Pawsitive

A pet wellness community in an app. We grow an authentic community step-by-step, starting with motivating dog owners to regularly walk their dogs using social incentives.

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Product & Solution

Pawsitive motivates dog-owners to maintain consistent fitness routines with their pets by using social incentives. We match dog owners with buddies and groups, with whom they can talk to, walk with, and build a community. Pet parents earn “paw points” for completing fitness goals and can use these points towards discounts at pet-friendly venues or for purchasing merchandise from a variety of partner pet brands and services. Pet parents can also learn about their dogs by gradually completing a pet personality quiz.With a large enough user data set within the app, we can train an algorithm to make personalized pet wellness recommendations to pet parents (i.e., training, socialization, health) based on quiz results. Our subscription features will provide dog owners with personalized, curated content to help them take better care of their pets. In addition to this, we will merchandise offerings from a variety of pet brands that we feel will benefit each pet’s overall wellness.

Problem & User Needs

Pawsitive has been vetted with over 40 dog owners and 15 vet specialists. Our interviews revealed that first-time pet parents tend to become very anxious when taking care of their dogs for the first time. They check reliable and unreliable online forums for advice from other pet parents. In addition to this, pet parents often feel like they are giving up on their own social lives to stay with their dogs. Finally, pet parents gradually become lazy over time and skip out on daily walks with their pets. As a result, over 56% of dogs in the U.S. are considered to be overweight or obese. Pawsitive alleviates pet parents’ emotional anxiety, connecting them with other dog owners and helping them maintain consistent fitness schedules through the motivation and advice received from buddies and pet parent groups.

Competitors & Partnerships

Pawsitive is the only app on the market at the intersection of the pet wellness space and the pet social space. Unlike pet social apps, like Dig, Rover or Wag, Pawsitive truly strives to enhance the bond between pets and parents. Unlike pet wellness apps like Fuzzy or PetDesk, Pawsitive takes on a more holistic approach to pet health, considering dog training and socialization, as well as general health. Pawsitive replaces workarounds like Reddit or Slack forums and Facebook groups by helping dog owners form more meaningful connections and create authentic communities via the app. Our team also plans to partner with a variety of pet brands and pet-friendly venues. We will connect with local brands (e.g., Manayunk Dog Bakery) and venues (e.g., Parc), as well as niche brands (e.g., Ollie) and mass brands (e.g., Chewy) as we gain broader appeal within the market. At the moment, we have a handful of partnerships with local brands, including Penn Vet, Good Karma Cafe, J’aime French Bakery, HD Dog Training, Industrious Office Space, and Tangible Creative.

Scaling & Revenue

We plan to scale our business from walkable U.S. cities with a high number of dog owners to the suburbs. We will start with Philadelphia, where there are 220K dog owners. From current interviews and social media marketing analysis we have, we estimate that 10% of dog owners will download our app (22K) and use our free features, while 10% of users who download the app will purchase a subscription (2.2K). We will scale our business to NYC (375K dog owners) within our second year of business. In our third year, we will scale to Chicago, Seattle, and San Francisco (490K dog owners). In our fourth year, we will scale to 15 more U.S. cities, and 40 more in the fifth year. By our sixth year in business, we believe that 1% of all dog owners in America (48M) will be making frequent purchases using the Pawsitive app, spending $20 per year on Pawsitive-branded merchandise and $200-300 per year on partner brands and services. This will result in an annual revenue of $464M by year 6.

Marketing Strategy & Team

We will market our app via Instagram and Facebook to our early adopters, who will be first-time dog owners in their early twenties, mid-twenties and mid-thirties, living in walkable cities. From there we will expand to more mature, experienced dog owners and suburban dog owners as well. Studies indicate that younger dog owners (i.e., 18-24 year olds) spend $174/month on their pets, while millennials (i.e., 25-34 year olds) spend $142/month on their pets. Our marketing approach will primarily focus on Instagram and TikTok ads, as these social platforms appeal to younger demographics. From there, we will rely on word-of-mouth recommendations of our product to grow and scale our business, eventually going viral. As a test, we recently placed 2 ads addressing the coronavirus quarantine and our plans to create a virtual community during these hard times. Both our “quarantine-friendly” ads performed well, gaining us 60 followers in the Philadelphia area in one week, after spending $65 on both ads. We A/B tested different design elements and user-friendly copy and will continue to improve our marketing strategy. Our marketing team will begin sprints this week and improve our branding strategy, social media strategy, and product development for the app subscription over the next 2 months. In addition to this, our development team from AMS apps will help us launch a virtual alpha test with pilot users in May with our MVP. We will also test all free features functionality in a virtual beta test in June/July. We are excited to work as a team to deliver a product and service with a high-quality user experience that we hope will brighten our pet parents’ days and strengthen their sense of community, despite living through a year where social distancing is so necessary.

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