Inspiration
My Personal frustration; Trying to find a vet on a short notice or get timely advice for my pet dog of 14 years in her final years was cumbersome. I proceeded to further study the market, and realized that more than 75% of 'new' pet patients book an appointment via a traditional phone call. Though an average pet owner takes their pet to the vet just about twice a year, this is a $17B/year industry in the US and tech startups have barely scratched the surface to solve this.
What it does
Provides a pet parent or owner the access to the largest network of high quality veterinarians that allows for instant booking pet appointments and Telehealth services.
How I built it
React, Flutter, Javascript
Challenges I ran into
Scoping an MVP for a 24 hr hackathon. While our MVP has features such as smart search, syncing with vet's calendars in real time, ratings, etc, we wanted to build a solution that helps us bring liquidity to our platform; that is the vets first.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We built an AutoResponder WebApp that is triggered via text when someone places a phone call to the vet in question. This WebApp lets the user book their appointment (most likely the reason for their call) on the vet's available slots without downloading an app or on-boarding. Human in the loop is eliminated.
What I learned
24 hour hackathon gave us a peek into the reality show big boss; Idea Brainstorms, Teaming with strangers & friends, ego clashes & resolves, coding, coffee, and the final pitch. YC can start streaming hackathon, am sure there is a market somewhere in there ;)
What's next for PetZen
Build the full version for the AutoResponder and onboard about 1k vets in SF Bay Area that are losing business due to missed calls. On the consumer side, we would invest in free deworming for pets, to generate demand. We also want to build our team, product and learn what our business model can evolve to be.
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