Lost My Doggie - Service Helps Find Lost Pets (opens in new tab)

This is a great example of a business where the revenue opportunity when sold as an insurance policy may be much higher than when sold as a per-incident/per-claim service.

Reposition as lost pet insurance, with differing rates based on type of pet, age of pet, whether or not pet has a homeagain RFID implant, etc. Perhaps also offer a standard response or a premium response, where the standard includes robocalls, craigslist posting, notification to local pet shelters/SPCA/dog catcher; premium level includes posting 'lost dog' flyers in local area using craigslist-recruited 'street teams.'

Sell it through vets, a PetCo partnership, dogster.com, etc. $29/year or something affordable like that. Get a special tag and everything "this pet protected by Pet Guardian" or whatever. See also AAA, TowBoat/US, Lifelock for insurance programs that target unlikely bad things like broken down car, grounded boat, or stolen identity.

"Do you care enough about your doggie to protect him with Pet Guardian?"

Market size is big: 60% of American households own pets. If just 0.50% of these pet-owning households bought lost pet insurance @ $29/year, that's an $8mm/yr business. If you got 3% of the market, it's $50 mm/yr.

Looks like an amazing opportunity for spammers to hammer a specific neighborhood ... or for teens to crank call the whole neighborhood.

What about the new law about robo-calling? Will they be affected by that?

I've been wondering, couldn't missing pets be tracked with dogs? Like they could find them via their smell?

I got a call from this service on behalf of one of my neighbors who lost his dog. I went to look at the service and though that this was a great idea. It appears to be a fully automated service that combines a request form, a GEO database, a telephone number database, and an automatic calling service. I think this is a great example of startup that a one or two person team could build by combining several existing web services to satisfy an existing need.

This service seems in line with Magic Jack and WebKinz. Software designed for lower tech experiences people who value utility, but not a pure pixel based experience.

This class of startup is really interesting. From what I've read MagicJack could do $100MM in revenue and WebKinz is a cash factory throwing off $750MM per year. Both utilize software, but it isn't the lead aspect of the service.

These companies really fly under the radar relative to the other hot startups of the day. ReadWriteWeb covers them to some degree, but it is an area that deserves a LOT more coverage.

A custom mouse cursor on a website! Haven't seen that in a while.