YouSaid · the spoken record

Brad Baxter

lines on the record: 67
first: 2025-05-05
most recent: 2025-05-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“When you talk about luck, we've certainly had our share of what I would say some bad luck things happen and there's some good luck things that have happened and I think all those kind of balance out the timing part of it I think was kind of essential because we kind of grew up with our business during the time that e-commerce was coming into play and Without e commerce, this business would not have existed. And as far as luck is concerned, I think you generate your own luck just from the hard work and trying to do things the right way and good luck follows you when you're trying to do the right thing and you're trying to. Do what matters versus just hoping that something's going to land in your lap.”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, she did. And again, I'll say that this would not have been possible without her and not from the standpoint of, you know, I don't want to give the wrong impression because she had a full-time job. I mean, she was working, she's always worked full-time. And on top of that, she was carting the kids around to the various schools and picking up after dance. And I was too when I could. She definitely filled a lot of the gaps while maintaining a professional career herself. And so I have a lot of respect for her and being able to do that and supporting my dream to build this business because without her, it would have been a lot tougher.”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think one of the things that maybe we could have done differently is You know, I never actively went out and looked for funding to help accelerate the business. You know, maybe I could have brought it to the level that it's at now more quickly. Especially when there's competition around the corner. Sometimes speed is important. You've got to come to market quickly. And if you're taking your time and you're doing it organically, you can get beat out of the market pretty quickly if you're not careful.”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So for me, it was just recognizing that I'm not the guy that probably is the best person to take the business from, you know, 150 million forward.”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's more about building teams. It's more about hiring the right people. It's not about that one individual person that can do it all. It's how do we bring in the right people? How do we collaborate more effectively? And I felt like, you know, Jacob really wanted this and he had proven himself as the operations officer. And I always kind of described him as the glue that kind of held everybody together as we were growing. And I'm still there. I'm still here today. I'm in my office. And I'm still active in product development. And I still have my opinion about things that the hills that I need to die on. I'm still going to die on those hills, but there's a lot of hills that I used to want to die on that I, you know, it's okay. I'm going to let somebody else figure that out.”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it wasn't really about that. It was recognizing that the business was changing. My skill set was being able to do a lot of different things fairly well. And wear a lot of different hats in the business, and that was how I was able to survive for so long without having to hire a lot of people is because I was able to do a lot of different things and kind of fill the gaps and just do everything. And I will say that there's probably nothing in the business that I haven't done, including cleaning the toilets. When the company gets larger.”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think we were doing about 80% direct consumer and international was maybe five to eight percent, something like that, and the rest was the small amount of retail that we had at the time. So yeah, direct to consumer is a huge part of our business, still is today.”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a very interesting time. There were a lot of things that we had to do to keep the lines running. And I think if I recall, we were considered an essential business because we provided pet supplies so we could keep our business running. Sales did dip for a while, but that was only for maybe a month. And then after that, they started coming back up again. And then through the whole pandemic, they just spiked. It was quite a crazy time.”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, it certainly has. So it's getting even more difficult now because it used to be just provide a great piece of hardware. Okay, that's great, but now you have to provide a great piece of hardware and match it with a great digital experience as well.”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bringing on Pondera, our partners, kind of helped us, I would say, mature a little bit. And having another set of eyes on the business that are looking at it from a purely business standpoint and being a little bit outside of the day-to-day stuff, because when you're in the business, I mean, sometimes you don't see some of the things you need to see. So I think it was helpful to have them as partners. And to this day, it's been helpful to have them as partners. And one of the things that they helped us with was to see that the trajectory of the business was going to outgrow. Building that we were in. I mean, we already saw that, but it was more of a fact, it was more around, you know, how big are we going to go? And so we ended up adding another 160,000 square feet.”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it wasn't too bad, but through that deal, we were able to get my dad cashed out. I took a few chips off the table, but nothing was put on the balance sheet of the company. The company was operating profitably and it didn't need outside funding necessarily. So just kind of an interesting point to make is that none of that funds were put on the balance sheet of the company. And just to clarify, too, it wasn't a majority ownership share. They actually bought 50% exactly. The company, and then Jacob and I own the other fifty percent.”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's a matter of priorities. I mean, I could have paid myself more, but I opted. I chose to. Turn everything back into the business as much as I could.”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. There was a lot of pressure at the time, and I remember this even in automotive for automotive suppliers to move a lot of their production offshore. We studied this and we found out that what it would cost us to ship the product from overseas to our warehouse is what it would cost us to assemble it locally. So it was kind of a wash in that regard. And then just having more control over the supply chain where we could be a little bit more just in time with our suppliers being local. And we had to have a warehouse anyway for fulfillment. So it just kind of made sense to be vertically integrated for a lot of reasons.”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we definitely did. I mean, we doubled our sales from 2015 to 2016. Wow. And we maintained profitability. Really started to understand the importance of marketing and doing it the right way, targeted, focused, as well as sort of high funnel marketing, which is bringing people in that, you know, are unsure about the product. And it might take six months, six to nine months to get that person to convert, but you've got to be spending money on that as well. You can't just be spending all your money on the conversions.”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“YouTube, Instagram They would promote it, and then we would do a giveaway. And this proved to be very successful. I think coming into that promotion, we had about 30,000 visitors to our site per month. And then I think we bumped that up to over 300,000 due to that promotion. So it was just a huge increase in visitation to our site.”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think one of the breakout moments for us was really that Christmas holiday season. And this was kind of a unique idea that the Jacob had. And it was called the 25 Days of Christmas. And what we did is we were sending Litter Robots to what you would call today as influencers. And every day we would have an event where we would, the influencer would talk about the litter robot, how they're using it, and then we would be doing a giveaway as well.”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and so it definitely needed some help. And you're right. I'm not a good marketing guy. And the percent of revenue that you have to spend on marketing is usually more than you would imagine. And I think at the time when Jacob came on board, we were spending about 8% of our revenue on marketing, which I thought was just. And then Jacob was coming to me and saying, Well, can we bump it up to 10? Can we bump it up to 12? Can we bump it up to 15? And every time we did that, we were seeing results because we were applying it in the right way. Then in combination with a brand new product that we were launching, Combination of those two at the time really were very impactful for the company.”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think revamping the website was one of the first big steps that we had to take. We had sort of a retro look to our website prior to that, I believe.”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I definitely thought of it as a multi-million dollar business. I can remember at the time sort of the Number that we were shooting for the pie in the sky number was 20 million. That's where we wanted to take the business That was the long shot.”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are a lot of things happening, and you just had to, it would be overwhelming if you thought about them all together. But by breaking them down and focusing on things, knocking them out one at a time, just focusing on it, finishing it, and going on to the next thing Over time, that starts to build some momentum where you can really get in trouble is if you start trying to do too much all at once and you start thinking about all the things you have to do, it can just bury you.”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was really a grind for a while. Going back to what I said earlier, I'd rather die than not be independent. So that's what it took to remain independent. And I had this dream of building a great business around a great product idea. And if I wanted to do that, I had to keep the other business going. I think over those years, one of the things I was able to do is compartmentalize things. So I can focus, and that's maybe a problem I have, is I get really, I can focus on something and I won't hear anything else going on around me. And so the, you know, the house can be burning down over here. And I'm focusing on this to get it done, even though this is happening over here. And I think you had to do some of that during those years where”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was answering calls. I had eventually I had a person dedicated to answering calls, but I've answered hundreds, if not thousands, of customer service calls over the years.”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Certainly, there was a worry about that, but not a strong worry. And I knew how hard it was to do what we were doing. And the other thing that I understood, too, is that with this kind of a product and something that's new like this, you have to have a very strong customer service presence. And from day one, whatever we could provide for customer service, we were doing it. It was a major pillar of our business and part of the whole process. And I knew that that would be difficult to replicate for somebody trying to come in and compete with us. I mean, sure, it could have happened, but... I just kind of stuck to my guns and I knew what was going to make it work long term”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One was from the competitor LitterMaid. And if I recall, I think it was a number. Around 200,000 to buy the patents, and I got the impression that they essentially wanted to just buy it and shut it down and not pursue it. And it really wasn't attractive to me because I thought it could be way so much more than that in the future. And so I really didn't consider that.”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We really didn't. I wasn't looking for investors. I wasn't looking to supercharge the business. I was kind of going for the long game on this. I had a couple of offers to buy the business early on.”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so when push came to shove, when you really looked at it, it was actually quite ideal for direct consumer because the product was quite large. And does the consumer really want to drag it home from the store or would they prefer to have it show up on their doorstep”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did. I mean, we were trying to get into the stores all the time, and at the time, I thought that was our path to success was to get into retail because then we'd have all these eyeballs looking at the product and all these retail stores out there that would If they had 2,000 stores and you supply them each with two units, that's pretty high volume, and so that was really what I was focused on. We really didn't have the margin in the product, and most of the retailers wanted 50 points on the product, and there just was no way that we could provide that. We were maybe making 30 points at most on the product at the time. So there's no way really to make it attractive to the retailer. Plus, the unit was quite large.”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“2004 was the first year that we hit a million dollars and that was a huge milestone for us. Prior to that, the numbers were pretty small.”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The volumes were still pretty low, but we were growing organically, and I could see the trajectory was moving in the right direction. And when we retooled, the product came out looking like a more refined product. I mean, when I look at it today, it looks pretty clunky compared to what we're producing today. But at that time, it was a refinement over what we had been producing. So we got a bump in sales from that”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wasn't that bad, but with overhead and I guess. You boil it all down and you include everything, yeah. We were not making anything.”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These are the choices and the balance balancing act that you have to make as an entrepreneur. What am I going to do here? Am I going to take some extra time and improve the design or do I take what is a good design and just sort of replicate it so that I can at least start making money and move on from there?”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think it ever really crossed my mind to do that, to fold, yeah. I got pushed a little bit, and I think that helped because. Once I got pushed and I kind of went over the edge and decided, you know, I really got to do this. I was super motivated to get it done. So I retooled that thing. I designed it and retooled it in the course of about 12 to 18 months. I essentially took what was the previous design and just converted it to injection molding with a few things that I knew that I could add, but it was all about a race to getting it done as quickly as possible so that I could start making money on the product and keep the business alive.”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was starting to feel irresponsible, especially to her, I think. And I certainly recognized it and knew that I had to do something fairly quickly. And I did. I managed to work through some of my previous contacts. And without any kind of financing, without a bank loan, without investors, I was actually able to retool the product by amortizing the cost of the tooling with one supplier that I worked with and then I was able to take out a loan, a two-year loan at 12% interest with another supplier that I had worked with. And through those connections, I was able to retool the product.”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was kind of by design in the beginning, but then as the volume started to grow, I realized that even though the volumes were growing, I wasn't really able to make money because it was just so expensive to produce. Product. And so at about five years, I had kind of come to Jesus moment with my wife about what am I doing? Because I was, at that time, I think I had dumped about 300 to 350,000 dollars into the business just to keep it alive. And that was all coming from the other business. And I was taking a very minimal salary so that I could dump everything back into the automated pet care business and keep that alive. My wife put up with that for five years and then it kind of came to a head and like, what are you doing? Where's all this money going and what's the end game?”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was hand assembly. Each one was kind of an individual project because of the inconsistencies of the parts from the vacuum forming.”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it was the other business that helped keep it alive. I mean, without that other business, it would have died very quickly because we would have run out of cash and there just wasn't enough. There was no profit for the first five years. And because of the manufacturing method that I chose, there wasn't a real strong possibility that I was going to be able to make a lot of profit on it going forward. Plus, it wasn't very scalable.”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My wife will tell you that at the time I was spending very little time at home, I was probably spending 12 to 14, maybe sometimes more hours a day working on both jobs. That I can recall sometimes spending time in Pontiac late into the night and then realizing how late it was. And instead of going home, I just actually just slept on the floor. Wow.”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We weren't. And it was in some ways by design because, like I mentioned before, we were trying to refine the product, trying to understand exactly how it would work the best, how the cats would use it. I mean, we would have certainly taken more volume if we could have gotten it, but it was kind of a blessing that the volumes were low because it allowed us to kind of take our time and learn and to adjust some things about the product. Certainly quite a few things that we learned early on about cat behavior, how the cats would use it, and a lot of those changes got incorporated into the early models.”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Amazon came a bit later, but But you're right. I mean, the websites at the time are all basically homegrown. They all look different. There were no standards. And we certainly fell into that category. And a lot of people would look at the website, but then they would call us. They wouldn't want to place an order on the website. They would want to call in. So we took a lot of phone orders during those days.”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We came away with about five And then shortly thereafter that we had launched our website, which is a complete homegrown type thing. There weren't any out-of-the-box options at the time. I think we worked with a friend, a neighbor down the road that helped us with our very first website. And so we were into e-commerce very early, just kind of by necessity due to the size of the product. And we didn't have a lot of margin in the product either.”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Convention Center there, and we took the litter robot there, and it was the first time the Litter robot had ever been out in public. That show was really interesting because people would come by and say, what is that? And I would tell them and then they would immediately say, oh, my cat would never go in there. So it wasn't very... Some ways very positive and uplifting because I was getting a lot of pushback on how weird it looked. But there were a few people that would come by and want to see how it worked. And as they watched it work, you could just see their eyes light up when the unit cycled and they saw exactly how it worked and how simple it was. I was getting kind of a mix of positive feedback as well as sort of the my cat would never use that kind of feedback.”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there were times when people kind of gave me a strange look, but look, I think they were happy to help me out. They may have thought whatever they thought, but as long as I was willing to pay them for their time and their effort. I think they didn't really mind or care what it was for. And I have to admit there were times when I did feel a little embarrassed around it. But I was just so driven to do it. And I thought it was, you know, it. The concept works so well, and I knew that there was a place for it, so I was driven to make it work. My kids were also very embarrassed. They never really wanted to say what their dad did Didn't really understand the other business, but they knew that I had something to do with cat boxes. And I didn't want to say that my dad made cat boxes.”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The building we were in actually was an old automotive factory. It was the original Oakland automotive company, which eventually became Pontiac. And so we were in this, I think it's like a 1910 structure. And it's a concrete building four stories tall. And it was on that fourth floor that we started building litter robots. And it was in the summertime. And I can remember it being very hot up there because, again, it was a concrete building. It didn't have any central air conditioning or anything like that. We had a window air conditioner, but that barely kept up because the concrete would heat up in the sun and it would just bake.”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, working in automotive, I had contacts that were back at Ford and Motor Company working at Electronics Division. I had contacts that knew how to make circuit boards. I was able to tap into that as far as The building the product. We did that in Pontiac, Michigan for a while, and I was actually the sole assembler for probably the first three or four months.”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was. I think when you talk about the risk standpoint, I think my dad figured that, look, my kid's not going to stiff me on this loan or on this investment. So I think there was that. And then, yeah, my wife was a big part of the support. Mechanism that allowed me to do a lot of this because without her, it would have been a lot more difficult for me if I was the sole provider for the family for sure.”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the first person I went to was my dad. And I said, Dad, I've got this crazy idea. I want to develop this litter box. And I think I need about $30,000 to invest in the initial set of tooling. Are you interested in providing a loan for that? He said that he was and that he would actually I was interested, he would be interested in becoming a partner, taking some equity in the company. And so for $35,000, which they actually had to refinance their home to get the cash for that $35,000, he got 35% of the business.”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, injection molding is really expensive and you want to make sure that you've got the design right because if you have to change it, it's very expensive. And I just didn't have that kind of capital at the time. And even though I was making okay money, I was funneling a lot of that money back into the business to grow the business. So I think at the time, actually, I was taking a salary of about $50,000. And the rest was being poured back into the business.”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wildan had developed a few prototypes, and so I brought those home with me, and I started modifying his prototypes because there were a few things that had to be worked out. So I was modifying his prototypes. And once I got those things figured out, I kind of moved then into the CAD design. And I think the CAD design took me. I don't know, maybe three, four months, something like that. I was doing it in the evenings. I was still working the other job, of course.”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. Yep. He was actually very happy with the fact that there was interest and. It was relatively low risk for him because if I succeeded, he succeeded. If I didn't, it wasn't any skin off his nose. So I think he was happy that there was a chance.”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. I mean, it was, he had done some prototyping, which was helpful. And I contacted him and I said, look, I've got an idea for a business and I'd like to take your idea to production.”
2025-05-05 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Whisker/Litter-Robot: Brad Baxter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT