Scratch's Mike Halligan on Why He Was Wrong About Meta: How He Built a Smarter Growth Engine | #607 — Add To Cart: Australia’s eCommerce Show

Five years ago, Mike Halligan joined Add To Cart from a hotel room during COVID lockdown, sharing how Scratch was disrupting the dog food category with a simple but powerful idea: healthier food, delivered on subscription, built on trust rather than tactics.

Fast forward to today, and Scratch is still grounded in that same philosophy. But behind the scenes, the business has evolved significantly.

Today, we're discussing:

Why Scratch remains subscription-only despite the pressure to drive one-off sales
What happened when Scratch tried to build a dog-owner community and real-world activations
The moment Mike finally admitted defeat and embraced Meta ads
The AI workflow Mike built using Claude to analyse reviews and generate ad concepts
Why Scratch focuses purely on new customer acquisition on Meta
How AI now helps Mike build internal tools without hiring developers
Why the next year at Scratch is about calming the chaos and executing better

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