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Your perspective seems outdated.
Great outcome, and great example of what I was trying to convey in my post.
People still underestimate the headroom that the internet has to transform how we live and behave in the world. The last 20 years was really only the beginning.
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.
If you really want to know the answer, you have to do the work to get to it.
I'm not going to engage with emotional arguments filled with rhetoric like "all the single yuppies who feel bad leaving their dog locked in their $1m/yr closet apartment". It's just not a good use of my time, I'm sorry.
If you want to have a reasonable argument with rough numbers, calculation and analysis of customer behavior, then I'm game. If you just want to specifically convince yourself that walking dogs isn't worth the money that was invested, then it seems you've done a good job of it already and you're not really interested in having a balanced debate.
How big of a market do you think staying in a stranger's spare room is? Your answer a few years ago likely wouldn't have been more than $1 billion globally. AirBnB is a $30B company on the verge of going public.
The internet is not yet done transforming how we live and work. The world you live in 10 years from now will look very different. Economic priorities will look different. The way people behave will be different. And it will all happen faster than at any other point in history.
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.
Although 10% may, ultimately, be a good estimate, it's a bit misleading to equate all owned dogs to the whole "market".
At the very least, you'd want to exclude rural dogs, who, presumably, have plenty of outdoor access. Probably pro-rating this for some definitions of "suburban" would make sense, too.
I'm not sure how multi-dog households would work in terms of pricing for a dog-walking service, if an owner wanted them all walked at once, but it seems better to count dog-owning households rather than dogs.
Most importantly (and this could obviate the need for any of the other filtering), the real market is only those owners who can afford to pay $20-$30 for a walk. Of those 80 million dogs, how many are owned by people who can afford an extra $2k-$11k/yr on top of basic pet care expenses (<$1k/yr)?
> 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
$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.
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.
