Product First, Then Brand: Building Awareness, Klaviyo & AI Search with Hunter Bonge

Thanks so much for having me, Stephen. I’m Hunter, and I lead growth and marketing for a company called High Tech Pet. We’re the makers of the PowerPet door, the world’s first smart pet door. It’s been sold to over 200,000 customers, it’s backed by 30 years of proven technology, and it’s been opened over 10 billion times. The way PowerPet works is that your dog wears a little collar and opens the door with ultrasonic technology, and then the door securely locks in place behind them. PowerPet is raccoon-proof, burglar-proof and weatherproof, and humans use the app to set schedules and remote-control the door from their phone while at work or on vacation.
PowerPet’s best customers are pet parents who essentially want three things: freedom, security and convenience. That’s freedom for their dog to let themselves in and out, security for their homes, and convenience for themselves, never needing to get up to let their dog out again or rely on a dog walker or sitter when they’re at work. The install is easy and DIY. You can mount PowerPet in your door, a wall or a sliding glass patio door, and it looks really good in your home. The finished product looks almost as if your home came with a puppy portal built in. That’s a little bit about PowerPet, why customers love us, and why I’m excited to be involved.

I define myself as a growth accelerator. I arrive when a company, or part of a company, is at an inflection point. At NBCUniversal, that moment was when customers were spending less time going to the movies and more time streaming at home. In the NFL, it was when a franchise was moving from St. Louis to Los Angeles. At Nike, it was when customers were transitioning their shopping preferences from wholesale to direct-to-consumer online. Now I’m leading a company during the pet tech boom. But my family is who really pulled me toward High Tech Pet, and it wasn’t really a major move, because in a way I’ve been involved with pets my whole life.

If I learned one thing at Nike, it’s that product is king. Brand and marketplace don’t matter as much. At Nike we had the best brand of all time, but it only went so far, as we lost market share to Lululemon, Alo, Vuori, Hoka, On and Brooks, to name a few sportswear brands that simply made better yoga pants and running shoes.
At High Tech Pet, it’s fun to solve the exact opposite problem. We have a really, really good product, and really the only product of its kind in a smart pet door. Of the few competitors we do have, we clearly win on quality, performance and history. So the only thing left to do is build a brand, which to me is the easier problem to solve. We have, I would guess, less than one percent unaided brand awareness, so there’s a lot of opportunity. Building brand awareness is a simple formula: the capital you have available, times cold outreach plus warm outreach plus free content plus paid ads. That’s what we’ve been working on these past couple of years.

We reach customers anywhere and everywhere. For the first thirty-five years it was mostly word of mouth and the occasional holiday or coupon marketing email. Now it’s a lot more advanced and a lot more end-to-end. We did a few things that really improved our marketing tech stack over the past year and a half.
The first was paid media. We do a ton of advertising on Google, Meta and Amazon now that we didn’t do before, including a lot of top of funnel, now that our creative studio is far more advanced and we’re churning out a lot more and better content to educate people on what in the world a smart pet door even is. I think we took that understanding and awareness for granted before, and now the educational aspect of our content and advertising is a lot better.
The second most important thing was switching our email provider to Klaviyo. It integrates really well with our Shopify store, and the marketing emails are a lot more personal, based on what the customer actually bought. If you have the older PowerPet model, you only get emails relevant to that model. If you upgraded to the new model, you only get emails relevant to that one. Our marketing has become a lot more personal and targeted, versus sharing the same message with our entire customer base.

I personally use AI throughout my day for efficiency. For High Tech Pet, the main benefit of AI has been our new live chat. About six months ago we launched a live chat feature on our Shopify store, and it has aided in about 10% of our sales. In addition to giving customers an extra touch point, so they don’t need to wait in line on the phone, it’s been really helpful in finding exactly what they need and explaining the benefits of a product that’s otherwise pretty complicated. Live chat has been the biggest customer-facing thing.
When it comes to AI’s role in search and discovery, if AI is doing its job, it will recommend best sellers and products with a rich history of proof. We are the best-selling smart pet door, and it’s not even close, so when AI sees that, it should recommend us first. I would encourage all brands, not just legacy brands, to go deep on one platform, master it, and then move on. We started with Google, and once we felt we had a good foundational working knowledge of Google Advertising, Google Search and Gemini, we moved on to Meta, and then to Amazon, if that’s relevant for your business. I saw in your prep notes that we might touch on Reddit. I haven’t tried Reddit yet. I hear it’s getting more popular from a B2C perspective, but I only heard that about ads, and I think it’s still pretty early.

That maybe is next. People fall under one of two buckets: either you already have a doggy door you’re trying to upgrade, or you just adopted a pet, or your schedule just changed, and you’re looking for a way to give them smart, easy access. Typically people search “smart dog door” or “automatic pet door,” and we’re pretty easy to find from there, whether it’s on Google, AI search, Amazon, or wherever you’re shopping.
We’re really excited because coming up soon, when you visit the front page of our website, we’ll have a Build My Door tool. We sell so many different models and sizes, and each comes with its own collection of features, so a first-time visitor might not know which door is best for them. Once they arrive on the homepage, they’re invited to build their door, and it asks three essential questions. Number one, where do you ideally let your pet in and out: through a wall, a door or a sliding glass patio door? Number two, how big is your dog or cat: 30 pounds or less, 30 to 100 pounds, or more than 100 pounds? That gets you your size recommendation. And finally, how essential are Wi-Fi and app control for you? Are you home often enough to turn the door on and off manually, or are you more of a working professional on the move, traveling a lot, who wants remote app control and 24/7 scheduling? After you answer those three quick questions, it takes you to the exact recommended product page for the model that’s going to be most useful for you.
Shipping is three to five days, and the install is an easy DIY, usually done in less than an hour, or two to three hours for more advanced jobs. After that, our customer support and technical product experts are awesome. They solve any installation question, any collar pairing question, any error indicators you don’t know the meaning of, and any scheduling issues. You also have a 90-day risk-free return window and a one-year limited warranty.

PowerPet comes in three sizes: medium, large and extra large. Medium is for cats and dogs under 30 pounds. Large is for pets 30 to 100 pounds. Extra large is for your Great Danes and St. Bernards, dogs over 100 pounds. Our large size fits the majority of pets, so that’s our best seller.

What’s next for PowerPet is all about listening to the customer. Customers ask for new features all the time in our reviews and our social media comments, and some of those features are coming out in 2027, so stay tuned. On the business side, I would love to build out a product team: product managers, product marketing managers, web developers and app developers who have worked in software and hardware settings before. If we can build a roster of talent that can deliver better physical and digital experiences, that will take us to the next level.

I’ve always held my teammates to a high standard. When I was a worker bee, I probably preferred to work with more speed because I had a lot of busy work to push through, but now that I’m a leader, I tend to prefer polish. I said before that product is king. You wouldn’t rush a product launch to meet a deadline if it sacrificed quality, so your slide deck should be held to the same standard. I’ve found that holding your product, your work and yourself to a high standard consistently over time will allow you to weather any storm. The truth will always come out in the end, and the cream always rises to the top.

Thanks, Stephen. This was awesome.