With Investments from Monashees, Tiger and Kaszek, PetLove Looks Towards Next Phase. Brazilian pet product e-commerce platform PetSuperMarket is pushing forward into a new phase in hopes of catapulting itself to new heights in the Brazilian marketplace.
With investments from Monashees Capital, Tiger Global and Kaszek Ventures, the company has updated its brand, changing its name to PetLove. PetLove leaders plan to use its new funds and updated name as momentum to increase its number of users to 320,000 by 2015. The company, which veterinarian Márcio Waldman founded 12 years ago, will also look towards growing its product offer and respond to evolving client needs. It will employ new marketing and sales strategies and expand its team in the months and years to come. The pet market in Brazil is estimated to reach a value of US$7 billion in 2012 and continue to grow from there (reported by ABINPET, the Brazilian Association of Animal Products).
Con inversión de USD 400 mil, el holding Ecomsual lanza sus dos primeras tiendas online en Argentina. Connect my dog: conecta a tu mascota con el mundo. Petsy y por qué dos europeos le apuestan al e-commerce mexicano y no al brasileño. El camino empresarial nos puede llevar a algunos lugares bastante inesperados.
Ese es el caso de Pablo Pedrejón García y Toby Clarence-Smith, quienes pasaron de Europa a Estados Unidos -graduados de Wharton- y luego a México para lanzar Petsy, una plataforma de comercio electrónico para todo lo que tiene que ver con mascotas. Cuando estaban decidiendo dónde establecer su startup, México no siempre fue el plan.
Aiiooo.com – A Virtual Social Network For Pets. Don’t we all go “aawwww…” at the pictures of all those cute and cuddly pets our friends put up on their Facebook walls?
Don’t you go gaga over Boo, the world’s cutest dog, whose Facebook page has over 4 million friends? OK, maybe not all of us. For those who’d rather not have pictures of animals flooding our timelines, here’s a tip: introduce pet-owning friends to Aiiooo (www.aiiooo.com), a fully-fledged social network for pets. Aiiooo, whose name originates from the Mandarin term for loving animals or “爱物” (pronounced “Ai Wu”), offers pet owners a place online for everything pet-related. Users can make new friends of all shapes and sizes (yes, your pets can have online friends), set up play dates, flaunt cute pictures of them and even track their moods.
“Pets are increasingly becoming main topics of conversation. “So we created a place for them to interact, socialize and spend quality time together online.” The Aiiooo team. LeMascotte mutó a Petnia.com y se anima al e-commerce para perros y gatos. En 2011 lemascotte.com nació como un ambiente en el que gente de todas las edades puede unirse, compartir anécdotas y celebrar la alegría que le brindan sus mascotas.
Muy similar a la home de Facebook, permitía ver las últimas actualizaciones de los miembros, compartir fotos y videos, iniciar o unirse a blog, iniciar o unirse a grupos, publicar y difundir avisos clasificados de mascotas perdidas, encontradas y en adopción, buscar servicios, productos y consejos para sus mascotas. LeMascotte fue la primera versión la red social y durante los primeros meses ayudó a realizar un análisis del comportamiento y necesidades de los usuarios en cuanto al uso del sitio. “Nos permitió testear y sumar funcionalidades para conocer a fondo los gustos y costumbres de los dueños de mascotas y profesionales del rubro veterinario. “Cuando alcanzamos los 6.000 usuarios sentimos que era el momento de una renovación. El naming, también era un problema para la startup.
Un negocio animal. Virtual Goods Contribute to Dogster Revenue. Dogster, Inc., has defied expectations by maintaining strong revenue streams despite the ongoing economic downturn.
The company maintains Dogster and Catster, a pair of social networks for pets and their owners. Part of the secret to the Dogster, Inc., success story is its in-house ad stream, detailed by VentureBeat, which allows the two sites to establish higher CPMs with advertisers than services like Google Adsense support while also targeting companies specifically interested in selling to pet owners. Another component of Dogster's business model that is less widely-discussed is its virtual goods sales, which according to chief executive Ted Rheingold, comprise about 10 to 20% of the company's revenue in an average month. Dogster and Catster offer four tiers of virtual goods that users can purchase using zealies, the service's currency. Bones are free and may be given by any user, but last only two weeks. Dogster still has its bite despite the downturn. Dogster, the social network for dogs and their owners, just converted $425,000 in bridge funds into additional first-round financing, reports VentureWire.
After a profitable 2008, raising a second round isn’t as pressing, the company says — citing a broader trend of success for sites catering to pet enthusiasts. The San Francisco company, which also operates Catster.com, has enjoyed high advertising CPMs for a while now — with a $2 floor, CPMs on its homepage range from $15 to $20, and on its newsletter from $20 to even $40. In an interview with startup blogger Sarah Lacy, Dogster chief executive Ted Rheingold attributed these figures to the company’s independent ad sales staff. The site decided to eschew Google AdSense and other ad networks in favor of its own sales team when it couldn’t meet the revenue demands of a larger staff (the average CPM with AdSense was about 28 cents).