My friend Jackson invested $2,000,000 and 8 years of his life to become the King of Cat Poo 💩 Here’s the true story of how he went from a dejected mortgage broker to selling over 10,000 tons of cat litter and built a $30-million empire from cat turds🧵 WARNING: GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS OF CAT FECES BELOW 😷 I’ve known Jackson since kindergarten - he's one of my closest and oldest friends. And when he gets interested in something, he doesn't just dip his toe in—he dives headfirst into the deep end of whatever bizarre pool catches his attention. He goes all in. For example, he started playing Magic: The Gathering as a teenager. By 2015, he was ranked #2 in the world. And when we started playing poker in college, he read every book on the subject, played for hours each night, built online bots to play for him while he slept, and eventually went on to compete in The World Series of Poker. But something changed for him in 2016. I hadn't seen him in a while and we caught up over lunch. He looked down and was wearing a wilted, oversized suit. He'd somehow ended up working in finance—brokering mortgages for rich people while slowly dying inside, one spreadsheet at a time. He wanted a change and he asked me for business ideas. One of the ideas I told him about was ecommerce. At the time, D2C e-commerce was just taking off, and I told him he should look into Shopify. I told him about dropshipping—a new concept at the time—and explained how it worked. He leaned in. Within a year, he had taught himself to code and started two successful niche ecommerce stores (one selling suspenders, the other masquerade masks). (True story: he once sold a masquerade mask to Justin Bieber.) Fast forward to 2018 and he'd quit his job and gone all-in on e-commerce. To celebrate he adopted his first cat. Little did he know this fluffy rascal would change the trajectory of his entire life. As he started buying all the accessories, he was struck by how profoundly ugly cat products were. Why did they have to look like a 1970's motel? Nasty shag carpeted scratchers. Litter boxes that looked like cheap plastic tupperware. He felt embarrassed to have them in his apartment. So, in a moment of manic excitement, he decided to spin up an online cat furniture business. This was not a new insight. In fact, it was one I had had myself in 2009, when I started my own cat furniture business called H.J. Mews. I told him to think twice. That I had lost all my money and I shared my story, which ended with me utterly humbled and broken, cat feces smeared around my home by a robot vacuum cleaner (I tell this story in my book, it's a good one). But he couldn't be dissuaded. Knowing that Jackson usually succeeded against the odds, I became the company's first investor and joined the board. His idea was simple: to make the world's most beautiful cat furniture. Functional and well-designed products that you'd be proud to have in your home. What he didn't know at the time was that his true obsession—the relentless mission that would consume his life for the next 8 years— wouldn't be pretty cat furniture. Unfortunately for Jackson, his girlfriend, and those around him...it would be cat shit. The story of this demented obsession started one night in 2018. That night, after dinner with his girlfriend, they came home to find that Jiggity, their cat, had tracked a treasure trail of foul-smelling cat turds across their apartment. It seemed that he relieved himself, and then, as he tried to cover up his mess, accidentally hurled a volley of poo clusters out of the litter box and all over the floor. Their apartment smelled like an outhouse in the dead of summer and his girlfriend let out a shriek, opening every window in the house while Jackson furiously swept the floor. His eyes watering as he cleaned up the mess, he vowed at that moment to make a litterbox that not only looked beautiful, but would solve this issue once and for all. Two years later, Jackson and his team had architected a beautiful new litterbox, The Cove, but to his chagrin, the problem remained. The litterbox looked amazing, but the same issue kept happening. His cats would track clumps of litter-coated pee and poo out of their box, and to top it off litter would often clog his toilet with cat poo. After trying every cat litter on the market, he realized that the secret lay in the litter. Some clumped, but couldn't be flushed. Others smelled like nasty perfume. Others created a huge mess by getting stuck in cat's paws and carried around the house. Nobody had made the perfect litter. So he set to work, turning his apartment into a mad scientist's lab, on a quest to become the James Dyson of cat litter (that is, if James Dyson were obsessed with cat feces instead of vacuums). He even went so far as to hire a feline scientist (yes, that's a real job) and tested 50+ formulations. His friends thought he'd lost his mind. It was all he could talk about, and nobody wants to talk about cat poo at Friday night dinner. Of course, he ignored the haters and continued on his quest. His team conducted hundreds of sniff tests with different formulas, which is as much fun of a job as it sounds 😷 In one experiment, he took a big whiff out of a garbage bin full of cat turds with their newest coffee-scented litter and was hit with a stench so foul that he had to run to the bathroom to retch. He couldn't drink coffee for the next week. Another time they wanted to test the smell of cat urine over time in a room, so they left cat urine-soaked litter samples in the shared coworking space bathroom overnight with a sign saying 'don't touch'. The next day, the samples were missing. They emailed the coworking space admin asking if anyone had removed them. A few minutes later, the timid administrator showed up in their space and admitted that he was the one who removed the samples. He paused, hesitant to utter the next words, and then whispered that he smelled an incredibly strong "biological" stench coming from the litter boxes. Adelle, their hopeful lead developer on the project, looked like she was going to cry. His team was defeated. There they were, years and $2,000,000 incinerated on R&D and they were running out of cash. There was one specific day when he hit rock bottom. He was sitting on the couch after a bad day at work. One of their suppliers was threatening to sue them, and he and his girlfriend were in the middle of an argument over his ever-increasing nicotine pouch addiction habit (she peeled a used pouch off the side of the bed). His cat Jiggity jumped up on his lap and looked at him with his innocent feline eyes. Jackson immediately felt a wave of calm wash over his body. But then he saw a twinkle in his cat's adorable little eye, and he swears to god his little leathery lips turned into a slight smile as he caught the foulest whiff of poo he'd ever smelled. His entire bottom, and now Jackson's lap, was smeared with diarrhea. His girlfriend looked at him and gave him a knowing look. She had his back. In that moment, covered in cat diarrhea, he had two choices: give up entirely or become the Steve Jobs of cat poo. History has recorded his choice. That night, with just 6 weeks of cash left, he sent a desperate email to @alexisohanian (the founder of Reddit) at 11:43 PM. A Hail Mary hoping he would invest. He replied in 2 minutes flat: "My daughter loves kitties. I'm in for $50K." That email literally saved the company and kept them going until they cracked it. Shortly after his saving grace investment, they tried some new additives in their formula and finally hit pay dirt. It was a combination of soy husks, pea husks, charcoal, and other antibacterial additives that fully neutralized the smell. And miraculously - unlike other cat litters — it didn't track outside the litter box. Not a speck. Jackson cried tears of joy. Like Daniel Plainview hitting oil. The result? A proprietary, lightweight, anti-stick pellet formula that doesn't stick to cat paws. 100% natural and safe ingredients. A claim he stands behind (see attached photo of him scarfing their litter). When he tried the product at his home, his girlfriend was hesitant to switch because it can be a pain to transition cats to new litters. But it was an instant game changer. No more vacuuming 3x daily. No more litter in their bed. No more crunching granules underfoot at 3am. Just clean floors and a happy cat. It turns out that hundreds of thousands of their customers agree. They've sold over a million bags of the stuff, and over 60% of those customers love it so much they subscribe monthly to ensure they never go without. Now, they're about to go to the next level and launch in every PetSmart in America. He still has a team of 25 (including feline scientists, industrial designers, material scientists, and mechanical engineers) and they continue to change the cat litter game. They're even launching a lavender version which smells delightful (very subtle using natural lavender petals, unlike other overly artificially perfumed litters). All because they refused to accept that cat products had to be ugly, ineffective, or badly designed (and spent an ungodly amount of time smelling and handling cat poo). Their customers don't just like their product; they become evangelists. They're so relieved to finally have clean floors, they tell everyone they know. Once, while pitching Petsmart in Phoenix, the sample for the demo didn't arrive in time. Jackson searched his database to find a nearby customer with a recent delivery and called her up. Confused at first, after realizing who he was, she invited him over ("I LOVE this shit!!") and welcomed him into her home like visiting royalty. (After all, he was now The King of Cat Poo.) @tuftandpaw is building the Dyson of cats. A beautiful, functional ecosystem of products that actually improve the lives of cats and their humans. So, if you feel his pain. If you know the feeling of scraping a stinky clump of cat poo from the bottom of your foot en route to bed. Then it's time you get to know one another. And now you know who wears the most sought after crown in the world of business. From Magic Card Champion, to Poker Player, to Mortgage Broker, to King of Cat Poo, running a $30,000,000 cat empire🤴🐈💩 What a journey. This is why entrepreneurs make the big bucks.