7 ms·

The startup world’s cuddly, cutthroat battle to walk your dog

48 points by themakermark 8y ago

bko 8y ago
> While millennials may not own cars or homes, three-quarters of Americans in their 30s have dogs. A little more than half own cats Does anyone else find this very hard to believe? I tried to track down the source [0, 1, 2] but I'm unsure how reliable "American Pet Products Association". It's describes itself as "The leading not-for-profit trade association serving the interests of pet product manufacturers and importers" [0] https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/9/12/17831948/rover-wag-dog-walking-app https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/9/12/17831948/rover-wag-d... [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2016/09/13/millennials-are-picking-pets-over-people/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.65444adc954c https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2016/09/13/m... [2] https://americanpetproducts.org/Uploads/MemServices/GPE2017_NPOS_Seminar.pdf https://americanpetproducts.org/Uploads/MemServices/GPE2017_...
- nytesky 8y ago
  It’s in WaPo, which should be doing fact checking. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2016/09/13/millennials-are-picking-pets-over-people/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2016/09/13/m...
  - Retric 8y ago
    These things often get cited over and over again, that does not make them true. I assume vaccinations could make a reliable sanity check for pet ownership, but I am having trouble getting annual numbers.
    - clieber 8y ago
      Hey. I'm the reporter from this story, a friend directed me to this comment thread. This data was sent to me by research firm Mintel.
      - Retric 8y ago
        I am not saying you don't have a good source. I am saying these numbers are not going to be exact. EX: The 2017-2018 APPA National Pet Owners Survey https://americanpetproducts.org/Uploads/MemServices/GPE2017_NPOS_Seminar.pdf https://americanpetproducts.org/Uploads/MemServices/GPE2017_... Overall dog ownership in the US at 48% +/- 4.4 based on 505 completed surveys. But, that's not nearly enough data to slice things down to 30-40 year olds and worse it's a servery which have dubious accuracy overall.
        soundwave106 8y ago
        But that's not the survey they used. A search on Mintel reveals surveys on pet ownership that seem targeted for consumer research and pet industry (eg: https://store.mintel.com/americas-pet-owners-us-august-2018 https://store.mintel.com/americas-pet-owners-us-august-2018 and https://store.mintel.com/us-americas-pet-owners-market-report https://store.mintel.com/us-americas-pet-owners-market-repor...). Their methodology as outlined on their web site (https://store.mintel.com/mintel-methodology https://store.mintel.com/mintel-methodology) and details the quotas they utilize to get what they feel is a statistically relevant cross section of data. Anytime sampling is used, of course it's not going to be exact. But a 2000 person survey is, given equal statistical rigor, going to be better than a 500 person online survey and might be enough of a population to justify more detail. (Unfortunately, the Mintel survey results cost $4300, so other than their methodology page it's going to be difficult for me to infer much more. But the methodology page seems to suggest they aim for +/-2 or 3% confidence level.)
        Retric 8y ago
        First it was 500 dog owners out of ~1000 respondents ~= +/— 4.4%. So, Double that to 2000 people and you can get 3% accuracy on overall per ownership, assuming no systemic bias. But, slice that into 30-39 year olds and you have ~1/7 the data and thus much higher error bars. Now, if they had sampled ~20,000 people then sure you can slice and dice like that. But slicing data always increases the risk of sampling bias as would anything that targets 30-39 year olds specifically.
      - 8y ago
    - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
      You could use % of people living in an apartment and % of apartments that allow pets as another sanity check.
- draw_down 8y ago
  Yes, I have a dog and live in a dog friendly place and it doesn’t seem like anywhere near that many people have them.
nradov 8y ago
The idea of buying a dog when you don't have time to walk it yourself just seems bizarre to me. Why do people do that? I also find the recent notion of "pet parents" rather offensive. My dog is my property. I have a responsibility to take good care of her, but ultimately I am her owner not her parent.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- pavel_lishin 8y ago
  > The idea of buying a dog when you don't have time to walk it yourself just seems bizarre to me. Why do people do that? Parents have children, and then send them to daycare. Is this significantly different?
  - lotsofpulp 8y ago
    There is a significantly different return on investment between children and pets, for individuals and society.
    - ohazi 8y ago
      The connection I feel with another human or another living thing has zero correlation with their value to society.
    - pavel_lishin 8y ago
      I don't see why this means that it's ok to pay someone to care for your child during the day, but not ok to pay someone to take care for your dog during the day.
      - lotsofpulp 8y ago
        I didn’t make that claim, but I was pointing out a reason why someone might not equate the two.
beaconstudios 8y ago
> Wag and Rover are two of the newest and largest players in the booming pet industry, each with more than $300 million in venture capital funding. If you didn't think we were in the dot com bubble 2.0 and the re-emergence of the Pets.com strategy won't show you, I don't know what will. I wonder which one will get the superbowl ad.
- aphextron 8y ago
  >If you didn't think we were in the dot com bubble 2.0 and the re-emergence of the Pets.com strategy won't show you, I don't know what will. I wonder which one will get the superbowl ad. This is a silly, meaningless analogy. Every grown adult on earth was not walking around with a computer connected to broadband internet in their pocket in 1999. There were less than 500 million internet users total.
  - beaconstudios 8y ago
    $600 million in venture capital... For dog walking. It's even more stupid than Pets.com because at least Pets.com was an ecommerce site so it could scale out. It doesn't really matter that Asia, Africa and Latin America have all come on line (I would bet that the 1999 internet was primarily Europe/US given its roots) if you're selling dog walking in California and New York now, does it?
    - ISL 8y ago
      Middlemanning the dogwalking trade is as scalable, if not more so, than ecommerce. Gig-economy work is the creation of value through organization and communication. $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.
      - Xylakant 8y ago
        That calculation assumes that the investor doesn’t get any return on the investment, so that seems a tiny bit optimistic.
elektor 8y ago
I'm curious. After the initial matchup, what stops these "independent contractors" and dog owners from cutting out the middleman (Wag/ Rover)?
- petra 8y ago
  A contract, probably.
  - Analemma_ 8y ago
    Ah, but as these companies are always so quick to remind us, their workers are contractors, not employees. Which here reveals itself as a double-edged sword: it lets you save lots of money on those pesky benefits and workers' rights, but it means you have no ability to prevent them from cutting you out and getting a better deal by going directly to the customer. As someone who loathes the startup tendency to misclassify employees in order to shift costs onto them, I do savor the schadenfreude when it backfires like this.
- vinceguidry 8y ago
  Nothing substantial. The article named a Wag contractor who openly admitted to using the platform to source clients for his personal business.
- iaw 8y ago
  That is frequently what happens with the house cleaning middleman apps. They can't keep the good housecleaners because they quickly arrange better side deals. Eventually my ex did the same to get a consistent cleaner.
- jbob2000 8y ago
  Absolutely nothing, which is why these companies are a flash in the pan. You can sign a contract with them, but it means nothing if someone on the other side of the country is violating it and you have no idea. Also, this is a petty cash business. Even if someone violates the contract, are you going to take them to court over $45? No, you'll just ban them. And the customers who liked that person will leave your service and phone them up privately. These companies die by a thousand cuts. Some people have this idea that all human processes need to be mirrored in software. This type of gig work is best left to ad-hoc job boards like craigslist or kajiji or facebook marketplace. Why do we continue to try to force this into software?
always_good 8y ago
Dog walking is a good example of how over-regulated Canada is. To walk a dog for money in Vancouver, you are required to have a $2 million insurance policy. https://i.imgur.com/ZEVBBuD.png https://i.imgur.com/ZEVBBuD.png Saner cities covered this liability with the $10 dog muzzle.

48 points by themakermark 8y ago

bko 8y ago

> While millennials may not own cars or homes, three-quarters of Americans in their 30s have dogs. A little more than half own cats Does anyone else find this very hard to believe? I tried to track down the source [0, 1, 2] but I'm unsure how reliable "American Pet Products Association". It's describes itself as "The leading not-for-profit trade association serving the interests of pet product manufacturers and importers" [0] https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/9/12/17831948/rover-wag-dog-walking-app https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/9/12/17831948/rover-wag-d... [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2016/09/13/millennials-are-picking-pets-over-people/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.65444adc954c https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2016/09/13/m... [2] https://americanpetproducts.org/Uploads/MemServices/GPE2017_NPOS_Seminar.pdf https://americanpetproducts.org/Uploads/MemServices/GPE2017_...

nytesky 8y ago
It’s in WaPo, which should be doing fact checking. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2016/09/13/millennials-are-picking-pets-over-people/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2016/09/13/m...
- Retric 8y ago
  These things often get cited over and over again, that does not make them true. I assume vaccinations could make a reliable sanity check for pet ownership, but I am having trouble getting annual numbers.
  - clieber 8y ago
    Hey. I'm the reporter from this story, a friend directed me to this comment thread. This data was sent to me by research firm Mintel.
    - Retric 8y ago
      I am not saying you don't have a good source. I am saying these numbers are not going to be exact. EX: The 2017-2018 APPA National Pet Owners Survey https://americanpetproducts.org/Uploads/MemServices/GPE2017_NPOS_Seminar.pdf https://americanpetproducts.org/Uploads/MemServices/GPE2017_... Overall dog ownership in the US at 48% +/- 4.4 based on 505 completed surveys. But, that's not nearly enough data to slice things down to 30-40 year olds and worse it's a servery which have dubious accuracy overall.
      - soundwave106 8y ago
        But that's not the survey they used. A search on Mintel reveals surveys on pet ownership that seem targeted for consumer research and pet industry (eg: https://store.mintel.com/americas-pet-owners-us-august-2018 https://store.mintel.com/americas-pet-owners-us-august-2018 and https://store.mintel.com/us-americas-pet-owners-market-report https://store.mintel.com/us-americas-pet-owners-market-repor...). Their methodology as outlined on their web site (https://store.mintel.com/mintel-methodology https://store.mintel.com/mintel-methodology) and details the quotas they utilize to get what they feel is a statistically relevant cross section of data. Anytime sampling is used, of course it's not going to be exact. But a 2000 person survey is, given equal statistical rigor, going to be better than a 500 person online survey and might be enough of a population to justify more detail. (Unfortunately, the Mintel survey results cost $4300, so other than their methodology page it's going to be difficult for me to infer much more. But the methodology page seems to suggest they aim for +/-2 or 3% confidence level.)
        Retric 8y ago
        First it was 500 dog owners out of ~1000 respondents ~= +/— 4.4%. So, Double that to 2000 people and you can get 3% accuracy on overall per ownership, assuming no systemic bias. But, slice that into 30-39 year olds and you have ~1/7 the data and thus much higher error bars. Now, if they had sampled ~20,000 people then sure you can slice and dice like that. But slicing data always increases the risk of sampling bias as would anything that targets 30-39 year olds specifically.
    - 8y ago
  - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    You could use % of people living in an apartment and % of apartments that allow pets as another sanity check.
draw_down 8y ago
Yes, I have a dog and live in a dog friendly place and it doesn’t seem like anywhere near that many people have them.

nradov 8y ago

The idea of buying a dog when you don't have time to walk it yourself just seems bizarre to me. Why do people do that? I also find the recent notion of "pet parents" rather offensive. My dog is my property. I have a responsibility to take good care of her, but ultimately I am her owner not her parent.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
pavel_lishin 8y ago
> The idea of buying a dog when you don't have time to walk it yourself just seems bizarre to me. Why do people do that? Parents have children, and then send them to daycare. Is this significantly different?
- lotsofpulp 8y ago
  There is a significantly different return on investment between children and pets, for individuals and society.
  - ohazi 8y ago
    The connection I feel with another human or another living thing has zero correlation with their value to society.
  - pavel_lishin 8y ago
    I don't see why this means that it's ok to pay someone to care for your child during the day, but not ok to pay someone to take care for your dog during the day.
    - lotsofpulp 8y ago
      I didn’t make that claim, but I was pointing out a reason why someone might not equate the two.

beaconstudios 8y ago

> Wag and Rover are two of the newest and largest players in the booming pet industry, each with more than $300 million in venture capital funding. If you didn't think we were in the dot com bubble 2.0 and the re-emergence of the Pets.com strategy won't show you, I don't know what will. I wonder which one will get the superbowl ad.

aphextron 8y ago
>If you didn't think we were in the dot com bubble 2.0 and the re-emergence of the Pets.com strategy won't show you, I don't know what will. I wonder which one will get the superbowl ad. This is a silly, meaningless analogy. Every grown adult on earth was not walking around with a computer connected to broadband internet in their pocket in 1999. There were less than 500 million internet users total.
- beaconstudios 8y ago
  $600 million in venture capital... For dog walking. It's even more stupid than Pets.com because at least Pets.com was an ecommerce site so it could scale out. It doesn't really matter that Asia, Africa and Latin America have all come on line (I would bet that the 1999 internet was primarily Europe/US given its roots) if you're selling dog walking in California and New York now, does it?
  - ISL 8y ago
    Middlemanning the dogwalking trade is as scalable, if not more so, than ecommerce. Gig-economy work is the creation of value through organization and communication. $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.
    - Xylakant 8y ago
      That calculation assumes that the investor doesn’t get any return on the investment, so that seems a tiny bit optimistic.

elektor 8y ago

I'm curious. After the initial matchup, what stops these "independent contractors" and dog owners from cutting out the middleman (Wag/ Rover)?

petra 8y ago
A contract, probably.
- Analemma_ 8y ago
  Ah, but as these companies are always so quick to remind us, their workers are contractors, not employees. Which here reveals itself as a double-edged sword: it lets you save lots of money on those pesky benefits and workers' rights, but it means you have no ability to prevent them from cutting you out and getting a better deal by going directly to the customer. As someone who loathes the startup tendency to misclassify employees in order to shift costs onto them, I do savor the schadenfreude when it backfires like this.
vinceguidry 8y ago
Nothing substantial. The article named a Wag contractor who openly admitted to using the platform to source clients for his personal business.
iaw 8y ago
That is frequently what happens with the house cleaning middleman apps. They can't keep the good housecleaners because they quickly arrange better side deals. Eventually my ex did the same to get a consistent cleaner.
jbob2000 8y ago
Absolutely nothing, which is why these companies are a flash in the pan. You can sign a contract with them, but it means nothing if someone on the other side of the country is violating it and you have no idea. Also, this is a petty cash business. Even if someone violates the contract, are you going to take them to court over $45? No, you'll just ban them. And the customers who liked that person will leave your service and phone them up privately. These companies die by a thousand cuts. Some people have this idea that all human processes need to be mirrored in software. This type of gig work is best left to ad-hoc job boards like craigslist or kajiji or facebook marketplace. Why do we continue to try to force this into software?

always_good 8y ago

Dog walking is a good example of how over-regulated Canada is. To walk a dog for money in Vancouver, you are required to have a $2 million insurance policy. https://i.imgur.com/ZEVBBuD.png https://i.imgur.com/ZEVBBuD.png Saner cities covered this liability with the $10 dog muzzle.