RCL Foods, Pets24 & Corporate Innovation

Welcome to the FinTech Arena, the ultimate podcast for FinTech leaders eager to stay at the forefront of industry trends. In each 30-minute episode, we will engage with prominent figures from well-established FinTech companies to uncover a little about their strategies for innovation, growth, and navigating the challenges in the ever-evolving financial technology landscape, from groundbreaking advancements in digital banking to exploring the impact of AI, blockchain, and beyond.

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we're excited to host Jamie Chennells as well as David Pugh. Just a quick introduction about the two. First and foremost, Dave. Dave is a seasoned digital marketer. He's renowned for his innovative and creative approach in crafting and implementing robust marketing strategies. He currently serves as the digital growth exec at RCL as well as the head of RCL Foods' internal digital innovation hub.

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He is also the creator of Pets24, which today is, of course, the most important title for today's topic. We also have Jamie, who is the expert, who is an expert rather, an innovator in the fintech and technology sectors. He currently serves as the CRO at scrums.com, as well as an advisor into the Pets24 team. He has experience in founding US startups and is

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most notably well known as the co-founder of scrums.com. which is Africa's premium AI software development company. Gentlemen, excited to have you guys on board. Welcome to the scrums.com fintech arena. Thanks for having us. I was quite excited. I've actually never had a buyer read out before. It sounded a lot more impressive than I think what I did. This is me. I'm going to write that one down. Yeah, taken straight from LinkedIn there, Dave.

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So gents, on that topic, you know, I want to get a deeper understanding into you guys'

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You both had incredibly successful careers to date and no doubt have deeper ambitions to sort of go further. So a question to both of you and Dave, we'll start with you. Can you briefly take us through what your role is at RCL? You're obviously carrying the dual hat there. What is your role? And then Jamie, after that, we'll hand over to you.

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Yeah, absolutely. So I've got the privilege of heading up the Studio Hex, which is our internal innovation hub. And I

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say to people, I've probably got the best job at RCL Foods because I don't really have a day job. The business has really created a unique space to allow us to explore and experiment. Even when we were on the wall here, we've got a saying that says, we're not tourists, we're explorers because tourists have a map and explorers have a compass. And they really have given us this opportunity

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to look at the world quite differently. And I think that's unique for a large EPMCG corporate business. And it's been a very, very exciting journey. And it's allowed us to partner with people like SovTech and Scrums and do things like we're doing on PES24. So yeah, great privilege. But part of it is digital, traditional digital marketing. We focus on digital commerce as well, driving that agenda. But the place that I'm most passionate about is this digital innovation that we're driving.

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How's it going, guys? Obviously, I'm the COO at scrums.com and being a co-founder here, I've worn many hats over the last decade. At present, I find myself spending time with, let's call it high-profile customers, customers solving exciting problems and challenges out there and really trying to chart and understand the way which AI is affecting not only organizations such as ours and the implementation of those technologies within our processes, but also looking at AI in terms of how it will impact our customers and how customers can best use AI to further their interests and their platforms out there. So I think a super exciting time to be dealing with that kind of tech as it really is changing every single week and things are just accelerating at a pace that Our human brains can't really comprehend right now. So lots of fun out there. And Dave, I'm super curious. From a Pets24 perspective, it's great to hear that on your side, you speak about this kind of ecosystem and the space for creativity where you can bring your compass to work.

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But was that like in the early days where you're trying to land some sort of concept that is very foreign and different to you know, what the rest of the business actually does. You know, from a pets 24 perspective it's not

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pet food uh in any way, shape or form. So tell us a little bit about what those early days were like, just trying to Yeah, it's been a journey. You know, our innovation hub is six years old now and uh it's taken a long time and we still face lots of challenges you know
i share lots of stuff stuff on Linkedin and what we're doing and the stuff we're experimenting with. But it isn't all fun and games. It really has been, and I mean, you guys will know this world well, but it's been like a startup and having to pitch.

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I almost see the rest of the RCL business as venture capitalists or investors in the projects that we do. So you're constantly having to go and pitch and prove ideas. And I'll often showcase, you know, I love using the lady from Canva where I think she pitched her idea. a hundred times before someone finally invested in it. And it's that same mindset that we take here. It's not been like, guys, here's a cool idea for a digital platform.

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Okay, cool. It's been constantly going back, having to look things, having to bring insights, research into it. And even an element of running before the guys have even said, yes, okay, guys, we're going, we've had to go and almost be brave. And I think that's been this maverick step that you've had to take in half a year. And as we've proved ourselves in smaller initiatives, the business gets more and more confident. And I think it's taken time to get credibility, to prove, guys, hang on, they can do something a bit different. As we've had the small wins, I love the small wins, because I think it's not just about the big win. And I think that's important in the startup mentality.

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Every time we have a small win. I'm not sure how to showcase it across the business. And all of those just sort of add up, almost investing in like a little bank account there. You know, that's into the credibility of what we do. So it's been a tiring journey. You've got to have the passion, the energy. And I think our CEO often talks about it. He's

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about grit. It's taken lots of grit to get us through. You know, you guys jumped on right at the beginning of this Pets24 journey. And you were at the start of some of those conversations. seeing what it's been like to try and get this across the line. Yeah, I suppose the question I was going to ask there is, you've got all of these ideas that the team's driven in this sort of startup type thinking. What was the sort of the reasoning or the catalyst behind looking at founding a business like H24? Yeah. So how it actually all started off first, we believe in insight.

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Everything's got to come from an insight. We drive one that we've done for a while now from Kantar Consulting, and I'm passionate about this, and that's that shoppers and consumers are tired of brands pushing content on them. They want to be part of conversations and content and community that's relevant to their life. And brands that are winning are able to immerse themselves in that content and actually be part of that world. I use social, for example. I truly believe that your social feed, that's where you are. Your mind is in a social mindset.

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People don't want brand content thrown at them the whole time. So that was the insight. Can we create communities that are not just overly branded content? We then worked with you guys and did this research to say, guys, is the activity in the pet world online? And I think we landed on the insight that there's almost a million unique searches of pet-related content every single month on Google, but no one place housing it, and no real trusted resource or trusted platform that is there. There's tons of Facebook groups and things happening on Gumtree and smaller communities, but no one really owning that space. And we know, you know, we're very involved with the largest manufacturer of pet food in the country.

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We know that this category is hugely emotional. very much like the baby category. A lot of the people here are pet parents. The pet is part of their family, part of their best friends, their babies, they call them. So that was that catalyst that kicked off this thinking, guys, there's an opportunity to create a platform that is trusted, that is properly, properly brand agnostic. Actually, the vision here for Pets24 is we really care about pets and their health and their wellness and being able to look after them. And we have to go in with a mindset of it's got to be agnostic, the right content from the pet and not just a brand push of what we think is right. And I think that was the real key insight behind this initiative.

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And Jamie, as David said, you've been a part of the journey from the beginning. What, from your perspective, made this such an exciting venture? Yeah, I think it's great when, number one,

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a software perspective, you're dealing with people who operate and have deep insights as to how an industry actually works. And I think RCL was very much one of those examples. We don't know much about the pet world as scrums.com. Some of us have dogs and cats. I think, ironically, this lined up quite nicely with my journey in getting my first dog. So really putting the user hat on, being able to put yourself in the seat of the user was a lot easier. But I really think having a good operator and somebody with deep insights into the industry, but also, as Dave mentioned, being able to see the

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opportunity there available for the taking and also knowing that nobody else was really doing it. So You know, the potential of having that first mover advantage in our space, I think to me was one of the most exciting things because it was, you know, it's that it's that adrenaline kick of we're going to be the first. There's going to be some people

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following us at some point, but you're kind of leading the race and you're sprinting those first couple of hundred meters knowing that there's nobody else there. So I you know, for me, getting out first and being first into the market was probably the most exciting part. But also knowing that You know, you're not quite sure if you're running in the right direction or how fast the other runners are going to be or when they're going to start the race. And I suppose, you know, in our world, you know, how much dry powder and how much capital everybody else is going to be throwing into the ring.

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so far, we're still in the lead. I think that's important, Jamie, especially on this innovation, which I think we did well, was, I mean, if I, and you will know, if you look back to what we launched 18 months ago, our first site that went live, I mean, it was dreadful. It wasn't great, but it was, guys,

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get something up. Let's learn and get going and get the ball rolling. And I think that for me was one of our earliest big wins. We weren't sitting mapping something out on PowerPoints and looking at documents. We were learning from the user from day one. And it really has been a platform that has been built by the user, by the community, seeing what they want, using data properly. Everybody talks about it, but we use the data to build a platform that's still, these are never end products. We haven't got to the end yet. But if you look where we were 18 months ago, where we are now with 160,000 monthly active users, it's been a really exciting journey.

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There's that famous saying that I think many people internally subscribe to, which is if you If you're not embarrassed about your first version of your product, then basically you took too long to launch it. And I think this was very much build something in 45 days. Let's get it out there and let's get people using it and see what the response is like. Sorry, Chase. I'll always link back because I think one of the things is how our FMCG business is doing it. That was one of the challenges we faced is

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we went live. You send this update to your stakeholders who might not quite understand this world or what the vision is. Oh my gosh, what is this that you put up that I've invested in? And it's this constant journey. Guys, we're going to evolve. Just watch the journey, watch the space. And even, I mean, you'll know a mindset of week one with our stakeholders to where we are now has also

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chalk and cheese. And Dave, tell us a little bit about what was that first experience like of showing your internal stakeholders this not so great version and trying to convince them that it's going to get better. How was that? Yeah, look, I think we even delayed it a month before we showcased because it was like, I think at one stage we had like a nine second load time on a page. And so,

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we sort of had to even and it is. I don't want to say stressful because it's part of the journey, but it is. It's going to these guys, they're backing you and saying, hey, cool, we bought into your vision. Here's some funding. Oh my gosh, what have I funded? So yeah, it was constant challenges. And once again, I think, but it's so important to bring these guys on the journey because what it's done is it's, and I'm taking now, talking outside of a PEDS24 space, it's once again built their credibility. They're on the journey. They understand it better now. So It's an easier sell on new projects, new platforms that we bring to the table. I think even just the way of working, how we operate to this model was unique and different.

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Because if I think back to when we started Studio X, often as corporates or FNCTs, you want to own all the innovation and you want to do it all in-house. And we did a couple of simple MVPs before and did it all in-house. And our big learning was, It's about partnerships and ecosystems. And, you know, I think you alluded to it right in the beginning. We knew the pet market. We knew the insights. We're not a tech business. So for us to try and build this, it's almost impossible. But I think that's where this

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partnership with Scrums has been invaluable. But we discussed, here's what we're good at. Here's what you are good at. And we've been able to build this innovation. And I'm Another thing I'm passionate about is innovation isn't just in-house, it's ecosystems, it's partnerships, it's building something together with different experts and in the community, building it with our

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community on this platform. I think you've hit on an important note there as well. You keep talking about the community there and 18 months ago, there was
vision of being Africa's largest pet community and And only 18 months later, you guys have achieved that goal, right? Which is, of course, no small feat. But I suppose the question that I do want to ask, and for our listeners out there, what does Pets24 do? What problem does it solve?

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before we answer that, I just want to boil on the one. Our only vision wasn't just the largest pet platform. It was

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to become the most trusted. And I think that was very important for us. And we went on this organic SEO journey. drive to build up that, because it's not just about baiting clicks and getting content like that. It needed to be trusted. And we've now hit that first goal. We're the largest and we've grown. We haven't, you know, we're nowhere near where we want to be. But a big win for me was now if you use Meta's AI tools on Facebook, on WhatsApp, et cetera, to look for pet related content, it's now pulling from Pets24 as its source of education and content. So for me, that's saying, Guys, AI is also now starting to trust what we're doing.

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And that's a massive win, you know, without the largest. And now we've proved that we are the most trustworthy as well. And that source is really a trustworthy source of information. So I know that's a long way around to your question. But I think there's lots of problems that we're trying to solve. And it links back. And why I made that point is it's this trusted platform. Because I think in this industry, People are looking, I related once again back to the baby category, owners of pets are really looking for guidance and how they must raise pets, how they must look after them, what is the best thing for them.

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And I think that's what we have built. There's lots of different other platforms out there saying things, but we've started to build a brand, a sage type brand where guys, this is trusted. So people can come to our platform looking for information, looking for content, knowing that they can trust it and it's reliable because their pet is part of their family. And I think we are appeasing that need. So it's almost like a pet owner mindset that we've appeased that with this trusted platform. And one of the things, and Jamie, you can maybe touch on it, but we constantly through the data looking for other problems to solve because that's what we want to be. There's a big issue in breeder fraud. where people are looking to buy pets online. You get a beautiful picture of this pet that you

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think you're buying, so you make your payment and then the person disappears and you realize that that photo is from Shutterstock or an online library somewhere. So there's a big problem in that market. So through the insights we've gathered, the Scrums team have built a new feature on Pets24 called PawPay, which is basically a pet escrow

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service. So guys, we've got this community, we are looking for the trusted breeders and shelters and places that are out there, we can play that conduit and take away and fight this fraud that is happening in pet ownership. Making sure that breeders are setting the right standards to look after pets and making sure that pets are then going to the right home. And we're ticking that box.

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Jamie, I don't know if you want to build on that, but those for me are two of the things that I'm seeing as problems we are solving here.

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No, it's super exciting. And I think that's where, you know, the campus mindset comes into play and that we really don't know what we're going to find out there.

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Poor Pay is a direct response to some of the data in the market telling us that, you know, for anybody who is, you know, particularly in the less formal breeder world out there buying a dog, a puppy in particular, you know, you've got more than a 50% chance of being involved in a puppy breeder scam. which is a staggering A, amount of fraud, but B, chance of losing. And I've seen it myself in terms of, you know, I have two dogs in

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both purchases and looking for a particular breed. The first time was a scam. Obviously, I didn't fall for it, luckily. But those are crazy numbers. And I think that's also just a great scenario where this is clearly a problem for buyers general pet community, in our case in South Africa, how do we fix it? How do we solve it? And there are actually some simple answers out there. So naturally, we've launched a feature which we hope will solve this, which we built very quickly. I think start to finish was within the month. Yeah, away we go. And of course, we're a little bit embarrassed about how it works on the back end, but we'll see if it works and we'll start to improve day by day, you know. that 1% better every single day is the mindset of the team. So if we've got interest and we've got volume, we'll make it better.

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Chase, our community is not just pet owners. We're trying to play this shared value platform

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everybody involved in the pet industry. So for example, we're now the largest directory of pet-related services. A lot of these pet service business with our small little business. They don't have the means to communicate to a larger audience. We've now created a platform where a small business can come on and connect directly with the largest community of pet owners. Another example is the vet community. People aren't aware of what it actually costs to look after a pet and make sure that they're looked after well. We are driving and educating to send traffic to the vet stores because guys, that's ]

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important for the wellbeing and the business for what they are also trying to achieve. So as I say, it's not just, I mean, there's brands, there's pet food brands, et cetera. There's this whole pet community where I think we're adding value across all of it, not just the owner, but across everybody involved in the pet community. And that's our goal.
Awesome. And you touched on something earlier, and I think it's for most of the listeners, a big buzzword, right? And that's AI.

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we know and have read and understand, you know, its capabilities. But I suppose what I want to ask is, how are you guys looking to do it? And Jamie, maybe this is a question for you. You know, you guys have gathered a lot of data. Are you using AI and how can you utilize it to create a competitive edge in such a prosperous industry? I mean, I'd love to hear Dave's opinion as well, but I think if I can just frame it, it's an enormous build on from what you said previously is, you know, in today's world, it's very easy for, you know, big large corporates and you know the like to kind of steamroll the smaller players in any ecosystem. And I think the pet world and the world of vets is interesting in this you

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know with this frame you know traditionally many people used to buy most of their pet products from vets. Now that's not necessarily the case. It's happening online. It's happening in some of your bigger retailers. And that is a threat to vets across the country. And I think, you know, we certainly see AI from a PES24 perspective as it's

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something we can use to strengthen and improve for the community. And so, you know, in our case, I think a good example is, you know, we've got an AI vet on our platform, but the idea there is it's not necessarily to replace vets. In fact, it's to draw people in to provide instant veterinary equivalent advice, obviously not as, not ever as good as a vet, but at the same time also point people in the direction of the closest and most reliable vets out there, being all of the vets that are listed on our platform, which is over a

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thousand vets across the country. And if we can help users find better vets close to them, geographically relevant results, I think we're doing a really good job out there. And so as AI continues within our world, we're looking to see how we can use it to better support the broader community and assist in retaining and keeping all of those pet businesses, be it small or big, which I think is, it's going to be hard, but it's a challenge we're up for. At the end of the day, we've spoken a lot about Pets24 being very community-minded. A lot of the decisions are made with that community lens of how can we provide value to the community and the greatest number of people and role players within our community.

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Dave, maybe over to you to see if I see it differently or what other angles. I love hearing you talk about that because I'm fully aligned. My definition for AI is added intelligence because I think a lot of people look at it, oh my gosh, AI is going to

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jobs and do this and that. And I'm saying, guys, no, it actually adds to your life, adds to value in what you try to do. It makes it easier and faster. AI is going to replace tasks and not people. And to build on what you mentioned about our AI Vet, that's not there to replace the vet. That's actually to guide people to the vet. What we don't want people doing is just Dr. Google sitting on Googling and there's hundreds of different articles and oh my gosh, now I've solved this myself. As a trusted platform, AI can just consolidate it and say, guys, you need to get to a vet because you've got these issues. So our belief is that we're going to use AR and our AI Vet to build the vets and to help them in this journey. And that's why for me, it's added intelligence. And the more we can use that across this platform to bring to this community, the

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There's definitely some common themes coming along here, right? So we're certainly looking at being the most trusted platform. AI

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not a replacement. It's actually added intelligence. Definitely like that one, David. I'm going to put that in my next vocab. We've spoken through some of the products that you guys have launched, Dave. Every business needs to look into the future, right? And I think my question is, what are some of the trends that you saw that could potentially lead to what's next for Pets24? Yeah, look,

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believe it's not so much a trend. It is this community. I'm passionate about brand agnostic community, so I believe our brands can leverage off this platform. But I think as we're growing this and as it's getting bigger, that for me is the trend that this is where consumers want to be. They want to be part of content and community that is relevant to their lives. And brands need to find a way to involve themselves in those conversations and to add value to the community's life. I think that's the big one that that it's not just about now using a platform like Pets24 to market to someone. It's using a platform like Pets24 as a brand. How do you add value to that community and to that owner's life through these platforms? So that, for me, is this big change that I'm seeing from a marketing

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And Dave, I mean, adding value, obviously, for big brands is a very valiant
and direction to take, how do you go about, again, handling those internal stakeholders in terms of like, it can be quite hard to trace that value back to the value for you as the big brand that's spending the money on it. How do you handle that sort of situation?
Yeah, look, that's always the challenge, especially when you've got lots of accountants in the business. But I'm definitely seeing it. We got a talk from a couple

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the guys that were at the Cannes Festival is that I think over the last couple of years, there's been very much shortism thinking about brands and how they're speaking to consumers. And we've moved back to this long-term brand building investment where you probably might only see the results quite a bit later down the line. But if you as a brand are truly thinking about what a consumer needs and what they want, you will add value to their life. And that's how brand affinity and brand loyalty actually works and matters to a consumer. I sat in a presentation the other day from Amazon, and I loved it. I mean, their goal, I love the way they positioned, we want to be the most customer centric business on Earth. So it wasn't like just the world, just the way they positioned it on Earth was like, you can see where their mindset is thinking. And I think they are constantly thinking about How do they bring value to their customers? And I think as brands, we need to start thinking like that. I think we've had quite a mindset where we have talked about us and most brands, they forget about the customer and they're constantly thinking about the retailer and how do I get my product into the retailer where it's actually, I've got to think with a retailer mindset. How do I add value to their life, actually be customer centric and put them at the middle. So it is a challenge, but because it's often an investment early on into adding value to life that you've got to say, guys, this is for a long-term play down the line. Because I believe in trust. I think, as I say, we have this goal with a trusted platform. If your brand is trusted, then there's huge uptake for you. Amazing. Jensen, coming up to the end of the episodes, quickfire question. David, what's your favorite book? Yeah, my favorite book. And Jamie, I think you might have mentioned something from it, but it's called The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson. And it's really about those small 1% improvements every single day and consistency. I love that.

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And Jamie? Very tough. Very, very tough. Dave, you were talking earlier about getting people to buy in

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And all I could think of is you could just force every executive of every single company to read The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. It would probably do the whole world a lot of good. But maybe not to be too mainstream, but certainly James Clear's Atomic Habits has probably been the most impactful book I've read in the last five years, just because the general mass of getting 1% better every single day really is something you can strive towards. And it's just that one little graph that I have on my wall at home.

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That does drive me to think slightly differently about how I spend every single day. And I think it's the one key takeaway that's probably stuck with me a long time since I first read it. I think that's why we're in sync often, Jamie, because I've read both and Atomic Edge and Slight Edge are very similar. It's the same sort of thinking and mindset. We wrote it first. Exactly. All right, guys. Well, thank you so much. A special thank you to David, Jamie. Thank you so much for joining us on the scrums.com fintech arena. To the listeners out there, don't forget to go and visit the pets24.co.za website. And I'm sure if you want to have deeper conversations with either of these gentlemen, please reach out to us at the scrums.com fintech arena. But other than that, looking forward to seeing you in the next episode. Chat soon.

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