Does anyone else find this very hard to believe? I tried to track down the source [0, 1, 2] but I'm unsure how reliable "American Pet Products Association". It's describes itself as "The leading not-for-profit trade association serving the interests of pet product manufacturers and importers"
[0] https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/9/12/17831948/rover-wag-d...
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2016/09/13/m...
[2] https://americanpetproducts.org/Uploads/MemServices/GPE2017_...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2016/09/13/m...
I assume vaccinations could make a reliable sanity check for pet ownership, but I am having trouble getting annual numbers.
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.
Some people have this idea that all human processes need to be mirrored in software. This type of gig work is best left to ad-hoc job boards like craigslist or kajiji or facebook marketplace. Why do we continue to try to force this into software?
I think part of it is that the dumber VCs out there are in such a rush to get in on the ground floor of "Uber for X", that they don't bother checking whether Uber's business model is valid for X. Uber doesn't have to worry about getting shut out by drivers and passengers making deals directly with each other, because people need rides at random and going directly to the driver means basically hiring them full-time. But that logic doesn't apply for someone coming on a fixed schedule to walk your dog or clean your house: middlemen provide no value beyond initial contact.
It's investing by fad and it's all going to come unraveled soon enough.
And some of the sitters and walkers who use these apps already had established sitting and walking businesses.
As someone who loathes the startup tendency to misclassify employees in order to shift costs onto them, I do savor the schadenfreude when it backfires like this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
$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.
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.
There are all kinds of reasons one may employ the services of a dog walker: reduced mobility of a previously healthy owner, impaired functioning of an elderly dog's bladder necessitating more frequent bathroom visits, travel, the arrival of a new child allowing less freedom to walk the dog, and about fifty more that spring to mind without even putting much effort into it.
All that said, there is not a chance in hell that I would ever trust a dog to a "valley" startup employing (effectively) randoms vs a local company with prior approved knowledge of who will be performing the service.
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?
(Kidding, and congrats on the child)
I completely agree with you that being the parent to a human child is harder, more work, more stressful, and that the stakes are way higher. I can absolutely understand feeling belittled and upset if someone tries to argue that raising a child is anything like taking care of a pet. It's not.
I don't think that this is the argument that most people who refer to themselves as "pet parents" are trying to make, but certainly some of them might be doing so. I think that that's silly and easily refutable.
However...
This whole thing seems too similar to the religious conservative argument that referring to gay unions as marriages was degrading the sanctity of their own marriages because of a word. That argument has always seemed pretty pathetic to me. The weightiness of a concept isn't diminished when people decide to recycle a word [1]. The sanctity of someone's marriage isn't defined by use of the word marriage. Similarly, the sanctity of human parenthood has nothing to do with how dog owners want to refer to themselves.
Language evolves, and it's usually pointless to fight this process. Sure, ambiguities that are introduced may be annoying, and you may get frustrated that you now have to clarify something when previously you didn't, but there's no reason for you to have the right to dictate how other people decide to see themselves. Trying to fight this with outrage and offense seems to me like shouting at a rain cloud for getting you wet.
If people want to refer to themselves as pet parents because they don't currently have or aren't planning to have children ("No, I'm not a real parent, but I am a pet parent"), leave them be. If they seriously want to make the argument that taking care of a dog is anything like raising a kid for 20 years, shake your head in smug amusement and leave them be. They're obviously wrong, and you know it. Hell, I even know actual parents to human children who also have a dog or two, and who consider themselves both parents and pet parents. They're clearly just trying to be cute rather than equating the two. Enjoy it if you think it's cute, or don't, and then leave them be, because at the end of the day, it doesn't affect you. It'll only affect you if you let yourself get upset by it, and that's just a really poor use of your time and energy.
[1] Obviously a lot more was/is at stake for the LGBTQ community, and I don't mean to belittle actual LGBTQ struggles for equality and acceptance by comparing them to the plight of people who want to be cute by referring to themselves as pet parents (there, I guess even I need to clarify).
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!
To each their own. Of probably equal or greater offense to me is the idea that one treat living, sentient beings to be owned and treated as property.
As to your other point, I have no idea other than changing circumstances. I find that having a dog saves me from being a lazy slob and forces me to drag my arse out the door for an hour when I otherwise wouldn't.
That's exactly how the law treats animals. They are property of their owner.
Parents have children, and then send them to daycare. Is this significantly different?
Hell, I’m out of town right now and needed a sitter for my dog. Opened the wag app and within 10 min had someone scheduled (and insured) to watch my dog for 5 days.
