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Your perspective seems outdated.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.
First, it seems like another instance of very wealthy people in big tech cities living in a bubble. Sure, many people who live in these cities can afford high prices for dog walkers. But that doesn't scale to anywhere beyond these hubs of uber-rich. No-one in middle America, let alone anywhere else outside hyper-wealthy cities, is going to be spending $30/day (I'm talking this number from another comment, I don't know where they got it) to have their dog walked. Assuming that's every weekday, that's at least $600/month. That scales if you ("you" being the founders/investors, not actually you) believe solipsistically that being able to do so is somehow common or even desirable to most people. It's a very yuppie thing to get a dog just to pay someone else to walk it. Even only having a dog walker a fraction of that time would be a huge expense to most people. So it's a service for the already-pampered tech/finance class. Hence, my comparison to the dumpster fire that was Juicero.
Secondly, the investment of $600 million in companies that basically exist to leech off dogwalkers shows me how far some parts of the startup world have veered from "disruptive innovation" towards rent-seeking and middlemanning. Not that this is particularly surprising - I've not particularly enjoyed watching the industry become more cancerous over time. But I guess I still like to think of the industry as if the old idea that startups were going to make the world a better place were true.
Thirdly, even ignoring all that - there seem to be a lot of flaws with the business model. I mean, what's to stop someone just hiring the dogwalker direct after the first time? Why would I trust a complete stranger from a big-brand company to walk my dog, compared to speaking to someone independent? If there's a PR crisis (like, say someone's dog being lost or killed while being walked like in the linked article) that damaged reputation is going to affect every dogwalker under the company umbrella.
I guess overall it seems like $600 million going towards making the world a worse (or more realistically, simply not-better) place.
Now, to answer your actual comments:
> 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.
It isn't. AirBnB is basically just a independent-contractor villa rental chain now. What % of AirBnB places (or more importantly, AirBnB revenue) are actually people's spare rooms? It seems they've just centralised the market for renting an apartment or house for travel and provided a more visible alternative to staying in a hotel.
> 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.
If paying other people to spend time with your dog is the internet revolution we've been working towards, count me out. I thought we were going to be making the world more efficient, scaling up towards closer integration so we could all make smarter decisions and lead better lives. There's some cool stuff going on in that space for sure, but all the money seems to be getting dumped into turning Silicon Valley into assisted living for rich young adults. And that's coming from a rich young adult (though I don't live in one of these cities).
