1. What’s the quick origin story of your brand, and what makes your product or positioning genuinely different from other options in your niche?

Maris Laatre: Bully Max started with a simple belief: dog owners deserve pet nutrition they can actually trust. Long before I joined the team, the founders noticed a huge gap in the market — most dog food brands focused on cost-cutting formulas instead of real performance, longevity, and transparency. Bully Max was created to fix that.

What makes us genuinely different is that we formulate every product with working dogs, active breeds, and health-focused owners in mind. Instead of generic, one-size-fits-all nutrition, our line is built around high-protein, high-calorie, functional formulas that support strength, endurance, digestion, and recovery — backed by real testing and customer results. We also highlight something rare in our niche: complete ingredient transparency and zero fillers. Every product is engineered to deliver a measurable difference in a dog’s health, energy, and performance, which is why our customers stay loyal for years.

2. Who is your best customer today, and what specific problem are they hiring your product to solve? How has that understanding changed since you launched?

Maris Laatre: Our best customer today is a dog owner who treats their pet like a true family member and wants visible, reliable results from their nutrition — whether that’s better muscle tone, healthier weight gain, or improved overall performance and vitality. Many of our customers come to us after trying multiple foods or supplements that over-promise and under-deliver, so they’re looking for something that actually works and shows measurable improvement in their dog’s strength, health, and energy.

When we first launched, we thought our core audience would be mostly working-dog owners — trainers, K9 units, and athletes. Over time, we realized that everyday pet parents were experiencing the same challenges: dogs who struggled to keep weight on, picky eaters, or breeds that naturally need higher-calorie, higher-protein nutrition. That shifted how we position our products. Today, our messaging is much more focused on practical results for real families, not just performance use cases, and that understanding has made our customer relationships stronger and our product development sharper.

3. Which 2–3 channels drive most of your revenue right now (for example SEO, paid social, email, marketplaces, influencers), and what have you learned about making those channels work in your category?

Maris Laatre: ur top revenue drivers right now are paid social, email/SMS, and influencer partnerships, each playing a different role in the funnel. Paid social (primarily Meta) continues to be our strongest acquisition channel, but we’ve learned that creative variety and fast iteration matter more than any single “winning” ad. In the pet category, authentic before-and-after stories and UGC outperform polished studio assets almost every time.

Email and SMS drive the bulk of our repeat revenue, and the big unlock for us was treating them as retention engines rather than broadcast channels. The more we leaned into behavioral flows, reorder reminders, breed-specific guidance, and purchase-based segmentation, the more predictable our LTV became.

Lastly, influencers have become a major trust accelerator, especially micro-creators with real dog-owner audiences. What we learned is that smaller creators convert better than celebrity partnerships, as long as the content feels like a genuine recommendation rather than a campaign.

4. How are you thinking about search in 2025 — Google, AI assistants like ChatGPT, and other discovery platforms? What, if anything, have you changed in your content or site to stay visible as AI search grows?

Maris Laatre: Search is shifting fast, and we’re treating 2025–26 as the beginning of an “AI-first discovery era.” For Bully Max, that means we’re no longer creating content just for Google rankings, we’re creating content that AI assistants like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini can confidently cite as authoritative. We’ve doubled down on clearer product explanations, expert-backed educational articles, and straightforward answers to the types of questions dog owners actually ask conversationally.

We’re also restructuring content around entities rather than just keywords, making sure our brand, products, and education pages send strong signals of credibility and consistency across the web. On the site level, we’ve improved transparency elements like ingredient breakdowns, comparisons, testing details, and FAQs, because AI models tend to surface brands that are easy to “understand” and trust.

So while Google still matters, we’re preparing for a world where customers rely on AI assistants to summarize options — and we want to be one of the 2–3 brands that consistently show up in those answers.

5. What do you do to turn first‑time buyers into repeat customers and advocates? Are there specific experiences, content, or community touches that work especially well for you?

Maris Laatre: At Bully Max, turning first-time buyers into repeat customers starts with earning their trust quickly. For us, that means two things: delivering a noticeably better product experience and offering support that feels personal, not generic. When someone buys from us for the first time, we immediately send a welcome sequence that walks them through how to use the product correctly, what results to expect, and how long those results typically take. This reduces uncertainty and helps people feel confident right from day one.

We also build a direct relationship early. Our team checks in proactively to ask how their dog is responding, and we encourage customers to send photos and updates. A surprising number of them do — and those small, human moments turn transactional buyers into true fans. Our private community groups and UGC-driven social content reinforce that sense of belonging; customers love seeing real dogs with real results.

Loyalty grows fastest when people feel seen, so we personalize recommendations based on their dog’s age, weight, and goals rather than pushing one-size-fits-all bundles. Finally, we celebrate customer stories publicly, transformations, training milestones, rescue success stories, which not only strengthens advocacy but also signals to new buyers that real pet owners stand behind our brand.

6. If you had to write a short playbook for an ecommerce founder one stage behind you, what would you double down on over the next 12 months — and what would you stop doing entirely?

Maris Laatre: If I were giving a playbook to an ecommerce founder one stage behind us, I’d tell them to double down on three things: deep customer understanding, retention, and operational clarity. Spend more time talking directly to customers, through surveys, support transcripts, community spaces, or even SMS replies, because those insights will shape better products, better messaging, and better funnels than any analytics dashboard alone.

Second, invest early in retention systems: email/SMS lifecycle flows, a simple loyalty program, and post-purchase education. It’s far easier (and cheaper) to grow when your existing customers come back consistently.

Third, build a repeatable acquisition engine, not a new experiment every week. Pick one core channel that already shows promise and get really good at it before chasing shiny objects.

What would I stop doing? Constantly switching tactics. Many founders burn time and money jumping from one “trick” to the next. Steady execution on a few proven basics will beat scattered experimentation every single time.