Unit Economics

The Unit Economics Podcast

The real mechanics behind your favorite brands. Conversations with founders on how products are designed, manufactured, priced, and distributed — with a focus on the decisions, economics, and tradeoffs behind the scenes. Hosted by Josh Stabinsky. 🎧 New episodes every week. 🌐 More at uepod.com Want to get in touch? hello@uepod.com

  1. [Lottie's Meats] Chelsey & Cassie Maschhoff

    3D AGO

    [Lottie's Meats] Chelsey & Cassie Maschhoff

    On today’s episode, I sit down with Chelsey & Cassie Maschhoff, the co-founders of Lottie’s Meats, a company built around a simple idea: making sausage feel like a product worth rethinking. In our conversation, we talk about what they saw when they looked at the category early on, why so much of the sausage aisle felt visually dated and operationally stagnant, and how they set out to build something more modern around whole-muscle cuts, a cleaner ingredient list, and a clearer point of view on quality. We get into the early product development process, what it looked like to take recipes that worked in a kitchen and translate them into real production runs, and why the path to market ended up being more complicated than just making a better product. We also spend a lot of time on the actual mechanics of the business: the realities of working with multiple USDA facilities, why meat production creates constraints that a lot of other CPG brands never have to think about, what they learned very quickly about the economics of frozen DTC, and how retail, food service, farmers markets, and pop-ups each served a different purpose in helping them get the company off the ground. This is a conversation about category positioning, supply chain complexity, and what it really takes to build a premium product in a part of the store where consumers are used to thinking mostly about price. I learned so much from my conversation with Chelsey and Cassie, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

    48 min
  2. [Muttville] Sherri Franklin

    MAR 5

    [Muttville] Sherri Franklin

    On today’s episode, I sit down with Sherri Franklin, founder of Muttville, a senior dog rescue based in San Francisco that has helped find homes for more than 14,000 older dogs. Sherri didn’t start her career in animal welfare. She was a hairstylist who had previously owned several salons in San Francisco when she began volunteering at a local shelter in the 90s. After watching a dog she loved get euthanized simply because she was older and overlooked by adopters, Sherri decided she was going to build something that didn’t really exist at the time: a rescue focused entirely on senior dogs. What started with Sherri fostering dogs in her own home and placing them with her hair clients eventually grew into a nonprofit with a full foster network, a dedicated adoption center, and a model that now rescues more than a thousand dogs every year. In this conversation, we talk about what those earliest days actually looked like operationally, from paying vet bills out of pocket to learning how to structure a nonprofit and recruit a board. We also get into the mechanics of running a large scale rescue today, including how foster networks function as the engine of the organization, how they think about adoption versus sanctuary care, and what it takes to consistently place senior dogs that most shelters have historically struggled to move. This was a deeply personal conversation for me, as Muttville is truly my favorite nonprofit in the world. The rate at which they’re placing dogs is absolutely amazing, and I’m just so honored to be able to share the work they’re doing, and help get the word out in any way that I can. I learned so much from Sherri during our conversation and I hope you enjoy this one as much as I did.

    43 min

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
2 Ratings

About

The real mechanics behind your favorite brands. Conversations with founders on how products are designed, manufactured, priced, and distributed — with a focus on the decisions, economics, and tradeoffs behind the scenes. Hosted by Josh Stabinsky. 🎧 New episodes every week. 🌐 More at uepod.com Want to get in touch? hello@uepod.com

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