Coordinate help for your pet from people you already trust, quickly and easily with Spotwag. And never again feel pressure to leave your pet with a stranger. Spotwag makes asking for help, or offering it easy for everyone.
Spotwag was built using Facebook Connect, because we wanted to start with each pet owner's core group of trusted friends, and Facebook seemed a natural place to start. We collect very limited data from users, but use Facebook to make inviting friends easiest. We've already started to receive feedback on integrating signup via email, and it is something we plan to integrate in the near future.
We envision this being a single online source to manage your pet's needs, whether with friends or professionals. We started with this problem of finding help for your pet while you are away, because it's common to every pet owner, and the needs are real. It began as an "Airbnb for dogs," but after talking to a LOT of pet owners, we settled on this as a starting point. We learned that pet owners prefer to entrust their pets to friends, family and those they already know and trust, rather than strangers, whenever possible.
And we heard over and over from non-pet-owners that they really want to watch other's pets - many cannot have a pet of their own for whatever reason, and this gives them a chance to enjoy pet ownership without the same commitment. We exist to make those connections happen, and to remove the 'awkwardness' in asking for help, because as dog owners we know that it is NEVER easy or enjoyable to ask your friends for help with your pet.
We've already had several people make successful requests on Spotwag in preparation for SXSW next week. http://spotwag.com
As much as I'm sure it improves the listings, I'd recommend not making the photo required. First of all, other non-required info (such as pet type) seems more important, and second of all it requires digging through my photos. I'd be likely to add a photo when I'm looking for someone to catsit, but it was a deterrent for me to add the cat in the first place.
I do like to give something back, and usually end up buying a bottle of wine or a gift card in return. There could be some interesting opportunities for selling gifts (pet-related or not) in addition to processing cash payments.
I know another woman that actually volunteers at the Humane Society once per month for 8-hours just to be around dogs, because she would love to have one of her own, but cannot given her work schedule as a consultant.
I just moved across the country, so there's not many people I know locally who would help out — so I think it would be a really good idea to partner with companies and individuals offering services like walking, sitting, boarding, etc. Yelp sucks. It would probably be the only realistic revenue stream too.
In terms of social connections, I'm not clear as to how the entire process would work on first glance.
Awesome job for an MVP.
We built this first version to make it easier for pet owners to go directly to their existing friends/ connections for help (boarding, for instance) when they are away. Like you said, pet owners find it difficult to locate trustworthy sources for this sort of thing, and many we talked with would prefer to go direct to friends, family, etc., but asking for help in those cases sucks. Non-pet-owners we talked with said they really want to help/ hangout with cool pets, but they simply don't get asked. We want to fix that issue first, so we make those connections easier to make by having coordination in one place, and helping to remove the "awkward" in asking for help. We want asking for help from friends to be as easy or easier than picking up the phone to call a kennel.
I mentioned in another comment here, but we're definitely thinking about ways we can grow each user's graph beyond direct friends, including some elements similar to LinkedIn (e.g. your direct friends giving an endorsement to their friends, so when you see a friend of friend come up as an option for help, you see 5 other direct friends have vouched for that person and their love/ ability to watch dogs). We envision something similar for professionals as well.
We're really excited about the possibilities here! Don't hesitate to drop a note with any other feedback or comments as you dive in.
1) Allow non-owners to create more robust profiles. I'd imagine if some of our friends saw that we really like dog-sitting, they'd consider asking us and/or reaching out to us if they were looking for a sitter. As it currently stands, all I can do is provide name, email and phone number.
2) Allow owners to post to friends of friends or perhaps consider making it the default if people seem open to it -- I would imagine that owners would be okay with others dog-sitting if they had a mutual friend who they trusted. Because people have an average of 200 friends, that means that potential sitters go from 200 to 40,000. Also, consider allowing the non-owners to reach out to friends of friends who need a sitter.
Great idea and nice MVP. I hope those ideas helped and I hope you all succeed!
Best, Luke -- LukeRB.com
Thanks so much for the input, and would love to hear more as you continue diving into the current release! =)
And a genuine question here but I don't understand what this problem solves if it's connecting me to people I would already ask (and for which the barriers to ask are pretty low). If they are a facebook friend wouldn't it make sense for me to just post asking for help from my friends? All that said I have a large breed dog that I would love to have help with (more in the long term boarding dept. though).
On your question - the problem is a bit different for different people, but basically we found through talking to pet owners that while they prefer asking friends/ family for help, they don't usually. Asking for help is awkward, intimidating, and coordination with said friends/ family is often difficult. On the other hand, we found the non-pet-owners actually want to help more - they want to be asked for help, so we try to make that whole affair less 'awkward,' and simplify the coordination bit. We believe asking for help should be as easy as picking up the phone to call a kennel.
We want you to be covered for all situations, but for now, we started with your direct friends because you already trust them, and if we can make going to them as easy as going to a professional, we feel it's a win-win for all.
Assuming we want to ask friends for help, my first reaction on seeing this was that it's useful, but on second thoughts, I'm not so sure.
You probably get this question a lot, but if you're just using Facebook, why can't I post the message myself on Facebook instead of going via you? Or as we used to do, just call or email them?
If the value you are adding is management of the arrangement info, then I'm not sure how useful that is. Facebook messaging or email is good enough for doing that and fits in with everyone's usual mode of communication.
I know this is an MVP and I'm sure you will add more useful features, but you really need to start with the most useful feature, otherwise it will be hard to get people onboard.
Helping people find good professional caretakers would probably be much more useful and will give you a direct way to make money via referrals.
If you are really seeing a lot of interest on the part of non-pet-owners to take care of pets, then this could indeed be an AirBNB-type opportunity - empowering non-professionals to become sellers on a new marketplace. Then, trust would be an issue and there may be other legal hurdles, but those are signals for opportunity.
Edit: One way to establish trust is to enlist people who live in my neighbourhood. The person we currently hire lives on our street, which has increased my trust for them a huge amount. When I can literally walk past their door every time I go out, I feel more comfortable hiring them. You could use online local forums to gauge interest and get people to sign up.
"We used to ask friends, but we didn't want to keep asking them again and again. A couple of them like doing it, but we still felt like we shouldn't take them for granted." This is exactly the first problem we aimed to solve. Spotwag is a way for your friends to opt-in to help and removes that awkwardness for you feeling like you're taking them for granted. If they're not up for helping, they can simply ignore your request. I mentioned in another comment you'll often be surprised by friends that do want to help toom friends that you wouldn't expect.
You're right about MVP. We have a lot of ideas for making Spotwag more awesome. We want to make it easier to schedule help on Spotwag than it is to call/email/text a bunch of people.
One of our short term priorities is to bring professionals on board and 2nd degree connections. After speaking of hundreds of pet owners, we feel strongly that finding someone you trust is key and a straight airbnb model wasn't going to work.
Second roadblock came when I clicked the save button. I was given an error at the top of the page, but the page didn't scroll up so I didn't know the submission failed. Also the error message was generic and didn't give me an reason why there was an error. I assumed I didn't fill in a required field but opted to close the tab and write this comment instead of guessing.
We're currently working on redesigning the entire site with real designers, but would love feedback on the idea, functionality etc.
Have you decided how to monotize it? One thought I've had would be the Airbnb model, but given that it's way more niche than finding a place to stay for vacation, I think this would have to be tested with an audience who is in dire need of this. Maybe find a way to target the "babysitter" audience?
Looking forward to seeing how this progresses nonetheless! Best of luck.
I was at a little sandwich shop called Ike's Place in San Francisco today and saw your business card!!
