The spark behind Snout

Emily has always been an animal lover—she grew up with a family dog and adopted her own dog, Bowser, in college, which pushed her to teach herself to code and build an app so she’d never again have to ask a vet to “fax over” medical records. That project became Pawprint, a consumer tool for pet medical records, but as she saw that owners loved the convenience yet wouldn’t pay for it, she began focusing on the stakeholders who truly needed that data and could support a real business around it.

From early iterations to product-market fit

As Pawprint grew, pet insurers kept knocking—only about 2% of pets were insured, and they wanted access to her user base and data—pulling Emily deep into the industry. Even as the rates of insured pets stayed low, vet costs jumped more than 40% in five years, roughly twice inflation, leaving even owners of “healthy” dogs with hefty routine bills and exposing a structural gap: most policies cover only accidents and illness while the first $800–$2,000 dollars a year goes to routine and preventative care that existing products barely touch.

The Snout model: wellness plans with real capital

After selling her first company, Emily stepped back and asked two questions: what’s the biggest problem in pet health, and can we actually solve it? The answer became Snout—capital-backed wellness plans that finance routine and preventative care in an underfunded industry, rather than just adding more software.

Today, Snout operates as a B2B2C business through veterinarians—the pet owner’s most trusted advisor—helping clinics increase engagement and spending. Clients on Snout plans spend about 2.5x more annually, visit more often thanks to unlimited exams, and are more likely to approve additional care because their routine costs are already covered.

Staying focused after multiple pivots

Emily describes the arc to Snout’s current model as three iterations deep: from consumer record‑keeping, to vet‑side software and insurance partnerships, and finally to capital‑backed wellness plans. Once she landed on this model, the strategy has stayed consistent—no major pivots, just refining execution in a space that “made a lot of sense” from day one.

A key strategic choice has been to stay firmly B2B2C through vets rather than chase direct‑to‑consumer distribution. Pet parents rarely adopt new financial tools without first asking their vet if they recommend it and will accept it, so aligning incentives with clinics sits at the center of Snout’s go‑to‑market.

Leading through rapid team growth

This year alone, the company has grown from about 30 to 45 people in under four months. Emily treats culture as a collaborative imperative rather than a top‑down projection of her personality. She still personally does a brief final interview for every hire—from hourly support roles up to senior positions—as a culture check and a chance to make sure candidates know what they’re signing up for, while leaving ultimate hiring decisions with functional leaders who work with those teammates day‑to‑day.

Why community matters

Early in her founder journey, Emily often felt isolated in mostly male circles and didn’t fully recognize the challenges she was facing as a woman until she met a small group of experienced women founders—YC alums, PE‑backed CEOs, and leaders of brands she admired—who began spending weekends together connecting and problem‑solving. That circle became a WhatsApp thread that’s been active since 2016 and inspired the Female Founders Retreat she now helps lead, where attendees often say they’ve met their closest founder friends. Her advice is simple: if you can’t find the community you need, build it yourself with dinners and gatherings and let the right people gather around you.

Lessons for early-stage founders

Emily’s path offers several lessons for other pre‑seed and seed founders. First, expect the journey to take longer than the optimistic “three-to-five-year” timeline most first‑time founders imagine. For her, those years were what it took just to understand the market and get her sea legs as a founder.

Emily also emphasizes that coding is just one of many useful skills; in a world shaped increasingly by AI, she believes the enduring advantages will be in communication, working with people, and learning to ask better questions rather than in writing every line of code yourself.

Above all, she urges founders—especially women—to seek or create communities that expand their sense of what’s possible and remind them they don’t have to build alone.