Kai Feller on the pricing pivot that built (and sold) Bark.com

Kai Feller and his friend Andrew Michael thought up the name for their business in a pub, before it had the business model to go with it. Bark – the sound a dog uses to tell the world what it wants. It was a fitting start for a company built on instinct, savings and a willingness to tear up what wasn't working.

Bark.com grew into a services marketplace connecting customers with everyone from gardeners to event planners, expanding into nine countries and growing at 200 per cent a year for three years. Feller and Michael never raised outside investment. In 2021, EMK Capital bought the business for £240m.

On the Business Leader podcast, Feller shares with Sir Richard Harpin how he bet the business on a single pricing change, scaled into nine countries without a local office and why he's bootstrapping again with his new AI venture Cyber Staff. In our interview, you will learn about:

• Why Feller “bet the business” on a single pricing pivot
• How Bark.com scaled into nine countries without ever putting a single person on the ground
• The one metric Feller says matters more than growth
• What Feller did next after selling Bark.com for a nine-figure sum

Why Bark.com ripped up its pricing model

Feller calls himself “definitely a born entrepreneur”, despite having no entrepreneurial family members to point to. After a spell building an events app called Socialite with his housemate at Cardiff University, he moved to London, met Andrew Michael and the two began talking about what would become Bark.

The company launched in January 2015, connecting people who needed a service with the professionals who could provide it, from dog walkers to PR agencies. The early model charged professionals a flat monthly subscription, and it worked in that people subscribed, but the unit economics didn't hold up.

“The more customers and leads we put into the marketplace, they would still be paying the same,” Feller says. “It wasn't scalable.” With Bark.com at around £750,000 in run rate and growing, the pair scrapped the subscription model for pay-per-introduction, instead opting to charge professionals every time they were connected to a customer.

“It's crazy because on reflection I think that took real guts to do but in the moment we discussed it for a day, had a dinner as a team, decided it and just did it the next day,” Feller recalls.

How Bark.com was automating before AI

Bootstrapping without outside capital forced Feller and Michael to solve problems with automation rather than headcount. “We're not going to go and spend a million quid on people to call a load of businesses and get them on board,” Feller says. “That forced us to think outside the box.”

That automation let Bark.com expand into the US after two years without any cash investment, an office, or a single person on the ground. By the time the company sold, the US was its largest market, still run entirely from the UK. “If I had the business now, I'd be calling it AI,” Feller says. “It was so powerful.” The model stayed identical across all nine of Bark.com's markets. “It's the same blueprint in each country.”

Growth held at 100 to 200 per cent a year for several years running, which taught Feller as much about managing people as it did about the business. “I was micromanaging, saying do it like this and like this,” he admits. “That's obviously not scalable.” He credits The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People with changing his approach to shared objectives rather than dictating how people got there.

When the pandemic hit, business dropped off overnight before recovering quickly. Around the same time, Bark.com was named on the Tech Track 100 as one of the UK's fastest-growing companies, bringing a wave of inbound interest. Bark.com eventually sold to EMK Capital for £240m, seven years after founding and without ever taking on an investor.

Feller stayed 18 months before leaving in October 2023. He became a father the next day. “It was timed to perfection," he tells Richard Harpin.

What do you do after a nine-figure exit?

Feller's new venture, Cyber Staff, keeps him focused on the same customer, only further along their journey. “Bark helped small businesses get new customers, and now I'm helping small businesses run their business once they have those customers,” he says.

The product uses AI to automate the admin that comes with running a small service business. “A lot of AI is completely focused on enterprise at the moment," says Feller. "Small businesses will probably benefit the most from this.”

Six months in, the team is five or six people, several of them former Bark.com colleagues. He's bootstrapping again, despite having the funds from the Bark.com sale to do otherwise and setting his sights higher. “I'm going to beat our old record of the largest UK bootstrapped business. This time it's going to be a £1bn+ – £10bn – we're going to aim for a lot.”

Kai Feller's four lessons for leaders

Set your ambition higher than feels comfortable. The highest possible ambition ends up driving daily decisions far more than founders realise. Bark's outcome went well beyond Feller's original expectations and he's aiming even higher with Cyber Staff.

Manage for the objective instead of the method. Micromanaging works when a team is small, but it stops scaling long before the business does. Feller relearned to manage as Bark grew, moving to a shared objective and giving people room to get there.

Profitability isn't a comfort blanket. Getting to profit early proved Bark's unit economics worked and that customers valued what it provided more than it cost. Feller sees that discipline as one of the biggest advantages he had over better-funded rivals.

Use AI as leverage. Feller works across six screens and several AI tools at once and argues that small businesses that get hands-on with the technology today will do the work of a much bigger team.

Listen to the full conversation with Kai Feller on the Business Leader podcast.