Show HN: I Built an iOS app to locate stray animals
apps.apple.com
apps.apple.com
1) PawBoost 2) Facebook Groups (which PawBoost usually posts to as well) 3) NextDoor
Past that, the animal needs to be captured and checked for a chip. Having 10+ different apps to report lost animals essentially means there's zero point to posting to one in the first place, unless there is some distributed system they all would agree to operate on top of (maybe ATProto? idk).
Is there a way to browse / search the app store from a desktop? Every link just seems to go to an advertisement splash page, and search for "stray" does not even return the linked app.
Found Lifestyle Apps [1] from StraySync's own "Lifestyle" category, yet only the top free apps to number 100 on desktop. Does not appear to show "PawBoost" or some of the other mentions.
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/charts/iphone/lifestyle-apps/6012?...
The first is getting mass adoption of your app, and tell people what makes it so much better than what we already have (facebook/twitter/nextdoor/instagram/etc).
Also lost pets are common, but they might rarely happen to you. That might lead to the second issue which is notification fatigue and uninstall the app. Or people will forget, and simply uninstall the app since they never use it.
I think a better solution is putting an airtag (or an rfid tag) on your pet, along with a telephone number on the collar to call.
Orange was chosen to be bright and align with prisoner garb. It’s such a good simple idea and the complete negativity of the internet pretty much killed it.
Where I live, a slightly similar app (intended to connect lost pets with their owners) has found widespread local adoption. It is promoted by a local non-profit, so maybe partnerships with non-profits would allow you to find the audience that will appreciate something like this.
Also, this needs an Android app. You need every user you can get to make it successful.
I was thinking it might help if they opened up the premise a bit, just made it about collecting pictures of animals, maybe tagging them as being a stray or having a collar but being alone, that it might increase the engagement for something like this.
Also +1 on the android point
A variation on "order a pizza, mug the delivery guy"?
This scam is unfortunately very common in real life, though it’s not set up as a mugging. They’ll demand a reward (they wont have the animal of course, though they may have a sorta similar picture to send you, or a fuzzy one.)
I would imagine the most useful function if a pet is lost or found would be to allow posting to places like NextDoor, printing posters, a contacting shelters, etc. and offering other support to people.
For something like this to work out we would need to incentivize users - how about a Pokémon Go style model for growth?
Actually, maybe animal rescue might not hold business model promise after all. How about a bounty driven model - I hear there is great business in ivory. Perhaps a pivot towards poaching rare and exotic animals? Any chance we could build in market place functionality?
There is only so much one can make by taking a cut off of finding stray pets. Not much of a runway there and few cases of repeat usage.
There is a much more promising market in finding and slaughtering rare and endangered species of animals that this would make a great use for. That’s where the ROI on each identified animal would provide a higher yield with success rate.
Finding grandma’s cat? Who cares. Finding the last rhino or final tiger in jungle? Now that’s some open-source poaching that we could platformize and scale.