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>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

>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.
    - ohazi 8y ago
      Do the dogs just stop needing walks at some point?
      - lightbyte 8y ago
        No, but after the first walk they are going to ditch the middleman and pay the walker directly
  - anoncoward111 8y ago
    The median American spends their entire monthly budget on rent, transport, and food. You need to divide $600M by the 7 million households that own dogs in that area. That's $80 per potential customer. And you need to convert and not churn all 7 million.
- ohazi 8y ago
  It does sound like a particularly "Silicon Valley" style of silly, but it doesn't seem outrageous. There are around 80 million pet dogs in the United States. Let's say the success case for one of these companies is to capture 10% of that market -- 8 million dogs in need of walking every day or two or three. Let's say they can take in $5/month in revenue from 10-30 walks (it's probably more than this). That's almost half a billion in revenue per year.
  - anoncoward111 8y ago
    You need to figure that 50% of people won't ever sign up for a service like this because they're just content to do nothing, and you should figure that this company will find a way to spend a lot of the money theyre given
    - ohazi 8y ago
      I did. > Let's say the success case for one of these companies is to capture 10% of that market > That's almost half a billion in revenue[1] per year. [1] Not profit
      - anoncoward111 8y ago
        Apologies, I misread :( They're only starting in NY and Cali, which I estimated to be about 7 million dogs that needed walking. Additionally, Uber and Lyft combine to do $8 billion in revenue per year, operating at much larger scale with much larger demand and averagr sale price. So I think $500M a year is optimistic. I would expect this type of startup to do more like $50M a year in revenue with a modest loss, and the users are then sold peripheral pet services.
        ohazi 8y ago
        That's fair. I was thinking more along the lines of what an investor might consider a long-term / endgame success case for the company. I would definitely expect them to be pulling in far below that for a long time.
- askafriend 8y ago
  You can't make blanket statements like that without looking at the numbers and the unit economics. 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.
  - beaconstudios 8y ago
    how many people do you think spend enough money having other people walk their dogs for this to be a profitable venture to the extent of justifying this investment, especially given Silicon Valley startups' incredible propensity to burn money for nothing? This is such a California/New York/London bubble concept, it boggles the mind. It compares to Juicero because that's another service that no person with a normal income level would have used. At least the dog companies have the benefit of being necessary for all the single yuppies who feel bad leaving their dog locked in their $1m/yr closet apartment. 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.
    - askafriend 8y ago
      I think the reality is that you don't know how big of a market it really is (do you have any numbers you're basing your strong statements on?) and you're projecting your disbelief rather than trying to dig to get to the truth. 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.

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.
  - ohazi 8y ago
    Do the dogs just stop needing walks at some point?
    - lightbyte 8y ago
      No, but after the first walk they are going to ditch the middleman and pay the walker directly
- anoncoward111 8y ago
  The median American spends their entire monthly budget on rent, transport, and food. You need to divide $600M by the 7 million households that own dogs in that area. That's $80 per potential customer. And you need to convert and not churn all 7 million.
ohazi 8y ago
It does sound like a particularly "Silicon Valley" style of silly, but it doesn't seem outrageous. There are around 80 million pet dogs in the United States. Let's say the success case for one of these companies is to capture 10% of that market -- 8 million dogs in need of walking every day or two or three. Let's say they can take in $5/month in revenue from 10-30 walks (it's probably more than this). That's almost half a billion in revenue per year.
- anoncoward111 8y ago
  You need to figure that 50% of people won't ever sign up for a service like this because they're just content to do nothing, and you should figure that this company will find a way to spend a lot of the money theyre given
  - ohazi 8y ago
    I did. > Let's say the success case for one of these companies is to capture 10% of that market > That's almost half a billion in revenue[1] per year. [1] Not profit
    - anoncoward111 8y ago
      Apologies, I misread :( They're only starting in NY and Cali, which I estimated to be about 7 million dogs that needed walking. Additionally, Uber and Lyft combine to do $8 billion in revenue per year, operating at much larger scale with much larger demand and averagr sale price. So I think $500M a year is optimistic. I would expect this type of startup to do more like $50M a year in revenue with a modest loss, and the users are then sold peripheral pet services.
      - ohazi 8y ago
        That's fair. I was thinking more along the lines of what an investor might consider a long-term / endgame success case for the company. I would definitely expect them to be pulling in far below that for a long time.
askafriend 8y ago
You can't make blanket statements like that without looking at the numbers and the unit economics. 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.
- beaconstudios 8y ago
  how many people do you think spend enough money having other people walk their dogs for this to be a profitable venture to the extent of justifying this investment, especially given Silicon Valley startups' incredible propensity to burn money for nothing? This is such a California/New York/London bubble concept, it boggles the mind. It compares to Juicero because that's another service that no person with a normal income level would have used. At least the dog companies have the benefit of being necessary for all the single yuppies who feel bad leaving their dog locked in their $1m/yr closet apartment. 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.
  - askafriend 8y ago
    I think the reality is that you don't know how big of a market it really is (do you have any numbers you're basing your strong statements on?) and you're projecting your disbelief rather than trying to dig to get to the truth. 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.