A Hims cofounder fired his entire marketing team for AI. Now his 24/7 online vet service is growing 20% a month
When Joe Spector’s corgi, Eddie, ate four M&Ms, the Hims co-founder spent hours finding an emergency vet who could see him. One office directed him to a pet poison hotline, another was an hour away and he had to wait four hours. The bill came to $2,000.
“It doesn’t have to be this way,” Spector thought at the time. Luck.
This stressful struggle in 2021 sparked this idea: DutchVeterinary telehealth company Spector launched on July 1 of that year after helping build and launch Hims & Hers, a direct-to-consumer telehealth brand known for its alopecia and sexual health treatment. These companies have since grown exponentially to cover a range of health issues.
Celebrating its fifth anniversary, Dutch offers members video visits with veterinarians for $100 per year for up to five pets. This is roughly the cost of a single in-person visit to a regular veterinarian’s office. The company now operates in 35 states, up from eight at launch, as more states relax veterinary telemedicine restrictions. According to the company, the company has recorded millions of interactions and currently has more than 100,000 active members. grew up Dutch 20 million dollars in early 2022 to scale the platform in a round led by Forerunner Ventures.
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.
He fired his agency to expand the business
Although Dutch is clearly on the path to growth now, it was a bit stagnant for a while. Now Spector is placing a bigger bet on how the company markets itself.
Late last year, Spector said Dutch paid an outside agency about $50,000 a month to produce five pieces of creative material, or about $10,000 per piece.
“It’s both expensive and limited because so much of the marketing, especially with a new product, is just testing to see what resonates,” Spector said.
That’s why he fired that agency. In a way, this harsh move is reminiscent of what Bolt’s CEO said. Luck At the Workplace Innovation Summit held in May abandoned the entire human resources teamalthough managers have very different motivations for their moves.
In its place is a new in-house marketing team that relies heavily on AI tools to create content from static ads to fully animated and live-action ads. Dutch now produces about 50 pieces of content per month in-house, or a 10-fold increase, Spector said. It’s a job that costs about 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’s really going on with pet owners who often don’t know virtual veterinary care exists.
