When Joe Spector\u2019s corgi, Eddie, ate four M&Ms, the Hims cofounder spent hours trying to find an emergency vet who could see him. One office pointed him to a pet poison hotline, and another was an hour away and had a four-hour wait. The bill came out to $2,000.<\/p>\n
Spector thought at the time \u201cthis does not have to be that way,\u201d he told Fortune.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That stressful scramble in 2021 sparked the idea for Dutch<\/a>, the veterinary telehealth company Spector launched on July 1 of that year after helping build and take public Hims & Hers, the direct-to-consumer telehealth brand best known for treating hair loss and sexual wellness. Those companies have since grown exponentially to cover an array of health concerns.<\/p>\n Dutch, which just marked its fifth anniversary, offers members video visits with veterinarians for a flat $100 a year covering up to five pets. That amounts to roughly the cost of a single in-person visit at a regular veterinary office. The company now operates in 35 states, up from eight at launch, as more states loosen restrictions on veterinary telemedicine. The company has logged millions of interactions and now counts more than 100,000 active members, according to the company. Dutch raised $20 million<\/a> in early 2022 to scale the platform, in a round led by Forerunner Ventures.\u00a0<\/p>\n The company declined to share its current revenue and valuation, but its revenue grew 5.5x between 2022 and 2023, 2.2x between 2023 and 2024, and 1.8x between 2024 and 2025.<\/p>\n Firing his agency to grow the business<\/p>\n Although Dutch is clearly charting its growth path now, it was a bit stagnant for a while. Now Spector is making a bigger bet on how the company markets itself.\u00a0<\/p>\n Late last year, Spector said, Dutch was paying an outside agency roughly $50,000 a month to produce five pieces of creative material, or about $10,000 apiece.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s both expensive and it\u2019s just limited because so much of marketing, especially with a new product, is just testing to see what\u2019s resonating,\u201d Spector said. <\/p>\n So he fired that agency. That drastic move is somewhat reminiscent of Bolt\u2019s CEO telling Fortune at its Workplace Innovation Summit in May he had ditched his entire human resources team<\/a>, although the executives had very different motivations for their moves.<\/p>\n In its place is a new in-house marketing team leaning heavily on AI tools to generate content, from static ads to full animated and live-action commercials. Now Dutch produces about 50 pieces of content a month internally, or a 10x jump, Spector said. That\u2019s enough work to cost roughly half a million dollars a month through an agency, he said. Just as important as the savings, he said, is the ability to test what actually lands with pet owners who often don\u2019t know virtual vet care exists.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have to get over the trust factor,\u201d he said. \u201cWe have to educate consumers on how this even works, or like what\u2019s the use case.\u201d<\/p>\n