The errand was supposed to take five minutes. Kevin Barry needed an air filter for his college apartment. The first one did not fit. The store did not have the right replacement. By the time the Saturday had surrendered four hours to a ten- or fifteen-dollar rectangle of pleated material, Barry had acquired both a filter and a grievance. His NC State classmate Thad Tarkington heard the story and recognized the useful sort of absurdity: a cheap, necessary product sold through an expensive, forgettable ritual.
They were already studying founders up close. At North Carolina State University, Tarkington and Barry ran the Collegiate Entrepreneurship Organization, inviting investors and business owners to speak. They liked business models and asked people about the chore. The replies were monotonously promising. Everyone knew the filter ought to be changed. Almost nobody remembered. If the right size arrived at the right moment, would they subscribe? The answer was generally yes, provided the quality and price behaved themselves.
Within days, Tarkington later recalled, the pair were working 20-hour stretches in The Garage, NC State's entrepreneurship space. They appropriated a conference room with a sign, slept on a small couch and woke each other when class was five minutes away. Three or four months into the experiment, the business looked more persuasive than the timetable. Both left school in 2013. FilterEasy launched the following March.
“Obviously, no one grows up thinking they're going to be in the filter business.”Thad Tarkington, reflecting on the company's unlikely category
The useful customer who looked like a mistake
The original proposition was almost comically tidy. Answer a few questions once. FilterEasy determines the sizes, quantities and schedule. Thereafter, the correct objects turn up at the door when they are needed. An entire aisle of confusion disappears into the post. It was the Dollar Shave Club idea translated into a product with less facial hair and more fiberglass.
Consumers came. Then some of them behaved strangely. One account wanted filters delivered to many addresses. Another wanted dozens. Some appeared to have hundreds of homes. Tarkington inspected their email domains, saw “property management” and began calling. The mystery customers explained that residents were supposed to change filters under their leases but often did not. Neglect could become HVAC damage, an irritated owner and another dispute for the manager to settle.
Here was a superior clue to a pitch deck: customers had jury-rigged the consumer service into an operational tool. FilterEasy began adapting packages with manager branding and clear instructions. A forgotten household chore now touched three parties - the person living in the home, the company managing it and the investor paying when equipment failed. Tarkington and Barry had not abandoned the original problem. They had discovered who felt its consequences most sharply.
A name built to be outgrown
FilterEasy was an excellent name until it became a bad one. It explained exactly what the company sold and nothing about what the company hoped to become. By 2019, after a rebrand that took more than a year, it became Second Nature. The phrase carried a larger promise: make caring for a home feel routine, and make new services fit under the same roof without sounding as though an air-filter shop had wandered into insurance or credit reporting by accident.
The financing followed the widening ambition. In March 2020, Second Nature announced a $16.4 million Series C led by a group that included filter manufacturer MANN+HUMMEL's corporate venture arm, Lead Edge Capital, IDEA Fund Partners and several other investors. Reporting at the time put total capital raised at $18.4 million. The company employed about 150 people then, including fulfillment operations in North Carolina and Oklahoma.
The intervening years turned a single recurring shipment into a collection of resident services. Tarkington has described air-filter delivery, insurance, credit reporting, identity protection, utility setup, on-demand pest control and group-rate internet. In October 2025, Second Nature announced a Resident Experience Platform combining its benefits package with personalized, mobile-first onboarding - the part of a tenancy where leases, utilities, obligations and a resident's remaining patience all arrive together.
Three winners, or the feature waits
The connective tissue is what Tarkington calls the “triple win.” A service should help the resident, improve operations for the property manager and create value for the owner. This is partly a product principle and partly diplomatic architecture. Renting produces overlapping responsibilities and mismatched incentives with impressive efficiency. A filter can be the resident's chore, the manager's compliance problem and the owner's repair bill. Solve only one perspective and the friction merely changes address.
Tarkington is blunt about the emotional weather of property management. “Nobody's ever calling you to say thank you,” he has said. “They only call when there's a problem.” Second Nature's work is therefore less about making a dazzling interface than arranging for fewer reasons to call. The company inserts itself into the seams - listing, leasing, fulfillment, utilities, move-in - and tries to turn obligations into documented processes before someone is angry.
That position invites scrutiny. Resident benefit packages can appear as mandatory fees if choices and terms are obscure. In a 2023 interview about regulation, Tarkington emphasized transparency, accountability and resident choice, as well as tailoring services to actual property needs. The triple win only works if “resident” is more than a decorative first word. Convenience is not permission to become vague.
“If you're all aligned and you understand the why, then you can go really far and fast.”Tarkington on the lesson he learned after focusing too narrowly on product and customers
The people problem inside the product problem
For a founder whose origin story features two students, a couch and an uncooperative filter, the later challenge is coordination. Tarkington told a 2025 interviewer that Second Nature had about 300 people. Asked what he would teach his younger self, he did not choose pricing, capital or even air flow. He chose people: clear communication, shared reasons and the patient work of alignment.
One ritual makes the idea concrete. The company holds a weekly all-hands call. For 15 minutes, everyone is sorted into small groups of four to discuss a prompt connected to a core value. The groups let colleagues meet people they do not ordinarily work with. More important, the values have to survive conversation. Tarkington describes them not as universal commandments for a worthy life but as the operating principles Second Nature currently chooses for making decisions. It is a less pompous definition of culture, and probably a more usable one.
He also gives persistence a sensible escape hatch. His advice to a new founder is to believe and continue, but not to wear “horse blinders.” Listen to feedback. Be intelligent about where time and money go. Determination without observation would have left FilterEasy selling only to homeowners; observation without determination might have left the idea in a university conference room.
Phone, wallet, keys - and a taste for motion
The public version of Tarkington is spare in small ways. He once listed the contents of his pockets as phone, wallet and keys, adding that he prefers his pockets empty. He does not drink coffee. His first jobs were lifeguarding and making sandwiches at Quiznos, at roughly the same time. He has snowboarded, played golf and practiced enough yoga to manage handstands and unusual balances, though by 2025 he conceded that he was “not as bendy” as he once had been.
These details suit a founder whose company sells the removal of tiny annoyances. The filter itself was never dramatic. That was the point. It was common, necessary, cheap and perpetually postponed. Tarkington has used the phrase “big doors, small hinges” for this class of problem. The smallest neglected item can move a household expense, a maintenance schedule or a landlord relationship.
Second Nature now speaks about an “experience gap” between the personalized convenience people meet elsewhere and the blunt machinery of renting. The ambition is much larger than the first box on the doorstep. Yet the original discipline remains visible: find the task people evade, study the workaround they invented and make the correct action easier to repeat. A grimy filter in a college pantry was not an elegant beginning. It was better. It was specific.