Amplify Your Business Kidney-Chek

For Episode 188 of Amplify Your Business, we’re joined by Hillary Sweet, the co-founder, and CEO of Kidney-Chek. Anyone who’s ever owned a pet knows that they are very good at hiding when they’re not feeling well. As pets age, vets start to offer regular bloodwork and wellness checks and tests to ensure that everything is still functioning normally. The problem is, many pet owners find these tests too expensive or unnecessary, as their pet has shown no sign of illness, so they opt not to have them done. Kidney disease is one of the most undiagnosed health problems animals face. One in three cats and 1 in 10 dogs will have kidney disease that goes undiagnosed or undetected.   Kidney-Chek wanted to come up with a solution to combat this often deadly health issue, so they invented a quick, affordable screening tool that uses your pet’s saliva to test for kidney disease. To learn more, visit their website and check out their products at https://kidneychek.com/    00:00 - Intro 00:47 - What are three things that you think every entrepreneur should know? 03:51 - What is it that Kidney-Chek does? 04:59 - Why did you decide to focus on pets versus humans? 06:14 - Is kidney disease in animals a problem that you discovered first and then built on it from there, or were you searching for a problem that needed to be solved first? 07:26 - What made you decide that you wanted to be an entrepreneur? 09:26 - Despite having a Ph.D., you had no intention of staying within academia? 10:41 - What have been some of the biggest challenges that you’ve had to overcome as you transitioned from academia into starting, running, and growing a business? 12:33 - Can you tell me a bit about the last three and a half years? 15:45 - Can you walk us through the competitive landscape that you’re facing right now? 16:19 - With no direct competitors, how do you address pricing? What methodology did you use? 19:28 - Is your long-term plan to continue to sell online and in retail stores or do you plan to skew towards one or the other? 22:48 - When you talked earlier about wishing you had done more customer validation earlier on, was that beyond the pricing? Was it in the messaging? Can you expand upon that a bit? 28:29 - What’s easier now for your business at this stage than it was before? 30:09 - What are the biggest hurdles or challenges that you’re going to have to overcome to get Kidney-Chek to its next level? 33:00 - If you were to write a letter to your pre-entrepreneurial self, what would that letter say? 36:50 - If our listeners wanted to reach out to you, how could they do that? 37:27 - Outro