Dogs, Dog Food & Dogma – e41 – with Daniel Schulof – David Vs Goliath
In this awesome episode of David Vs Goliath we learn a ton about Dogs, Dog Food & Dogma. Who knew that dogs need low carb diets too? Learn how Daniel took his research to the next level and risked it all to take on the big Dog Food Giants and is Winning! A special shout out to our corporate sponsor https://anthemsoftware.com who makes this show possible.
Adam Degraide:
Coming up today on David Vs Goliath … You know what? Not only do I believe I can do it, I’m going to do it.
Daniel Schulof:
My book’s called Dogs, Dog Food and Dogma.
Adam Degraide:
Talking about dogs, kibble, and low carb.
Speaker 2:
Welcome to today’s episode of David Vs Goliath, a podcast dedicated to helping small businesses leverage technology to not only help them compete against their large competitors, but win. Your host is currently the CEO of Anthem Business Software, a three-time Inc. 500 recipient and a serial entrepreneur with a passion to help small businesses everywhere find, serve, and keep more customers profitably. Please join me in welcoming your host, Adam Degraide.
Adam Degraide:
Hey, everyone. It’s Adam Degraide with another fantastic, hopefully summer edition that’s sunny outside for you, of the David Vs Goliath Podcast. Today, I have Daniel Schulof from KetoNatural Pet Foods. I guess dogs eat low carb, too. Had no idea, but we’re going to find out together. Today’s episode is brought to you by Anthem Software, where you can find, serve, and keep more customers profitably with their all-in-one solution of software, CRM software, that is, marketing services to get results, and also a training lab to help you grow your business, all built specifically for small business. Take the tour today at anthemsoftware.com for a 120-second video tour. You will not be disappointed. Also, be sure to visit us at davidvsgoliathpodcast.com. You can subscribe to receive our newsletter and you can also apply to be on the podcast. We look forward to having the applications. We’ve been getting a ton and we’re very, very grateful.
Adam Degraide:
Two personal items. Don’t forget about my book on Amazon. It’s the Adventures of Jackson. It’s a cute kid story made specifically to help them learn about bravery, gratitude, and attentiveness. And also my album The Calm is finally out, my piano acoustic album with a string quartet. I also play acoustic guitar on it, designed to just help you chill out and relax. You could find that wherever music is served up to you. Make sure you add it to your playlist, stream it, download it, buy it, share it, link it, tweet it, whatever it takes. I appreciate it. And if you like it, leave a review. If you don’t, be kind and we appreciate everyone who watches and listens to the podcast. Well, with no further ado, let’s get right into it today with Daniel Schulof. Daniel, welcome to the David Vs Goliath podcast.
Daniel Schulof:
Thanks, Adam. It’s good to be here.
Adam Degraide:
I’m so glad to have you. I know you’re temporarily housed up there in Park City, hanging out with some dogs, which makes perfect sense for your business and I-
Daniel Schulof:
We got six dogs up here right now. We have four dogs in our home in Salt Lake City, Utah and my girlfriend’s mother has two dogs of her own, so we’ve got a pack of six up here right now.
Adam Degraide:
Oh, my word. Good for you. It’s funny. I was checking out your site and obviously, you’re the CEO and founder of KetoNatural Pet Foods and I had no idea that dogs need to eat low carb for themselves as well, too. So when I got the request to have you on the podcast, I said, “Man, there’s no better David Vs Goliath than a gentleman who’s starting a natural pet food to compete with the large pet food conglomerates out there that have dominated pet nutrition for years and years and years. And I thought it was interesting because you could tell that you clearly loved … The video you have on your site is great, by the way, the six-minute video where you talk about the health of animals and how they don’t really even have the ability to digest these things. I had no idea. I’m not a doctor, I’m not a veterinarian so anything that you hear in this show, don’t take my word for it at all, but I thought it was interesting to actually hear your story. And for the watchers and the listeners, this is primarily a business podcast. We’re going to dive into your business pretty good. But before we do that, I wanted to talk a little bit about why you decided to do this and what the purpose of the company is for.
Daniel Schulof:
Sure. Basically, the story is once upon a time I was an intellectual property litigator in the city of Atlanta. I was basically grinding, doing business to business patent and trademark and trade secret disputes and it was a super cool job. I’m sure you know some lawyers. There are difficulties about the job, but it was super cool. But among the difficulties are as a junior type person, the grind is real and there’s no sense of equity being developed. When I looked at my bosses that were the ones who had done it totally right, they were at the top of their profession. They were guys that had a really good sense of work life balance, from my view. They were the guys that did it as well. If I could just nail it a hundred percent, I’d end up like them.
Daniel Schulof:
And they just didn’t seem like they had it that great to me. Basically, the economics of legal practice in the US right now is built around this concept called the billable hour, which is basically another way of saying your work doesn’t scale at all. You will, even at that age when you’re a senior partner, your salary is going to be much higher, but you’re still putting in just as much time in order to be valuable to the firm. I didn’t love that. This is circa 2011. Right around that same time I had read the Tim Ferris book, the 4-hour Work Week and it really resonated with me. I’m not, frankly, a huge fan of the dude, but that concept of setting up a micro business, remember this is pre-pandemic, pre-Zoom, and even the eCommerce economy just wasn’t quite as developed yet, so this was pretty revolutionary stuff for me, the idea that you can set up a micro business that is highly automated and that would allow freedoms like working remotely, traveling habitually, that kind of stuff, from a place where I was working in a non-scalable profession was very attractive to me. And so that’s the business side of it and the personal, outside of the doggy world side of it. That’s how I was teed up for making a change.
Daniel Schulof:
I was raised with dogs. My mother bred dogs when I was a kid and I’ve always liked dogs, but I got my very first my own dog around that same period of time as well and he was a rottweiler. He’s since passed on, but he was this big intense rottweilery rottweiler. And in order to make him a polite member of society, he had to get some daily bout of exhaustive exercise. And two things basically happened as I was struggling to make sure he could get enough exercise to not kill anybody while also working 14 hours a day at this law firm.
Daniel Schulof:
One is I found a toy that worked super well for dogs like him, that I realized wasn’t being marketed very well and that I could do it better. And I decided to basically see if I could set up a micro business in the 4-hour work week style that was basically grounded around a similar but better version of that product. And what it was is something that allowed the dog to exercise really effectively without people being involved. It’s this huge, hard, plastic sphere, it’s bigger than a basketball, and for a dog like him and for other dogs that just have this neurosis where they just have to kill and dominate things, he could play with it by himself to exhaustion. You put it down outside and they try to wrestle with it with their paws. They can’t break it. They can’t get their jaws around it and so it’s like they’re wrestling with another dog at the dog park by themselves. You could just check email or drink your coffee or whatever while it’s going on.
Daniel Schulof:
And then in the course of doing that as well, basically, I came to understand how significant a problem the problem of obesity is among pets in the Western world. Obesity and exercise are just overlapping phenomena to some degree. And so as I was reading the literature regarding exercise and trying to understand how to exercise my dog better, I came upon facts about obesity and it just blew me away.
Daniel Schulof:
Basically, there’s two facts. Whenever I talk about this, I highlight these two same facts. Number one is more than half the dogs and cats in the country right now are overweight or obese. So if you pick the next one you see at random, you’re more likely to find a overweight one than not. And then the second fact is that that condition, being overweight at all, moderately overweight, not colossally obese, just overweight, is worse for a dog than an entire lifetime of smoking is for a human being. It’ll shorten their lifespan by something like 20% on average. This colossal problem happening to the majority of dogs in the country and you would think it would be the easiest thing in the world for dog owners to prevent. If you buy the conventional wisdom that calories in and calories out and balancing them is the fundamental way to manage body composition, should be the easiest thing in the world, right? You decide exactly how much food your dog is going to get. Even if you’re not somebody that can exercise your dog a ton, you can just scale back the amount of food that you’re feeding each day. It shouldn’t be a problem and yet, all these dogs are and so that fascinated me.
Daniel Schulof:
And so I was getting this 4-hour work week micro business dog toy company off the ground and also understanding those issues better. I got the thing off the ground and was able to quit my job as a lawyer and work on that, full time is not the right way to say it because it was a micro business type thing, but it ran itself so well that I needed another professional project while this thing was just spitting out passive income and I started working on what would become a serious, big, huge book about the problem of obesity. I just started going down the rabbit hole and literally spent the next four years working on this thing that would ultimately become this huge 400-page book that took me all over the country and exposes what I think is a huge, huge problem in how the veterinary community thinks about the problem of obesity. And by that point, I was fully committed to doggy professional work and other stuff came from that.
Adam Degraide:
It’s fascinating because when I was watching the video … A few things you said. I’m not too sure if you know, I work with attorneys. I have 28 attorneys. No nobody has more attorneys in their life than me. I’ve got attorneys for everything you could possibly imagine from patents to trademarks to taxes to whatever. You name it, I bet I’ve had that attorney in my life. And I have some very dear friends that are attorneys as well, too. And it’s true, by the way. If you are the only source of scalability, then your income is, by nature, capped because A, you can only have so much time in the day and B, at the end of the day, billable hours, if that’s how you’re doing your business, it’s all you’re worth, is your time.
Adam Degraide:
And so micro business, the concept is fascinating. So my businesses always done, Daniel, have been software related, so they’re SAS models. So people sign up for a service from me and it’s repeat revenue and that’s where you make all the money. And I noticed that’s what you did with KetoNatural Pet Food. Basically, you came up with the idea that, first of all, you did this studying. And what was the name of the book again? It was dogs. What was it? I almost had …
Daniel Schulof:
The book is called Dogs, Dog Food and Dogma, which is a reference to the flawed scientific dogma that is otherwise teaching veterinarians about obesity.
Adam Degraide:
Yeah. So when you think about that, Daniel, the whole podcast that we have here is about championing small guys over the big guys. So for all of these centuries, whether it was willful or ignorance, the pet industry has been, from your perspective, preaching one thing about dogs’ health, which has been doing the exact opposite. I think that’s happened to us a lot in our own, for humans as well, too, as well. I’ve always felt better on load carb diets. The problem is I have a hard time sticking to them and keeping them because I love French fries. I love a nice sandwich with a piece of bread in between. I’m Italian in a lot of ways. My grandmother was full Italian so I like to eat Italian. It’s the hardest thing to sustain, but I always feel better. When I’m two weeks, three weeks of low carb, I’m like, “Oh, man, this is what I’m supposed to do.” And then I just see that pasta Bolognese go by. I’m like, “God, dang it. I’m just going to do it.”
Daniel Schulof:
Me, too. I’m the same way.
Adam Degraide:
We’re all the same way. I have had many dogs throughout my life. I had a dog named Snag, which was named after my mom, Susan, Neil, Adam, and Gary, and then I also had a dog named Ginger, which Ginger, for the love of God in country, only would eat one type of dog food. We’ve tried everything you can imagine but the one that was the worst for her is the one that she wanted and that was it. We couldn’t get her to eat unless it was the terrible dog food. So when you think about the fact that you have this giant industry and you’re this small guy that had a micro business, left your lawyer business, because you came up with a decent idea to start generating some revenue, and then you realized that there was no place in the market that was serving low carb, kibble-style food, because that’s what I thought was fascinating on it, it reminds me of like the keto cereals I eat sometimes, tell the folks about that iteration of where you are now with it and what you decided you had to do because nobody else was doing it.
Daniel Schulof:
Yeah. So basically, there are two main these that I put forth in the book. Number one is that contra to what most pet owners believe and more particularly, what most veterinarians believe, the scientific record shows pretty well that the fundamental cause of obesity and other chronic diseases that are common and otherwise inexplicable in the Western world among pets is dietary carbohydrate. Basically, the carbohydrate is the devil. And so half+ of the book is the scientific justification reasoning behind that conclusion. And it’s just this study says this, this works this way, this study says that, blah, blah, blah.
Daniel Schulof:
The other main thesis of the book is not a scientific one. It’s a cultural, social one, which is the reason that you, me, my vet, et cetera, aren’t drinking the Kool-Aid on that issue in the first place or don’t believe that is because for a long time, big pet food companies that have a very, very vested interest in promoting the healthfulness, the supposed healthfulness of dietary carbohydrate, have been hiding the ball, lying and basically controlling the information environment that we’ve all been exposed to and that’s the reason that we don’t say, “Oh, obesity is fundamentally a problem of carbohydrate intake.”
Daniel Schulof:
So I write this book that’s got those two main these and exactly, like you said, if you’re somebody who believes those things either because you read the book and you buy into it or because you came to those beliefs on your own through some other mechanism and you’re a dog owner and you’re like, “I need to feed my dog a low carb diet for these reasons,” you were not in a great place circa 2016. You could either feed it the lowest carbohydrate kibble you could find, which is 30%+ carbohydrates still, the absolute lowest, most pet food products are 50 to 60%, or you could feed it a non-kibble product. You could feed it a raw diet, fresh diet. And yet, they’re out there and they’re … Many of them, not all, it’s not simple as just saying raw equals good, but there are plenty of really good raw products.
Daniel Schulof:
The problem is that calorie for calorie, they’re unitized really differently than kibble. Kibble, you sell it in big 20, 30 pound bags that last many dogs a month or more. The raw products are unitized completely differently so the sticker price doesn’t blow you away because it’s not a month worth of food at a time. But if it was, it would be something like five to eight times as much as the fanciest kibble you can find. You’re talking about a big bag of raw would cost you $600.
Adam Degraide:
Geez, Louise.
Daniel Schulof:
It’s just very expensive because you could imagine, it’s raw so it’s got to be preserved somehow so you got to either freeze it and ship it cold or you got to freeze dry it, which is a big intensive process as well. And so it’s expensive to make, it’s expensive to ship around, and it costs the consumer a lot more. And so if you’ve got a little dog, you got a 10-pound dog, the difference between fancy kibble for you and raw might be the difference between 50 cents a day and $2.50 a day. And that might be something you can live with. But right now, I am sitting in home where outside this office door, there are six dogs. Two of them are St. Bernards, so they weigh north of a hundred pounds each. One’s only six months old and is north of a hundred pounds. There’s a Bernese Mountain Dog. That’s my mother-in-law’s dog is probably 150 pounds. And so the delta between a 10 pound, whatever, chihuahua and 150 pound St. Bernard, that’s 15 times more food. So that’s the difference between call it 6 or $7 a day for that dog and $50+ a day and so it’s a complete non-starter for a lot of folks to feed a raw diet.
Adam Degraide:
It totally is. And Daniel, I definitely want to continue this discussion, but I’m already late on a break. So we got to get to the break from our corporate sponsor, Anthem Software. We’ll be right back.
Speaker 2:
Anthem Business Software system is designed to specifically help small businesses just like yours find, serve, and keep more customers profitably. We do this by providing you with the most powerful software automations and marketing services to help your business compete and win in this ever-changing digital world. Take a short video tour at anthemsoftware.com.
Adam Degraide:
And we’re back with Daniel and Adam Degraide talking about dogs, kibble and low carb. It’s exactly what we do here on David Vs Goliath today. I’ve had some of the most fascinating people on DVG. I don’t know how much you’ve watched. Maybe you haven’t even watched any, but we’ve covered everything from high end software people to folks that are making healthy mouthwash to now low carb diets for dogs. And a matter of fact, you mentioned small dogs before the break. My wife and I used to have a mini Yorkie and her name …
Daniel Schulof:
Oh, a mini, I didn’t even know that was a thing. That’s got to be like a [inaudible 00:20:21]
Adam Degraide:
She was three pounds or something like that. She was so tiny. She was so amazing. She lived long. She lived a long life and she would’ve been one that we could have fed just about anything, but that dog cost me so much money. It wasn’t even funny because my wife, who I love dearly, Daniel, wanted to make sure that Godiva the nicest surroundings, the nicest everything, the nicest treatment. And in many respects, she was a princess and so therefore, we treated her like one, but you make a good point. I think back to my cousins who had a handful of dogs that were big. That’s a huge difference. And so you came up with the idea, you decided you had to do the business.
Adam Degraide:
I want to switch to the business gear of this a little bit as well too, because we have a lot of aspiring entrepreneurs that watch this, a lot of startup entrepreneurs that watch the David Vs Goliath Podcast. I’m sure we have a ton of dog owners as well, too. But when you came up with the idea and you decided there is a gaping hole in the market and you were going to personally fill that gap, in other words, you were going to go from a micro business to a serious full-time business that you were going to work on growing and building … I always talk about five things that make businesses successful. One is plans with goals. Two is people. Three is technology that we leverage in our business. Four is the process, we all leverage technology in our business, and then five is courage. So starting with plans and goals and the right people, did you A, do this on your own, B, how much did you plan, and C, how did you get this funded? Go.
Daniel Schulof:
As for people and expertise, I, having published a book about what links I believe exist between a dog eating something and a dog developing or not developing a disease, does not mean that I know everything that there is to know or enough even, to make kibble products. I know a lot about the nutritional issues going into this process before I founded the company because I spent literally four years working in this book, but there’s more to it, just the making the product side. Making kibble, the reason that low carb kibble didn’t exist until I came along was because just like bread or cereal or pasta or things that just now we’re starting to see very low carb keto-friendly versions of them, kibble’s has basically made the same way, historically.
Daniel Schulof:
What kibble is just a meaty version of any one of those things. You mix a bunch of stuff together, including meat in the case of kibble, but not the case in pasta or whatever. And essentially, you heat these ingredients up and because there’s carbohydrate in there, when you heat it up, it all holds together. If you’ve ever tried to bake a loaf of bread without using flour-
Adam Degraide:
Yeah. Forget it.
Daniel Schulof:
It doesn’t really work. It falls apart. That’s what the flour or the starch does in there, is it holds it all together. And so as an engineering matter, making low carb things like that is hard because number one, it’s hard. Number two, it’s more expensive. A calorie of carbohydrate is far cheaper to source than a calorie of meat-based protein, one tenth. And because the public had been misled about the healthfulness of these things for so long, there was no incentive to do it. And so for those three reasons, nobody had ever really set out to do it.
Daniel Schulof:
And so I basically was like, “We’re going to give this a good faith shot.” I know a lot about the nutritional issues. And I know enough about the industry to know who I can partner with to help me get up to speed with doing the rest of it. That was what gave me, that was the loose thinking about, “Okay, this is how we’re going to get this off the ground.” We found formulation partners in the form of veterinary nutritionists and in the form of food science experts that are more engineering types and gratefully, vitally, a co-manufacturing partner that was willing to take us on when we were super little and had very little money and just a lot of ambition.
Daniel Schulof:
And we started a one year process of trial and error of like, “We’ll run, okay. Here’s the formula. We know it’s going to hit all the nutritional markers we want to hit, but is it going to make kibble? Let’s find out. We’re going to run a test batch and see how it produces, see how palatable it is.” And it basically took us a year of trial and error like that to create our minimum viable product that we knew dogs like to eat. We knew it hit the nutritional markers we wanted to hit. We could deal with, live with the cost to produce it. It was consistent enough to scale. And so that was the process of going from zero to known viable product about one year, 12 months.
Adam Degraide:
Now, who funded that piece? Was that you personally?
Daniel Schulof:
Friends, family, fools. People had seen me-
Adam Degraide:
Friends, family, and fools. I like it. Nobody’s ever put that way.
Daniel Schulof:
Basically maybe 150 grand total, that was what we needed. We needed my salary, which at that time, which was absolutely nothing and enough to produce these test batches. We weren’t selling anything at that point so there was no-
Adam Degraide:
It’s all burn. It was all burn at that point.
Daniel Schulof:
What’s that?
Adam Degraide:
You were burning money because you were developing the product, so it was all burn.
Daniel Schulof:
Yeah, but it’s easier than software because I didn’t need employees to write code all day or anything like that. The cost to produce, even when we were trying to get the formula right, that was sellable product, conceivably, if it came out right. If the nutritional markers hit or whatever, that each small production batch, that’s sellable product. It’s like something that … So anyway, it didn’t take a ton of money. 150 grand or something like that is what it took to get through the first year. And then we put it into market in early 2018. And from then, for the next two years was basically a process of gradually growing it and taking on money from folks who were just increasingly large.
Daniel Schulof:
My demonstrable success as an entrepreneur and as a bankable, investible person came from the fact that even though the micro business was never designed to be something that you invest money in and it’s going to return 10X, it was still, I like to believe, very hard thing to do. To create that, I had no money for that. There’s all boot strapped and I made enough that I could leave my job making six figures as a lawyer and still pay my bills just off of this micro business. I was able to be like, “I’m going to write a book about a subject that I’ve got no formal training on whatsoever.”
Adam Degraide:
I love it.
Daniel Schulof:
And I’m going to turn it out and it’s going to be well received and I delivered entirely on that front.
Adam Degraide:
Yeah. It’s not like you were a veterinarian.
Daniel Schulof:
No, I’m not a veterinarian.
Adam Degraide:
Yeah. You’re not a doctor. And I was …
Daniel Schulof:
What do you get? Dude, here’s the thing. If your lawyers are good, you’ve had this experience. When you’re a lawyer and you’re litigating cases involving technology, some of the cases, I dealt with very diverse technology depending on who the client is. We represented Lockheed Martin in a case involving trade secrets over an aircraft that hasn’t been flown since World War II. We represented Cox Communications involving voiceover IP technology in 2010 or something like that. I don’t know anything about those technologies when the engagement begins, but by the time you’re getting to a point where you’re litigating that case in earnest…
Adam Degraide:
Yeah. You’re expert. You’re an expert.
Daniel Schulof:
You’re a pure expert and so you develop an intellectual hubris behind like, “I’ve learned very complicated, scientific stuff. I can learn this and it gives you the confidence to do it.” And then once I got in there and I realized how much … Is this a R-rated podcast or is this a PG podcast?
Adam Degraide:
You can say whatever you want. It just will get beeped by my-
Daniel Schulof:
Horse (beep). Once I realized how much horse (beep) was being taught to veterinarians and just how little actual evidentiary backing was behind it, it was like, “Oh my God.” It gave me more confidence. I can stand toe to toe with any expert in the world on some of these issues and be able to outdebate them, essentially, not through being a particularly good debater, but being more knowledgeable about it.
Adam Degraide:
I can tell that, Daniel, if you were one of my attorneys in any litigation that had happened, I would’ve liked you up there because you’re fired up. You’re passionate about what you do. You could tell that you’re clearly confident and if you’re not, you’re going to make it up, which is one of the most successful things that people do. Some of the most profound people that I’ve ever met that have built products up from nothing are most of the time just making it up as they go along. But the fact that you did the research, you went out for four years, you wrote the book, you had the confidence, you saw the need, friends, family, and fools helped you develop the actual formula, and here you are now.
Daniel Schulof:
Well, no. They provided the money.
Adam Degraide:
Well, that’s what I mean, yeah.
Daniel Schulof:
Really smart people who were anything but fools helped us [inaudible 00:29:34]
Adam Degraide:
Yeah. You, you couldn’t develop it without the money, so that’s the way I look at it, is that even the people that invest in my business a lot of the software comes from my brain, but I couldn’t do it without the people that helped me fund it.
Daniel Schulof:
Oh, no, of course.
Adam Degraide:
Yeah. They’re funding the brain and so that’s awesome. Currently right now, what is the size of your team in the business?
Daniel Schulof:
The folks who make our products, now we have a somewhat significant product line that includes a few different styles of diet, few different styles of supplements and treats, and so we don’t own any factories ourselves. Everything that we produce is created by a co-manufacturing partner that makes them to our specifications and we have different ones depending on the different product. None of those people are employees of mine. In addition, the same thing applies with regard to distribution. We don’t try to be in any brick and mortar stores at all right now. All we do is sell through eCommerce channels, primarily directly to consumers. And so in the say way-
Adam Degraide:
Are you doing affiliates?
Daniel Schulof:
Do we sell through affiliate marketers? Yeah, we do.
Adam Degraide:
Yeah. I was going to say one of my best friends runs one of the biggest affiliate marketing businesses in the world so I got to make sure I put him in touch with you because he’s a beast.
Daniel Schulof:
You want to plug him here. Who’s that?
Adam Degraide:
He’s a beast. It’s a company called GiddyUp. His name is Topher Grant and he’s an animal in the affiliate world so you should look him up, GiddyUp.
Daniel Schulof:
Yeah. That’s part of what we do. We do have a good product for the digital age in the sense that the nature of the product is substantive. What makes it cool and what makes it attractive as a product can be described in words. This is low carb kibble. It’s kibble with 80% less carbohydrate than what … So search-based marketing, paid advertising on Google and Microsoft and platforms like that, that’s our bread and butter [inaudible 00:31:42].
Adam Degraide:
When you first created the product, you think about it because there wasn’t a lot of alternatives out there. So when you first created the product, did you have good search volume? In other words, did you do any research as to whether people were searching for these things beforehand or did you just instinctually know it and go for it and hope the searches were there, because some people reverse engineer. They go and try to find what are people looking for right now on the internet that’s not being served and how can I fill that gap or the others is I have a good instinct that this is not being served and they hope that the market then finds them. Was yours a little bit of both or was it one or the other or …
Daniel Schulof:
Yeah, it’s a little bit of both is the general answer. I published my book in 2016. And so by that time, keto meant something for a lot of average consumers. There were people who were low carb people, low carb believers. The way that you at the beginning of the show were like, “This makes me feel good,” is definitely a thing.
Adam Degraide:
It does. I just wish I could stick to it.
Daniel Schulof:
Do what?
Adam Degraide:
I said I wish I could stick to it. It does make me feel better, but I just it’s so hard to [inaudible 00:32:50]
Daniel Schulof:
It’s the same with me. I’m a big endurance person. I do endurance sports. That’s one of my hobbies, so I run constantly and that’s why … I believe keto diets are very healthy for me. I do not eat one because partially because it doesn’t support that and then partially because I can because I run a lot. But like I said, hundred books, easily, a hundred books had been written in the human nutrition domain about keto diets by that point, so there was a thriving community of low carb people out there. And to me, that instinct that, “There’s enough of them and 50% of them are dog owners. I’m going to be able to sell to those people,” was there. There was in the early days, of course, some degree of empirical approach to it where I could look at the tools that Google makes available and try to understand how many people are probably searching for something like this already.
Adam Degraide:
Sure. Totally. Yeah.
Daniel Schulof:
But it’s more of a awareness and education challenge than it is brand refinement. The main thrust of being successful in our business is about communicating the value of reducing carbohydrate intake and telling people that we’re a solution for that.
Adam Degraide:
Have you done any research, Daniel, on other animal types? In other words, cats or animals that are [inaudible 00:34:13] or …
Daniel Schulof:
There’s a few things. When it comes to the link between dietary carbohydrate and health diseases, health conditions, health issues, you could frame things like I did at the beginning of the show as a matter of lifespan, but it requires a little bit of … The reasoning is low carb diet helps with X disease. X disease tends to shorten lifespan. There’s the link between, that’s how you explain that, the benefit there, but the diseases specifically are common to both dogs and cats. So obesity, diabetes, cancer are the three primary places where there is at least some degree of evidentiary published, peer-reviewed scientific evidence that says carbohydrate is behind this.
Adam Degraide:
What I thought was fascinating too, and like I said, anything that I say here medical is just always thoughts that I have just as a human, one in three animals or one in three dogs, you said, get cancer in their lifetime.
Daniel Schulof:
Oh, it’s hugely common, yeah.
Adam Degraide:
Sometimes I wonder if it’s a blend of what they’re eating, but also what we’re injecting in them throughout their lives or forcing them to take. I always wonder whether it’s vaccinations or a shot for this and a shot for that and a medication for this. I don’t know how much research they do on that type of stuff, but we do know that diet definitely has a big impact on it. And it’s the same thing with humans. You have a lifespan and it’s not just about living to a certain amount of time. It’s also about the quality of life that you get to live during that time and if you have a dog or a cat that’s overweight and not healthy, all of that stuff plays in together.
Adam Degraide:
We got to take one more break and then when we come back, we’re going to have some fun and talk about one of my favorite topics, which is courage. You’re with Daniel Schulof, the keto, low carb dog man, and Adam Degraide here, your host on the David Vs Goliath podcast. Here’s another message from a very important sponsor. Stay tuned.
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Adam Degraide:
And we’re back for our final segment with Daniel. Daniel, this has been a lot of fun having you on. Like I said, I had no idea that dogs needed to eat low carb as well as we did. One of the things we talk about here on the podcast … Basically, you had an idea, you started a micro business, it supported yourself, you left a business that you weren’t really enjoying being in anymore. All of that business life experience that you had as a lawyer though, gave you the wisdom and talent and the confidence to go and research and present something evidentially, with evidence on why this could be potentially healthier. You then realize there was a gap in the market. You got friends, families, and fools to help you believe in that gap as well. They funded it. You worked with really smart people to build a low carb, keto diet.
Adam Degraide:
In all of this stuff that people do, that you’ve gone through from the very first job that you’ve had to your lawyer experience to the research that you did to the fact that you love dogs, everything in your own life leads up to where we as entrepreneurs, which is, “You know what? Not only do I believe I can do it. I’m going to do it,” because hesitancy can kill an idea, as you know. Action brings life. What was it for you, Daniel? I know it was a lot of a life experience, but what was the intangible that said, “I not only believe this is going to work. I’m going to make it work,” and then step out in that faith and do it?
Daniel Schulof:
The two things this spring to mind, the first was, and I tell this to other folks who are looking to make this similar leap to what I made, from something that’s very consistent and bankable as a job to something that’s riskier, because it starts with zero. I say this a lot because it was a big, meaningful thing for me, is getting psychologically, authentically comfortable going to zero was a big mental step for me. So being like, “Okay. If this fails, if I set out to do this and it does not work, what is my life really going to look like? Let me really try to imagine that and make sure that I can live with that. If it happens, it’s not the desired outcome, but if it happens, can I deal with what that’s going to look like?”
Daniel Schulof:
And in my case, what that would look like is probably taking two years of steps back in my career as an attorney. Like anything else, big organization, seniority matters. You move up through the ranks over time. Probably going to spend two years on this project and I’m going to have to reenter the job pool a couple years back. I do have a graduate degree from a leading institution and a good resume so I will be able to get a job as a lawyer, maybe not at the same ultra high profile international firm as I was at before, but probably, honestly. It was like that. And I’ll probably have some degree of credit card debt and I’ll have less savings. I’m going to be starting over somewhat financially, but I was in my late twenties and I came out of graduate school. You have to go to law school. I didn’t start working when I was 18 or something like that. And so it wasn’t a great deal of that. And so getting comfortable with that. “Okay. What is that going to look like? What is that going to feel like?” I was single at that point. I wasn’t married. I didn’t have any kids. I didn’t have other people that were relying on me for my income and so getting there was the mental hurdle that I needed to overcome.
Adam Degraide:
Yeah. It sounds to me like yours was purely rational, but it was rational to the point though, where you were able to allow yourself to feel what it would’ve been like, had you would’ve been in that area. That’s what I meant by that. It wasn’t purely rational in the sense that you had no heart feelings towards it. You rationally thought through the worst case scenario, put yourself on the couch as if it just happened and let yourself feel it. And you said, “Can I live with it?” And the answer was, “Yes.”
Daniel Schulof:
Yeah. It’s not that bad.
Adam Degraide:
Not that bad. And I tell people if you’re a talented person in general and if you’re watching and listening to David Vs Goliath Podcast right now and you have a desire and you have an idea and you have something that you haven’t done, don’t not move forward with that idea in some way. You’re going to do it. There is a step of faith there, but to Daniel’s point, when you do it makes a big difference, how you do it makes a big difference, and your support network makes a big difference.
Adam Degraide:
So in Daniel’s case, he didn’t have a lot of people to worry about because it was himself. And so he had to get to the point where he was on the couch and he was comfortable with the fact that if this thing blows up in my face, I can live with it. Now, you might be married. You might have kids. You might have other people that are counting on you, a sick relative, a sick mother or whatever and that could be holding you back as well, too. In that case, you have to go through a different process mentally, but the same process is absolutely something you should do. I love the fact that Daniel went through the intellectual process of what’s the worst case scenario. And in most cases, when you get there, it’s not unlivable and it’s not undoable. So therefore, what are we waiting for? At some point, let’s jump out and let’s do it. That’s really great advice, Daniel. Any other advice that you’d have?
Daniel Schulof:
Yeah. The other side of it is a little bit less laudable. That at least involves some degree of forethought and courage. The other side is just selfish. I like challenging stuff and my hobby is to do these big, super mega endurance races that give me a sense of pride because most people can’t do them. You know what I mean? And I like being like, “I did this, I’m a badass,” and whatever that’s driven by, insecurity or whatever it is, is a thing for me. And I like the feeling of being like, “You know what? You weren’t able to do it, but I was, and I did that.” And it felt that way with regard to setting up and starting a business and making it successful as well. I had belief in myself to some degree. It’s really easy from where I’m sitting right now to be like, “I had the intellectual hubris to try,” but in the moment, you feel it both ways. Some moments I’m feeling very confident that I could do this [inaudible 00:43:54]
Adam Degraide:
Yeah and other moments, you’re like, “What the heck am I, what am I doing?” And speaking of endurance, by the way, speaking of endurance, my concept of endurance is a long night out with my wife on the town, still getting out of bed, walking my 50 yards over here to my gym and my studio and running on an elliptical machine for 45 minutes and trying to do light training in my strength training for 50 minutes. If I could do that three times a week, I’m feeling pretty good about myself. In your case, you’re doing Ironman and triathletes and all this stuff like that, so good for you. Good for you.
Daniel Schulof:
But I don’t have the endurance. I had to give up the drinking side. I had to give up drinking. I can’t do that side of it. I don’t have the endurance for that. I found as I aged, I couldn’t do that.
Adam Degraide:
Something’s got to give. You can’t have everything. You can’t eat candy and chocolate and vegetables all day long and have that work for you. At some point, one of those is got to go and probably going to have to be the chocolate, unfortunately, and adult beverages.
Daniel Schulof:
I say this all the time and it’s absurd, but I eat ice cream every night, literally every night of my life, and not a spoonful. I’ve had my ice cream for the day, a significant amount of ice cream, literally every night of my life, but I just have gotten to a point where I’m doing so much volume when it comes to running that it’s just [inaudible 00:45:12]
Adam Degraide:
It seems to me, just looking at you, Daniel, looks to me like any calorie that goes in is being burned quickly, quickly burned in your side. Well, this has been awesome having you on the DVG podcast. How can people find you, Daniel?
Daniel Schulof:
I do maintain an active Twitter handle that is @DanielSchulof, but for the most part, my communication stuff is in the professional realm. I love doing interviews like this one. A big part of what I try to do is I believe that you should be able to hear from … I’m not an expert that’s like, “I put out this book and now you’re never going to hear from me.” Because I don’t have the credentialing that veterinarians have, I need to constantly be out there exposing myself to other people’s feedback publicly, letting people ask questions of me, letting people challenge the stuff that I put forth, because otherwise it’s too easy for people to just be like, “That’s a crank.” You need to be able to hear it and see it and so I do a lot of academic conferences and professional level stuff. But that being said, you can find a lot of podcast stuff. I do maintain a Twitter handle. I don’t think you’re going to learn a great deal about me if you follow it, but if you go to ketonaturalpetfoods.com, you will find a great deal of my writing, speaking, all that kind of stuff.
Adam Degraide:
Yeah. I saw it. It’s a great site. It’s well-built. It’s well-laid out. Your video is fantastic, so check it out. If you had a good time today on the DVG podcast …
Daniel Schulof:
I’ve had a wonderful time. I appreciate so much the amount of energy and forethought. Thank you for being thoughtful about doing research ahead of time. You’ve probably been on plenty as an interviewee yourself and the difference between a host who’s enjoying what they do and is taking the time to get familiar with me as an interviewee is night and day. When somebody hasn’t done that, man, that’s a tough experience. When somebody’s like you, it feels great so thank you.
Adam Degraide:
Well, you’re welcome because here at the DVG Podcast, what we try to do very specifically, watchers and viewers, as is to provide education, inspiration in stuff that you can actually activate in your business right here on the David Vs Goliath podcast. We’ll see you next week.
