clear discipline: don't fall in love with the product before you've pressure-tested the market, the competitors, the packaging, and the production economics.

Before I wrote a business plan or signed a supplier, I ran four parallel research tracks — market, competitors, packaging, production — and tried to spend as little as possible on each until a clear signal emerged. The gallery below shows actual artefacts from that period.

Track 01 · Market research

The personalised, direct-to-consumer pet-food category didn't exist in Australia yet. So I studied the adjacent categories that were working — particularly human-food D2C subscription brands like Marley Spoon. Their acquisition mechanics, offer structure (dollar-off rather than percentage-off, hand-addressed cards, timed first-order triggers), onboarding cadence, and retention playbook were all directly transferable. I collected their mailers, traced their funnel, and reverse-engineered their email flows. The point wasn't to copy them — it was to understand what Australians had already been trained to expect from a D2C subscription.

Track 02 · Competitor research

Two flavours of competitor mattered. Local adjacent competitors — Pet Circle being the dominant Australian player at the time — taught me how category shipping, fulfilment partners (their stack ran on Shippit), unit-pricing and cross-sell worked at volume. I ordered from them, inspected their packaging, studied their shipping labels, timed their deliveries, and mapped their logistics network. Overseas reference competitors — Ollie in the US being the clearest analogue — gave me a visual and brand language to react against. I studied Ollie's Instagram cadence, creative direction, tone, and box design to work out where Petzyo should differ (warmer, more Australian, plan-led rather than bag-led), not just where it should copy.

Track 03 · Packaging research

Packaging is where D2C pet food lives or dies — it's the product the customer literally touches. I bought and studied competitor bags across the full spectrum, from supermarket premium (Purina) to specialty and imported brands. The details that mattered: the zip-closure mechanism (resealability drives perceived freshness and premium feel), the Australian Made credential placement and visual weight, barrier-film construction, tear-strip behaviour, portion-measurement cues, and photography conventions. Every bag I opened contributed one small decision to what Petzyo's packaging would eventually do differently.

Track 04 · Production research

The final track was the one most first-time founders skip: understanding the manufacturing economics before you commit to a partner. I studied both ends — outsourced contract manufacturing with Australian pet-food producers (formulations, MOQs, landed COGS per bag at different volume tiers), and the alternative of bringing a small-run production line in-house. That included researching specific machinery — forming/portioning equipment, ingredient-handling, sealing — and tracking second-hand pricing on platforms like Gumtree so I had a realistic view of what capital outlay in-house production would need. I never bought a machine; but knowing exactly what one cost meant I could negotiate with contract manufacturers from a position of genuine understanding.

Research gallery — field artefacts

Below are five specific artefacts from this period. Each is a piece of physical or digital evidence from one of the four research tracks. Captions explain what each told me and how that insight eventually shaped Petzyo.

01 · Market

Marley Spoon mailer — the D2C acquisition playbook Australians were already trained to expect.

02 · Competitor (US)

Ollie — the US analogue. Studied to decide where Petzyo should deliberately differ.

03 · Competitor (AU)

Pet Circle unboxing — the dominant player's shipping experience, mapped end-to-end.

04 · Packaging

Incumbent zip closure + Aus Made badge — what to keep, what to replace, what to invert.

05 · Production

Formatic R1200 on Gumtree, $7,950 — priced vertical integration to negotiate honestly with CMs.

The plan was the product. Everything else was scaffolding.

The single biggest design decision at Petzyo was that the hero of the experience was the plan, not the bag. A new customer didn't see "12 kg Chicken & Rice, $89" — they saw "Biscuit's plan: 2 cups/day, delivered every 28 days, $X/month, easy to change." That framing then forced every other piece of the design.

The onboarding quiz

The quiz collected the minimum information needed to produce a real recommendation — breed, age, weight, activity level, known sensitivities, treats/human-food habits — and it was designed to feel like a conversation, not a form. Length was a tradeoff I revisited repeatedly: shorter meant higher completion; longer meant more accurate plans and better retention. I ran variants and settled on the shortest version that still produced a defensibly accurate portion recommendation.

Subscription & packaging

Each plan produced a cadence and a bag size. Packaging was built around two rules: (1) the dog's name on the bag — trivially cheap to do in digital-first printing, disproportionately emotional, and (2) portion clarity — owners needed to know, at a glance, how much was one day's food. Small decisions, big retention effect.

The tech stack

Shopify as the storefront, a subscription app for plan management, a transactional-email tool for lifecycle flows, an analytics stack for cohort and funnel tracking, and a 3PL for warehousing and dispatch. I didn't write bespoke software — I orchestrated commodity tools and spent my energy on the unique parts: the quiz logic, the plan rules, the brand voice, and the service.

ADD TO BOX — the marketplace extension

By mid-2018 the core subscription was working, and the logical next step was to extend the customer relationship without breaking the operating model. The answer was a marketplace — internally codenamed ADD TO BOX — where subscribers could add pet products (treats, toys, dental, accessories) to their next scheduled delivery, shipped with their existing plan, with no extra shipping cost and no minimum-order friction.

It was a deliberate flywheel play: the personalised food plan was the reason to stay; the marketplace was the reason to spend more. Supplier conversations started in the June period, with first supplier orders placed shortly after. Pricing was positioned to beat online alternatives by stripping out shipping friction — a defensible edge because we already owned the delivery cadence.

IP, compliance and credentials

Through this same window the business locked in the defensible pieces:

• Patent lodged for combined shipping — the mechanism behind ADD TO BOX.
• Two relevant trademarks submitted.
• Australian Made member acceptance — category-relevant credibility for a food brand and a hook for PR.
• Used-packaging pick-up service launched (Inside FMCG coverage, Aug 2018) — a sustainability play that worked on three levels at once: environmental responsibility, retention touchpoint, and press moment.

Plan v2: the one that actually ran the business.

Somewhere around month 6 or 7, enough real data had come in that Plan v1 was obsolete. Plan v2 was the working document — the one I was forecasting cash against, hiring advice around, and steering the business by. It was less about growth story and more about operating discipline.

Unlike the Dec 2016 IM, this version was written with real trading data in hand — same period as the MD reports in Chapter 07.

What changed between v1 and v2

Three shifts. First: customer cohorts by channel behaved very differently. Paid social delivered volume but lower retention; organic, referral, and email delivered fewer customers but much higher retention. The plan had to be honest about that mix. Second: the plan moved from forecasting revenue to forecasting contribution margin per cohort. That's a more honest number and it is much harder to lie to yourself about. Third: the plan baked in a far less optimistic view of paid acquisition over time — I assumed CAC would get worse as the easiest audiences saturated, and that turned out to be directionally correct.

What stayed the same

The thesis didn't change. Personalisation, subscription, direct relationship — all still intact. What changed was the unit economics and the operating posture around them.

Bootstrapped — not entirely by choice. Petzyo was too early for Australian VC.

The honest version of the funding story is that Petzyo was too early. In 2016–2018, the Australian venture ecosystem was almost entirely focused on software and SaaS — D2C consumer brands were viewed as too inventory-heavy, too margin-compressed, and too unproven locally to justify a cheque. I had real investor conversations (RMIT Activator, Black Sheep Capital, 4Legs, Venture Group — covered in the earlier entries in this chapter); most of them liked the brand and the numbers but said some version of "we don't do D2C" or "come back when the category is proven in Australia".

The category did get proven — just not by me. Lyka launched in 2018 and became the breakout AU D2C dog food brand, raising significant capital once the thesis was visible. Scratch followed. Both came after Petzyo and benefited from the exact market evidence that Petzyo had been asking investors to imagine. The timing was just wrong — we were asking Australian VCs to back D2C before Australian D2C had a successful reference, and most of them weren't willing to be the first cheque into a category they didn't have a mental model for.

So Petzyo ran on personal capital, a small friends-and-family round, an RMIT Activator loan, and — increasingly over time — the revenue it generated itself. It was bootstrapping by necessity dressed up as bootstrapping by strategy.

What the money went to

Early capital paid for the expensive boring parts: initial product inventory (unavoidable minimum orders), packaging, brand, Shopify and app stack, the first wave of paid-social spend, and a small contingency. No payroll. I didn't pay myself for a long stretch.

The investor conversations that were live in 2018

By mid-2018 the business was in active funding conversations across three parallel tracks — each in a different stage, each kept deliberately separate so no single conversation could dictate terms.

30% month-on-month, for four consecutive months. No fluke.

Growth did not come from a single viral moment or a single channel. It came from a consistent cadence of small experiments — creative variants, audience tests, landing-page iterations, price tests, reorder-flow tweaks, email subject lines. I killed what didn't pay back inside two cycles and doubled down on what did. The numbers below are pulled straight from my internal Managing Director reports for April through August 2018 — the reports I wrote for my own board and advisors at the time.

The monthly view — Managing Director reports, 2018

Transcribed from the internal reports. Numbers are as-reported at the time.

The quiet compounders

Three things quietly did an enormous amount of the work. Email lifecycle flows (onboarding, first-reorder, plan-change, re-engagement). Referral — happy pet owners are one of the best word-of-mouth audiences on earth. And service recovery — how a business handles a late delivery or a fussy eater is 10× more durable a brand moment than any ad.

Operational milestones across those five months

The numbers are the headline, but the operating story underneath them matters:

• Lowered attrition rates through a combined promotional strategy shift, site improvements, and a rebuilt digital onboarding — logged in the June report.
• Patent for combined shipping lodged, plus two relevant trademarks filed — the IP foundation for the ADD TO BOX marketplace (see Chapter 03).
• Australian Made member acceptance.
• Warehouse footprint reduced to M-W-F single-person operation as an interim cost control — a conscious choice to preserve margin while ad spend experiments ran.
• Used-packaging pick-up service launched and covered by Inside FMCG (August 2018) — a deliberate sustainability play that doubled as a retention and PR moment.

What Petzyo taught me — the expensive half and the useful half.

The Petzyo story had two very different kinds of lessons inside it. One set came from building and operating the business day-to-day — product, brand, unit economics, growth — and almost all of those transfer directly to the AI work I do now. The other set came from how the exit went, and those are the lessons I would pay any amount to have learned from reading someone else's case study instead of from living through my own.

I'm leading with the exit lessons because they're the ones I most wish someone had put in front of me in 2016.