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The startup world’s cuddly, cutthroat battle to walk your dog

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Re: The startup world’s cuddly, cutthroat battle to walk your dog

#21

Post by ohazi »

beaconstudios wrote: post #17
aphextron wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you didn't think we were in the dot com bubble 2.0 and the re-emergence of the Pets.com strategy won't show you, I don't know what will. I wonder which one will get the superbowl ad. This is a silly, meaningless analogy. Every grown adult on earth was not walking around with a computer connected to broadband internet in their pocket in 1999. There were less than 500 million internet users total .

$600 million in venture capital... For dog walking. It's even more stupid than Pets.com because at least Pets.com was an ecommerce site so it could scale out. It doesn't really matter that Asia, Africa and Latin America have all come on line (I would bet that the 1999 internet was primarily Europe/US given its roots) if you're selling dog walking in California and New York now, does it?

It does sound like a particularly "Silicon Valley" style of silly, but it doesn't seem outrageous.

There are around 80 million pet dogs in the United States. Let's say the success case for one of these companies is to capture 10% of that market -- 8 million dogs in need of walking every day or two or three. Let's say they can take in $5/month in revenue from 10-30 walks (it's probably more than this).

That's almost half a billion in revenue per year.

Re: The startup world’s cuddly, cutthroat battle to walk your dog

#22

Post by Xylakant »

ISL wrote: post #20
beaconstudios wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$600 million in venture capital... For dog walking. It's even more stupid than Pets.com because at least Pets.com was an ecommerce site so it could scale out. It doesn't really matter that Asia, Africa and Latin America have all come on line (I would bet that the 1999 internet was primarily Europe/US given its roots) if you're selling dog walking in California and New York now, does it?

Middlemanning the dogwalking trade is as scalable, if not more so, than ecommerce. Gig-economy work is the creation of value through organization and communication. $600M in VC money is $2/US citizen. If half of households have a dog, that's ~$8/dog-house. If 10% of them want a dog-walker (the biggest "if"), that's ~$80/customer. At $30/walk, $600M in investment doesn't seem entirely crazy.

That calculation assumes that the investor doesn’t get any return on the investment, so that seems a tiny bit optimistic.

Re: The startup world’s cuddly, cutthroat battle to walk your dog

#23

Post by anoncoward111 »

ISL wrote: post #20
beaconstudios wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$600 million in venture capital... For dog walking. It's even more stupid than Pets.com because at least Pets.com was an ecommerce site so it could scale out. It doesn't really matter that Asia, Africa and Latin America have all come on line (I would bet that the 1999 internet was primarily Europe/US given its roots) if you're selling dog walking in California and New York now, does it?

Middlemanning the dogwalking trade is as scalable, if not more so, than ecommerce. Gig-economy work is the creation of value through organization and communication. $600M in VC money is $2/US citizen. If half of households have a dog, that's ~$8/dog-house. If 10% of them want a dog-walker (the biggest "if"), that's ~$80/customer. At $30/walk, $600M in investment doesn't seem entirely crazy.

The median American spends their entire monthly budget on rent, transport, and food.

You need to divide $600M by the 7 million households that own dogs in that area. That's $80 per potential customer. And you need to convert and not churn all 7 million.

Re: The startup world’s cuddly, cutthroat battle to walk your dog

#24

Post by lotsofpulp »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #12
nradov wrote: post #11

The idea of buying a dog when you don't have time to walk it yourself just seems bizarre to me. Why do people do that? I also find the recent notion of "pet parents" rather offensive. My dog is my property. I have a responsibility to take good care of her, but ultimately I am her owner not her parent.

> The idea of buying a dog when you don't have time to walk it yourself just seems bizarre to me. Why do people do that? Parents have children, and then send them to daycare. Is this significantly different?

There is a significantly different return on investment between children and pets, for individuals and society.

Re: The startup world’s cuddly, cutthroat battle to walk your dog

#25

Post by ohazi »

Xylakant wrote: post #22
ISL wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Middlemanning the dogwalking trade is as scalable, if not more so, than ecommerce. Gig-economy work is the creation of value through organization and communication. $600M in VC money is $2/US citizen. If half of households have a dog, that's ~$8/dog-house. If 10% of them want a dog-walker (the biggest "if"), that's ~$80/customer. At $30/walk, $600M in investment doesn't seem entirely crazy.

That calculation assumes that the investor doesn’t get any return on the investment, so that seems a tiny bit optimistic.

Do the dogs just stop needing walks at some point?

Re: The startup world’s cuddly, cutthroat battle to walk your dog

#26

Post by askafriend »

beaconstudios wrote: post #17
aphextron wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you didn't think we were in the dot com bubble 2.0 and the re-emergence of the Pets.com strategy won't show you, I don't know what will. I wonder which one will get the superbowl ad. This is a silly, meaningless analogy. Every grown adult on earth was not walking around with a computer connected to broadband internet in their pocket in 1999. There were less than 500 million internet users total .

$600 million in venture capital... For dog walking. It's even more stupid than Pets.com because at least Pets.com was an ecommerce site so it could scale out. It doesn't really matter that Asia, Africa and Latin America have all come on line (I would bet that the 1999 internet was primarily Europe/US given its roots) if you're selling dog walking in California and New York now, does it?

You can't make blanket statements like that without looking at the numbers and the unit economics.

Just because you think walking a dog is trivial doesn't mean that there isn't a huge need for a service like this.

A marketplace that can capture a majority of the marketshare in the US in the dog walking category will be minting money. Some of the back of the envelope calculations posted here easily show this.

Analogies from 1999 are no longer useful and haven't been for some time now. Just because Pets.com didn't succeed in 1999 doesn't mean Pets.com can't succeed today. Timing matters. Some of the early dot coms were just too early. The internet as a whole didn't have enough penetration for those kinds of businesses to work out the economics so early on.

Your perspective seems outdated.

Re: The startup world’s cuddly, cutthroat battle to walk your dog

#27

Post by anoncoward111 »

ohazi wrote: post #21
beaconstudios wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$600 million in venture capital... For dog walking. It's even more stupid than Pets.com because at least Pets.com was an ecommerce site so it could scale out. It doesn't really matter that Asia, Africa and Latin America have all come on line (I would bet that the 1999 internet was primarily Europe/US given its roots) if you're selling dog walking in California and New York now, does it?

It does sound like a particularly "Silicon Valley" style of silly, but it doesn't seem outrageous. There are around 80 million pet dogs in the United States. Let's say the success case for one of these companies is to capture 10% of that market -- 8 million dogs in need of walking every day or two or three. Let's say they can take in $5/month in revenue from 10-30 walks (it's probably more than this). That's almost h…

You need to figure that 50% of people won't ever sign up for a service like this because they're just content to do nothing, and you should figure that this company will find a way to spend a lot of the money theyre given

Re: The startup world’s cuddly, cutthroat battle to walk your dog

#29

Post by ohazi »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #24
pavel_lishin wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The idea of buying a dog when you don't have time to walk it yourself just seems bizarre to me. Why do people do that? Parents have children, and then send them to daycare. Is this significantly different?

There is a significantly different return on investment between children and pets, for individuals and society.

The connection I feel with another human or another living thing has zero correlation with their value to society.

Re: The startup world’s cuddly, cutthroat battle to walk your dog

#30

Post by ohazi »

anoncoward111 wrote: post #27
ohazi wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does sound like a particularly "Silicon Valley" style of silly, but it doesn't seem outrageous. There are around 80 million pet dogs in the United States. Let's say the success case for one of these companies is to capture 10% of that market -- 8 million dogs in need of walking every day or two or three. Let's say they can take in $5/month in revenue from 10-30 walks (it's probably more than this). That's almost h…

You need to figure that 50% of people won't ever sign up for a service like this because they're just content to do nothing, and you should figure that this company will find a way to spend a lot of the money theyre given

I did.

> Let's say the success case for one of these companies is to capture 10% of that market

> That's almost half a billion in revenue[1] per year.

[1] Not profit

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