By Reid Hislop | President, CEO Furlocity.com
Creating Connections is an Understatement. We like to think of UVC as company creators!
Last August, Furlocity was one of the fortunate companies to have a one-on-one meeting with Paul Singh and his partner Dana. Nasir and Kathryn of UVC were able to join us as well in RenderTribe’s downtown Saratoga’s office. This 45-minute meeting is proving to be one of the most valuable meetings of our company’s young life!
During that meeting, we answered many of the team’s questions related to pain points faced by pet parents in traveling with your pets. If you’re a pet parent, you know exactly what I’m talking about. In fact, many of our pet parents refer to this planning cycle of their trip as the most complex and stressful. At that time, we also talked about our expansion of our booking engine into other pet verticals – ie. Doggie day care, grooming, pet walking, etc.
“Good, but think bigger!” Paul challenged our thinking to include additional innovation by, “injecting ourselves into the daily lives of people with their pets.” What the heck does that mean?
Here’s our answer – Many of us today use our smartphones to discover, learn and engage with the world around us. We feel it should be no different when it comes to the lives of our pets. Today the Furlocity team is building a mobile app and website that combines your pet profile with (a) social networking, (b) crowd sourced reviews about local pet businesses and (c) the ability to book those services online – all based on your location.
The app would allow users to connect with one another online, share photos, find out about activities in their area; including professionally organized pet expos, as well as recommendations of traditional boarders and kennels, but also doggie day care, groomers, and the other pet verticals we identified. Think of it as FB (discover), meets Yelp (learn through opinions and reviews), meets Airbnb (book a service or event).
How’s that for an injection into daily life with you and your pets!
Thank you Paul, Dana, and UVC for the opportunity. We think our new mobile app does exactly what you suggested. MVP in 45 days!
