An Airbnb for Dogs Gets $3.4 Million in Funding | Hacker News Reader

An Airbnb for Dogs Gets $3.4 Million in Funding

allthingsd.com

60 pointsjordhy61 comments

To preempt an impending flood of "bubble!" babble:

It may surprise you how sensible this business idea is. As someone who has had to alter vacation plans due to (reluctant) dog ownership: dog boarding is very expensive, and commercial dog boarding facilities are not great, requiring careful reviewing and inspection before selecting; even then, your preferred venues are likely to book up exactly when you want to be out of town.

Our corgi broke his spine 18 months ago [1] (enormous incision [2]), and was fully paralyzed from the midsection down. We had an operation performed and he's now kind of ok, but permanently restricted from going up or down stairs or any kind of high impact activities. He, of course, is not willingly restricted. Boarding for special needs dogs starts at $120/night and often costs $150+/night, and is very hard to find.

Instead of boarding Linus, we bring him. Many hotels will let you bring a dog for an extra $15 - $20 per night. Unfortunately, you can't leave a dog in your room if you aren't there, so you have to bring dog everywhere. This essentially means no traveling in the south or for much of the summer because it will be too hot to leave dog in the car.

[1] http://danceswithcorgis.com/2010/11/18/dog-laminectomy-updat...

[2] http://i925.photobucket.com/albums/ad93/Danceswithcorgis/sur...

So maybe there is an opportunity for folks like you. You bring your dog with you, and We pick up your dog at your hotel in the morning, care for it while you are sight seeing, and drop it back off in the evening.

Contract out with hotels that allow pets, mostly dealing with small breed dogs, no overnight hassle.

I bet you could use the service from the OP for such a thing, maybe.

Bubble was my first thought, but then I read the article and this actually sounds pretty sensible. In cases like this one must keep in mind that $3.4M for a company isn't that much, you can spend that easily on salaries and marketing.

Couldn't agree more. It seems the title was poised precisely to make it seem as this is a stupid idea, while is really far from it. I also own a dog and I can't wait to use this service. Last year alone I spend over $2,780 in dog hotels.

Yeah, the headline is very cheezy and makes it seem like that. An X for Y Gets Z million. But in reading the article you can see that it's a pretty solid business and there are probably millions of people willing to pay for a service like this.

Maybe it has the potential to become a billion dollar company.

As an owner of 2 (very active) dogs I agree. This is one of those times where I smack myself wondering how I didn't see this opportunity.

This is a money maker.

Dog boarding is indeed expensive, but I can't imagine using such a service for my dogs.

It's one thing to get an apartment trashed with a service like AirBnB - that stuff is usually replaceable, but the last thing I need is for one of my dogs to get sick/injured/lost/worse from some stranger I found on a dog sitting site.

My wife and I are crazy dog owners who treat our dogs like family, but I think we'd rather overpay someone we trust than use a service just to save money.

This is like the argument of "I'd never meet people from the internet in real life". Guess what? Those are real people.

The people you trust with your pets are the same people on rover.com.

The people I'd trust with my pets probably represent a tiny subset of the people on rover.com. And I am not interested in a trial and error process that risks my dogs' well being to find out who is as good as they represent themselves to be.

It's not like your dogs can talk and rat out the bad people on rover.com, which makes it very hard to trust the reviews. Think about the review criteria. It's based on a subjective "well, my dog seems ok" assessment from an absentee dog owner who has no proof their dog was treated well or exercised while they were away.

Fair enough. Could you provide some sort of criteria or anecdote describing how you found your current dog sitter? It might help rover.com build profiles of trustworthy individuals and make their service a viable option for dog owners like yourself, which can only be a good thing.

I'm imagining that at some point protective pet owners accept that someone from the internet is capable of providing for their pet. That sort of customer feedback goes a long way in shaping useful services.

>>Fair enough. Could you provide some sort of criteria or anecdote describing how you found your current dog sitter?

I'm spoiled and lucky. My breeders (who are also my friends) board our dogs when we need them boarded. It just happens that my breeder is the director of the breed organization for my region, and his wife is the director of the rescue organization for the same breed in my region.

They are basically what all the books/guides tell you what to look for in a good breeder. I'm not sure many people are fortunate to have that type of resource available to them.

I myself would be uncomfortable boarding a stranger's dogs, and that's counting the fact that both my wife and I have certifications in pet first aid. Not all dogs are alike, and things like how well a dog is going to integrate into a boarder's home with existing dog(s). Not all people are equipped to handle manifestations of aggression or dominance from a boarding dog towards other dogs and/or humans. Not all people are careful about what food they leave lying around within reach of a dog. Not all people are careful about how escape-proof their back yards are. Some of the people could use your unaltered dog for unethical breeding while you're gone. Lots of stuff can go wrong. You get the picture.

All I can say is that if you're really attached to your dog(s) like I am, then you should be very discriminating about who you choose to care for your dog. Finding a caregiver online is totally different from other types of services, and should require careful consideration. It's nothing at all like selling a good, meeting people or dating. You're leaving a live being in the hands of someone based on some relatively anonymous and not necessarily informed reviews.

Strikes me as a great idea.

I board my dog with the doggie daycare that she goes to every day, but before they started offering that service I hated boarding her. There just aren't any boarding services in town that I trust, and our dog has a terrible time in those kennels where the dogs are cooped up in concrete-and-mesh-fencing pens 23 hours a day. The last time we tried, she chewed herself badly enough that she had to go the vet. After that I had to resort to driving five hours (each way) to drop her off with my parents before going on trips.

I'd have leapt on a service like rover.com if it had existed at the time.

Yeah I'm not a dog owner but I've had to watch dogs for desperate friends before, who find themselves having to take sudden trips without a way to care for their dogs.

Actually, the more I think about this, the more it seems like an incredibly good idea. To be honest, it even seems to avoid some of the negatives inherent in the airbnb model (nobody's going to turn your dog into a meth lab, for instance).

Despite all the people saying this is not a bubble, it is. Small businesses like this would not have got money a while back. This is not a technology business, it has no first mover advantage, it does not require large amounts of capital to make stuff, maybe it will take off as a product category, but without a bubble it would not get $3 million, or indeed want that amount, being the sort of business you would grow organically. The bubble is people throwing cash around, not a bubble in startups, which have always been created.

I disagree with almost all of that.

It's not a technology business? Is airbnb? You need a way to connect folks who are willing to board dogs with those who need boarding. How do you do that without technology? The bulletin board at your supermarket isn't going to make it happen.

It may not be particularly novel technology, but that sure as hell doesn't matter.

first mover advantage: I personally have no idea if any other options exist for this. I have no idea if they are a first mover in crowd-source kenneling options. It certainly doesn't matter. We've beat this topic to death in the startup community, first mover advantage is rarely an advantage in the first place.

without a bubble it would not get $3 million: Says who? Since I see no real signs of a bubble (in the traditional sense), I certainly don't agree. It's a relatively small amount of money for a business that is taking on a big market opportunity.

A bubble is not the presence of investment in the first place. It's not even the presence of a lot of investment. Bubbles form when investments (on a large scale) are shoved into increasingly irrational businesses or investment vehicles in order to cash-in on the perceived momentum of a space. When you're investing just because "startups are the place to be right now" then you're looking at a bubble.

Here we're talking about a company with a solid (proven) idea, in a big space, taking on a modest amount of money. I don't see the problem.

Airbnb is not a technology business. The internet is simply one of the major marketing and communications channels we have now, that does not mean that all businessess that use it are tech companies.

Dog kenneling businesses did not get millions of pounds in equity investment based on very small revenues and the idea in the past. They self funded and grew. This is a less capital intensive way of providing the same service, so it has even less need for external capital. But it is taking it because the bubble means that its valuation is vastly inflated, because there is so much money chasing startups.

I am willing to be many Dog kenneling businesses started with a business plan and a loan from a bank. When you get down to it 3.4 million is not that far above what it would cost to open a mid sized dog kennel and operate it for a while until you can build up a decent customer base in many parts of the country.

I disagree with pretty much all of it, too, but mostly with "it has no first mover advantage". In fact, the first to get traction in this type of category (two-sided marketplace, reputational) gains a massive, probably monopolistic, advantage.

Marketplace businesses tend to be natural monopolies, so there is in fact a strong first mover advantage. Once you become the dominant marketplace in a category it becomes very hard for someone else to displace you (look at craigslist, ebay, etc.)

I'm guessing a significant chunk of that 3m will go towards marketing.

User ratings, if done correctly, will make the site "sticky", so if they build their user base fast enough, they could have a first mover advantage. Even so, social networks supposedly have a first mover advantage and even those die off as improved user experiences are presented. It sounds like several of these dog sites have launched in the past few months, and the winner will be the one that makes the best user experience while building volume of users with polished profiles and ratings that seem real and credible.

$3.4 million is pretty chicken-shit to invest in a business. I know a brewpub that opened with more than $2 million and being a restaurant, it doesn't' have near the upside potential.

The first mover advantage in this case is simply the network of people that sign up + lot's of reviews. The barrier to entry is how many other people want to get into that market.

I work in at an "Airbnb for X" company. We happen to do car sharing, not dog sharing, which means there's a little more technology involved, but $3M for any company isn't much.

There's a huge amount of operations involved in making any peer-to-peer industry work right. You have to have good anti-fraud, good abusive user detection (how do you weed out the guy who runs a dog-fighting ring and is signing up with fake information in order to steal someone's dog?), good support for when things go wrong, etc.

Word for these kinds of things don't spread organically—to get people on both sides of the transaction (and properly balance supply and demand), you have to do pretty focused local and digital marketing.

Add on software developers to build the site and keep iterating on features, designers to make it look pretty, maybe a PR firm to help get the word out... Things get expensive fast.

Next up: Baby.com. When you go on vacation and don't want to take your infant child, just check out a few profiles, pick one, and drop your baby off at the stranger's house. All members are community vetted to ensure quality care. Was your experience less than satisfactory? Simply "thumbs down" the user's profile and write a review to let other members know.

My first thought in seeing this post was to make a site for finding babysitters but a quick search at google shows that many such sites already exist (although maybe there is a way to do it better.)

Do you come from a society where people don't use day care?

This sounds like a potentially great idea for a Facebook app, actually: Install the app, and it searches your social network for local friends-of-friends who have advertised baby-sitting services and have been hired at least once by one of your friends. Then the app helps you to direct-message the sitter, as well as some of the sitter's customers that it knows about.

Surely something like this already exists…?

There's a huge difference between someone operating a daycare and "Airbnb for Babies". What you propose could be fairly decent and avoids the "handing your baby over to a stranger" problem, which is something that "Airbnb for Dogs" would need to overcome as well.

I'm really excited about this. I've had a really hard time finding boarders for my dogs. The going rate seems to be around 60/night per dog here, but tends to include things like aromatherapy, which I'm not particularly interested in. I just want someone to feed, walk, and pet them.

I'm inclined to agree. Growing up, we always had to find hotels that would accommodate our dogs since my parents didn't feel right leaving them in kennels, and trustworthy friends were not always available to come over and take care of the dogs in our house.

I imagine this will be a pretty awesome service for those who need it.

Aromatherapy for dogs?

Does this involve extract of bin juice, with just a whiff of fox droppings and dead pigeon?

Yes I have a dog, I know getting where to leave my pet during trips can be a pain, BUT I also know how DANGEROUS it can be to leave it with ANYONE.

This is not a room that can get trashed, and my dog can't tell if the guy or girl is an ass and just leave. My neighbor once left his dog with a woman he thought he could trust, and when he came back from vacation his dog was starved to death and covered in hundreds of ticks.

It had to be put down...

Airbnb horrors stories are too many to risk your dog becoming a cautionary tale in some blog.

Exactly. Dogs are something that you should have a much deeper connection to than an apartment, there's no way I'd let mine stay with some random person.

One thing that differentiates this from AirBnB (besides being for dogs) is that they are booking locally. This means that once owners find a place that they like, they are likely to try to book the same place multiple times, assuming availability.

Also, it makes it more likely that people might try to make future transactions directly without using the site, unless booking through them provides value beyond discovery.

> it makes it more likely that people might try to make future transactions directly without using the site

If they make life better for the host, this shouldn't be a problem -- "oh hey sally, glad to hear you and spot are doing well, we'd love to have him stay with us. just go online and you can find all our availability and we'll see your reservation right away. call us back if you have any problems."

I agree this is a risk in the business model. However, given how annoying it can be to coordinate schedules, an online scheduling feature could be useful enough to bring them back to the site. (And if your preferred sitter isn't available... you'd need the site for a new one.) I guess it depends on the extra perks of the site vs the cost of use ie. the percentage of revenue Rover keeps for themselves. I'd pay $2 just to avoid a chain of emails asking what day/time works best for any calendar event.

Spotwag is in the same space. They're differentiated by leveraging your Facebook friends and friends of friends in order to find care takers. Pets are like children. Do you really want to trust them with anyone?

http://spotwag.com/

This is brilliant; both sides of the market exist and are eager to find the other one.

Rover's biggest problem could be that people will happily watch dogs for free / even pay to do so. This is an unusual problem for a market maker (are there any other examples?)

Que? I would love to find some sweet old lady to watch my dogs for free rather than pay $25-50/night to board my dog in a box not much bigger than my CPU. I would pay a nice commission to the site to connect me with such a benevolent, non-crazy old lady such as this (if it does in fact exist).

Probably depends upon your network of friends.

I never would have thought it a problem because in my circle of friends there are multiple dog owners, and when one wants to go out of town the other just takes in their dog for the time.

So I presume you've signed up?

I believe there are lots of people that love dogs but can't have one full time (travel a lot etc); or who would happily take in another dog for a few days to keep their dog company. I imagine the price will rapidly approach zero therefore.

It's a great idea, but it'll be a very interesting marketplace to watch!

a box not much bigger than my CPU

Somehow, I don't think any dog would survive in such a box...

I'm sure you could do it. The trick would be finding the right frequncy to push them in at so they don't get stuck. I think I read somewhere that the resonating frequency of the average dog was ~2GB.

If you're in the bay area, I'd probably watch your dog for free even though I'm not an old lady. Mostly, it's because I have a dog as well, and it's hard to find things to tire her out. (she's a very active corgi)

If you're serious, you can find my contact info in my profile.

I'm building Spotwag.com. Lots of people watch dogs for free, even better when you know who said people are.

We're definitely excited about this and ready to shake up a giant market. And we're looking for more solid developers.

If you love dogs and want to talk about software (We're all on a Django stack) send us a quick introduction to tech-jobs@rover.com.

Another company in the space is dogvacay (http://dogvacay.com/) which recently got a million dollars in funding (http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/3/prweb9299700.htm)

Pretty cool. Example: "2 inground pools, one for people and one for dogs" -$15 night

Wow, this is awesome. We have two large dogs that we always have trouble finding affordable boarding for when we can't take them with us.

A quick search on this site turned up several options that look superior to the boarding we have been using and at half the price.

Solid business!

This looks silly, but it is actually a really solid concept in my view. It may even be better than the airbnb for humans.

I remember seeing that there was a project pitched as airbnb for dogs at startup weekend st louis last year, and I thought it was an amazing idea. I guess this isn't those guys, but It's still cool to see the idea taking off.

Nope - it's not that, though we did come out of a Startup Weekend! (It was the June 2011 one hosted at Amazon's new buildings in South Lake Union.)

Great concept - as a dog owner (and father of 2 young kids) always hard to solve both sides of the equation (babysitter + dogsitter, often they are mutually exclusive)... when will it come to the uk... or maybe I will just..

Non-native speaker here: It took me quite too long to figure out that the boarding you are all talking about has nothing to with planes *doh

And spends all of it on their domain name.

I've met a couple of the developers and they seem knowledgeable and excited.

I can echo this enthusiastically.

Excited? Definitely. Not sure about knowledgeable. ;)

I can totally see them getting their a$$e$ sued off for skirting kennel licensing laws. There's a reason that kennels are expensive: they have to take steps to make sure their pet hotels are safe for pets, and more importantly, that they have taken appropriate measures to prevent the transmission of diseases.

Describing this as AirBnB for dogs is very accurate, as it has many of the same problems. It's only a matter of time before someone's dog dies and the first thing the mainstream public hears about this site is a horror story.

This site has some merit, but not $3.4 million worth. Maybe in SV people might be willing to leave their dog with unlicensed strangers. In the rest of America, people will leave their dogs with family, friends, people recommended by their family or friends, or a kennel (in that order).

"It's only a matter of time before someone's dog dies and the first thing the mainstream public hears about this site is a horror story."

Unfortunately this is the first thing I thought when reading about this.

The story of the Airbnb-using lady whose apartment was trashed by a bunch of meth-cooks is likely to look absolutely quaint when compared to the first Rover.com horror story.

I love this idea. Yet, if I were the founders, this is the issue that would keep me up in the night, not just for what could happen to the pets, but for what could happen if a dog bites a child. I don't think the site is for every pet owner, but with a $4 billion US market in pet services and plenty of pet owners who hate kennels, I think there is sufficient demand to make this a success. It will be interesting to see how they offset the risks.

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