200 Hours of Dev Work in 20, Dog Festival Brand Building & AI-Powered Lead Gen with Aaron Argueta

Aaron: Hey Stephen, I appreciate you having me. I’m Aaron Argueta, co-founder and CMO of Bailey’s CBD for Pets, headquartered in Costa Mesa, California. We’ve been in business since 2017, and we make hemp-derived CBD supplements for dogs, cats and horses, all veterinary-crafted, small batch, made with love, third-party lab tested and quality assured.

Aaron: It was due to my business partner, Jay O’Keeffe. His pug was Bailey, and he was in the medical cannabis space really early on with CBD therapies, making therapeutic products for people with ailments like cancers, lupus and seizures. Those people weren’t looking to get high; they were looking for health benefits. One day he playfully made a label with Bailey the pug’s face on it, called it Bailey’s Complete Balanced Diet, and a few customers asked, my dog is dealing with some ailments too, and the CBD worked really well for me. Do you have something for my dog? He made the label for a few bottles, and within the first few bottles it was a hit.

We’d both been touring musicians, and we’d been friends for years. He knew I was entrepreneurial and business-driven, and one day we partnered up to bring it to life. We saw that most CBD brands had 200 different products and maybe one or two pet products. We wanted to make a brand dedicated to Bailey the pug that’s more fun and animated, that can help reduce the stigma around CBD for animals, and that makes you smile.

Aaron: It’s a matter of time in the market. We’ve been in business for nine years, and all of our products are made with our chief veterinarian, Dr. Robert J. Silver, DVM, out of Boulder, Colorado. He’s been partnered with us for going on nine years, and he helps us develop products, create dosage guides and be the authority arm for product development.

We also have thousands of reviews online, on Trustpilot, Google and our website’s product widgets. You can find great threads on Reddit where we’re often recommended. It’s word of mouth, social proof, and people publicly expressing their experiences with us. That matters especially now in 2026, when there are somewhere around 9.7 million Shopify stores. You might get an ad, look the company up, and have a hard time figuring out whether it’s real, and that introduces skepticism. When you can look up a brand and see a strong public profile and true third-party verified reviews, it goes a long way.

Aaron: Around 2019 or 2020 we noticed that pet parents were coming to us with two common concerns: my pet is super anxious and needs to calm down, or my dog is older or predisposed to joint health conditions and I’ve heard about CBD for that. So we made our products more user-friendly and more therapeutic by blending in active ingredients that work well together.

Our hip and joint soft chews pair CBD with glucosamine, MSM and green-lipped mussel, which are joint-supporting ingredients. Our calming blend chews add chamomile, valerian root, tryptophan and passion flower, natural herbal actives that have been used for centuries to help relax, calm and sleep. We found that pairing them with CBD gives pets a bit more of a calming effect than CBD on its own.
It’s also much easier for customers. If someone has a dog with hip dysplasia or joint pain, they can come to our website, see Bailey’s hip and joint CBD products, and narrow down exactly what suits their pet, rather than doing all-in-one research. It was a good, holistic way to market our products for intended solutions.

Aaron: It’s a cohesive ecosystem. We rely heavily on pop-up markets, dog festivals and dog events, and we’re weekend warriors with our team covering the field. We’re in Southern California, so there’s no shortage of dog-themed events, which is fun to be a part of. It’s one of our best ways to turn an in-person, one-on-one conversation into trust. Customers take something home, try it, and when they find it’s effective and their dog likes it, they find us online. Now we have a retention-based customer who is fond of us because of that impactful experience.

Retention is everything for us, so we offer high-incentive subscription programs, an easy-to-navigate website and a mobile app. The brand relationships, the cross-brand giveaways on Instagram and being involved in the local pet community are foundational. They give us the wings to invest more in our website and SEO. And if you look at Google Trends, the search volume for our branded keywords is on a constant upward trajectory. That tells us the in-person experience, word of mouth and local pet community are driving organic traffic and our own authority.

Aaron: We’ve been using AI tools for three-plus years, and it’s wild to watch how advanced they’ve become compared to how infantile they were three years ago. I’m actually running a process in the background right now. We have something like 300 blog articles on our website, and many were built in 2023 and 2024, in the early days of ChatGPT. Human writers developed them, and we used early ChatGPT to create the HTML structures that we copy-pasted into the articles. That created a big code mess, and now we have almost 300 articles to audit, fix and adjust.
I’m doing a complete audit and structural adjustment of all those blogs at scale through ChatGPT, using the plugins we have for Semrush, Google Search Console and Shopify. What would be somewhere around 200 hours of personal dev work, I’m probably going to be done with in about 20 hours. That’s incredible, because 200 hours of dev work could be upwards of forty thousand dollars. These tools put a lot of power back in the person’s hands. My frustration has long been how to get 200 hours of dev work alongside everything else we’re doing for CRO and site optimization, and spend all that money when we’re trying to build other parts of the business.

We also use Apollo for lead gen. We do a lot of B2B business, so our two internal sales reps create lead lists with ChatGPT, Gmail and Apollo working together. This week, for example, we found a store locator for a retail loyalty program where you buy six, get one free, found all the enrolled stores in Illinois, had ChatGPT identify who the buyers are, and enriched that data through Apollo. Once we have their email addresses, we run a sequence with fun, playful, Chicago-themed messaging so it doesn’t feel like an evergreen blast.
The message says, we sell at this store in Chicago that’s been killing it and this one in northern Illinois that’s also doing well, we found your business online, and we see a great alignment. That gives social proof and lets us expand our footprint. We also mention that we offer buy six, get one free through the loyalty program, and invite them to book a meeting or reply “catalog” for our wholesale catalog. We started building this just this week, and so far it seems to be doing pretty well. We’ve gotten a few bites.

Aaron: There are rules in place. The 2018 Farm Bill federally legalized hemp and set the definition at less than 0.3 percent delta-9 THC by dry weight. There are also evolving rules: on November 12 there’s an amendment to the Farm Bill that essentially limits the use of full-spectrum hemp extracts in products, which is what we use. So we’re updating all of our packaging and hemp extract sourcing to be compliant with the amendment.

Animal health is a little nuanced, because three bodies see different things. AAFCO oversees food and treats for animals, the FDA oversees drugs, and the National Animal Supplement Council oversees supplements. Animal supplements as a category only came to life in the early 1990s, so it’s a fairly new category. We’re working with the National Animal Supplement Council to go through their procedures and become stamped with their approval, which is a lot of work and overhead.

Aaron: We have a Shop Bailey’s mobile app on the Apple App Store and Google Play, which is a great way to get a first-time discount and explore our products. We have a 24-hour pet CBD hotline, 844-PETS-CBD, staffed by our internal pet parent team. Our website is baileycbd.com, and we’re @baileycbd on socials. We’re always running cross-brand giveaways with a handful of other local small-business pet companies, so check us out on Instagram, enjoy all the fun dogs, and take part for the chance to win some free goodies.

You’re exactly right. We decided we want to turn those germination complaints into opportunities to create Triangle Seeds fans. We’re a small business, so Matt and I personally handle them. We’ll text back and say, can we get on the phone and talk about what happened, so that when I send you new seeds you have success? It’s not super common for the owner of a business to call and help you through an issue on a thirty-dollar seed pack, but we’ve got the time and the passion. We both prefer phone calls. Talking through grow problems over text can be maddening.

Aaron: It’s been an honor and a pleasure. I really appreciate you having me. Thank you so much.