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> Wag and Rover are two of the newest and largest players in the booming pet industry, each with more than $300 million in venture capital funding. 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.
I'm curious. After the initial matchup, what stops these "independent contractors" and dog owners from cutting out the middleman (Wag/ Rover)?
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.
I agree with your first statement. I find your second statement a little bizarre. People are going to feel varying degrees of attachment to their pets. Why would you care? You can think it's silly or weird, but who are you to take offense at something like that?
Every once in a while, the Bay Area picks a new phrase that it enters into the public lexicon. "Pet owner" was said to invoke slavery, so "pet guardian" was the new thing you had to say, otherwise face consequence.
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I agree with your first statement. I find your second statement a little bizarre. People are going to feel varying degrees of attachment to their pets. Why would you care? You can think it's silly or weird, but who are you to take offense at something like that?
> I find your second statement a little bizarre. Every once in a while, the Bay Area picks a new phrase that it enters into the public lexicon. "Pet owner" was said to invoke slavery, so "pet guardian" was the new thing you had to say, otherwise face consequence.
If you want to consider yourself a "pet owner" -- that's fine with me. If you'd rather be a "pet parent" -- more power to you.
But to take offense at someone else choosing either one of those for themselves?
Fuck off! What the hell do you care? If it hurts your sensibilities then do it differently yourself, but leave other people alone!
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$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. Analogie…
I can get behind gig economy companies like Uber because transport is a HUGE industry and the taxi experience was generally not very good, but dogwalking? If I wanted my dog (assuming I had a dog) walking, I'd just google "dog walker near me" and pick some local person off google's local business listings that would charge me a lot less than a startup that's going to charge me through the nose for a much less personal service.
I'm curious. After the initial matchup, what stops these "independent contractors" and dog owners from cutting out the middleman (Wag/ Rover)?
To walk a dog for money in Vancouver, you are required to have a $2 million insurance policy.
https://i.imgur.com/ZEVBBuD.png
Saner cities covered this liability with the $10 dog muzzle.
I'm curious. After the initial matchup, what stops these "independent contractors" and dog owners from cutting out the middleman (Wag/ Rover)?
They can't keep the good housecleaners because they quickly arrange better side deals. Eventually my ex did the same to get a consistent cleaner.
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Hey. I'm the reporter from this story, a friend directed me to this comment thread. This data was sent to me by research firm Mintel.
I am not saying you don't have a good source. I am saying these numbers are not going to be exact. EX: The 2017-2018 APPA National Pet Owners Survey https://americanpetproducts.org/Uploads/MemServices/GPE2017_... Overall dog ownership in the US at 48% +/- 4.4 based on 505 completed surveys. But, that's not nearly enough data to slice things down to 30-40 year olds and worse it's a servery which have dubious accuracy…
Their methodology as outlined on their web site (https://store.mintel.com/mintel-methodology) and details the quotas they utilize to get what they feel is a statistically relevant cross section of data.
Anytime sampling is used, of course it's not going to be exact. But a 2000 person survey is, given equal statistical rigor, going to be better than a 500 person online survey and might be enough of a population to justify more detail.
(Unfortunately, the Mintel survey results cost $4300, so other than their methodology page it's going to be difficult for me to infer much more. But the methodology page seems to suggest they aim for +/-2 or 3% confidence level.)
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> 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.
