Co-founder Chris is a great dog parent, but needs help from time to time, especially at the end of his workday. We couldn't find a single dog walker in SF who didn't require pre-arrangements and long commitments.
@chug2k Hey Charles and thanks for your submission. Tell me how do you plan to satisfy both sides of this marketplace? More specifically where are these dog walkers coming from?
Hey Sean! Thanks for the question. One great thing about starting with an on-demand marketplace is that we can focus on growing our customer base first. As we get more customers who are excited by the convenience and great service from Fetch, we can scale up on our walker base. We’ve met a lot of great dog walkers already who are excited about the idea, both at local dog parks and on Craigslist. (There were 59 SF Bay Area Dog Walker postings on Craigslist yesterday alone.) We also plan on talking to the most highly rated dog boarders on DogVacay and Rover, which are peer-to-peer dog boarding marketplaces.
I know a bit or two about this space (wife has her own dog-walking service) and am kind of surprised you guys chose this name considering there is a really large, nationwide company already called Fetch (http://www.fetchpetcare.com/).
@scrivs Yeah, @chug2k and I have been going back and forth on this one. We found out shortly after we decided on the name. Nothing has quite communicated our vision as “Fetch” so we kept it in the meantime. We'd love to hear any suggestions! Also, what do you and your wife think about the idea, other than the fact that we need to change our name?
@kungfoox I'm not one to speak on businesses and executions, you guys might knock this one out of the park, but I will talk about some of the challenges.
People with dogs usually don't randomly need a dog walker. They either know their schedules and can walk the dog themselves, they have a person that does it for them already, or will have a friend quickly drop by to walk their dog. Worst case they will be cruel and let their dog wait a couple extra hours until they can get home.
And as others have mentioned dogs are not things that people take lightly. It's hard enough letting a stranger just come by and pet your dog on the sidewalk, so it's going to be a huge ask to get a complete stranger to swing by your place to walk your dog. I know my dogs wouldn't take kindly to some unknown person trying to put a leash on them and take them out, but maybe mine are the exception.
This is probably why every dog service that I've interacted with has a meet & greet session so both the service provider and the dog can build a level of comfort with each other.
Best of luck with your application.
@scrivs Really great points. Let me hone in one one specific point quickly - we hate that worst case of the dog being home alone, which is why started the service. There's just no alternative to the cruel situation you described, which really sucks! Well, until now.
Dogs definitely come in all shapes and sizes. We've been fortunate with the ones we've come across so far, but definitely understand your concerns. We have been asking owners to do a meet & greet the first time we walk their dogs, just so the dogs get to know us and that we're friends with the owner.
@scrivs I think you make a lot of valid points, and I wanted to add to @chug2k comment. We surveyed a range of dog parents throughout the city to really see if the problem that I had as a dog owner applied to others as well. To your point, many of the owners who used dog walkers had a very regular schedule, but we found some owners who had more fluid schedules were actually intimidated by dog walking services. There were a lot of questions that they were unprepared for in terms of scheduling but having walkers on-demand enabled them to either ease into a schedule or free it up.
Love the idea, but it's tough when dealing with the things people care about the most. Put another way, it's not surprising Uber for babysitting hasn't taken off yet and Care.com is facing pushback for its scandal (http://www.hlntv.com/article/201...).
One person's opinion: I suspect you need something more than a rating as a trust mechanism--not for the times things will go right (most of the time)--but for the times thing go wrong. A mechanism like Hinge (eg mutual friend / connection validation) will go a long way to helping this take off I think.
@borker if it wasn’t tough, it wouldn’t be as fun to solve. =) We actually first started out with dog sitting, but found there was a much higher barrier to entry when it came to trust. I can only imagine how tough it must be for UrbanSitter and Care! (UrbanSitter does seem to be doing pretty well, by the way). After looking at our data and sending out more surveys, we thought dog walking would be a much better way to ease into the market. We walk dogs around the neighborhoods that their owners are already familiar with.
We’re looking for additional ways to build trust. One really interesting insight we got from dog owners is that when their regularly-scheduled sitter is out of town, they tend to go with people who are friends with their sitter over sitters their own friends use! So we hope to make our dog walkers all feel like they’re part of the same community.
Another key trust-builder is familiarity with the neighborhood - our data shows people trust walkers who walk dogs near them. So we’re hoping to make that part of the “trust” system as well!
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