The student startup creating an ethical marketplace for buying and selling pets
Pets — from delightful doggos, to crafty cats — we can love them more than we love ourselves. However there is an unfortunate side to pet ownership, especially the buying process. From shady breeders, to unethical selling practices, and crappy online customer experiences, buying a pet can drive even the goodest boy crazy.
That’s where PETspot comes in — it’s an ethical online marketplace for pets that is aiming to change the way we buy and sell pets by keeping breeders and customers accountable. PETspot only aligns with breeders from state-approved organisations and also audits breeders to ensure they are RSPCA compliant.
When I caught up with Nick Figliano, the founder of PETspot, on a Wednesday evening he was last man in the office, yet kicking with energy when he greeted me by the door. Nick is a business student at UTS. His team was crowned NSW’s top student startup at the Student Startup Festival 2019 and he’s also a nominee for the Sydney Young Entrepreneur awards!
Q: How did you come up with the concept? How did you know there was a market?
As with most founders, the idea coincidentally came to me when I was in the process of finding a pet for my family.
I spent months trying to navigate Gumtree, Personal Breeder, Shelter sites, and even visiting places in-person. Not only was it difficult to find what pets were available near me, but there was no way of knowing who I could trust online. I wanted to be sure that I wasn’t unknowingly supporting someone who treats pets unethically. I thought to myself, “there must be an easier way for all this”. After chatting with my now co-founders, it became clear that I wasn’t the only one who had this issue — there was a problem to be solved here.
As for the market… to put things into perspective, there are actually more pets than people in Australia! 450,000 puppies are sold each year within Australia (and that’s just puppies, not dogs). We realised that it was the younger generation that was pushing the demand higher and higher (particularly Gen Y / ‘Millennials’), indicating a growing market trend.
If you’ve ever had a Sunday surf through your Instagram feed, strolled through the neighbouring park on your way to brunch, or even rocked up to work on a casual Friday — you‘re bound to find furry friends and pets playing about. It’s hard to miss the Aussie obsession with pets, especially as we’ve come to see them as family members.
Q: What are marketplaces and why did you choose to run PETspot as an online marketplace?
A marketplace is essentially a place where buyers and sellers meet to conduct commerce. We decided to run PETspot as an online marketplace because marketplaces give buyers a choice in what they would like to buy and sellers a variety of people to sell to (much like in the real world). Importantly,
Marketplaces have fundamentally changed the way we use online space.
Marketplaces also enforce ethical norms. Just like shopping in Paddy’s markets, if you don’t like a certain seller’s practices you don’t have to buy from them and chances are there are a few similar stores to hop to. Marketplaces give pet buyers the power to choose and incentivise ethical breeders. Non-ethical breeders can get reported, rated poorly, and in some cases deregistered.
Secondly, we operate as a marketplace because most Australians are familiar with the concept already and use them regularly with homegrown brands like Seek (for jobs), Carsales (for secondary cars) and global ones like Airbnb (for accommodation). Given that buying pets requires a lot of trust and commitment, we opted for technology that Aussies were used to.
Q: What are some of the technologies you’ve used to build your marketplace platform?
In the very beginning, we worked exclusively out of WordPress. We wanted to keep things as lean as possible by validating our ideas before building out a full-fledged platform. After a quick Google search and seeing positive reviews on suitable and affordable WordPress templates — we bought a marketplace theme and plugin (similar to the one here) to kick start our journey.
As the months went by, our early adopters flocked into the WordPress platform and started giving us feedback on what features we could potentially add and integrate into the site. As you can tell, there were plenty of options to play around with … but we wanted to be absolutely sure that the user experience remained intuitive rather than overbearing.
That’s when we started migrating to AWS’ full-fledged suite for websites. AWS helped streamline back-end logistics with a clean and intuitive front-end interface. It has all the tools you need to capture customer insights and seamlessly manages both supply-side and demand-side flows.
Q: How did you acquire your first few suppliers/buyers? Isn’t there a chicken and egg problem?
Exactly, the difficulty with running a marketplace model is that you have to tackle two completely different customer acquisition models. In the beginning, we asked ourselves:
- How do we incentivise people to list their pets on PETspot (the supply side) compared to current alternatives, while maintaining quality control?
- How do we make sure buyers know about the benefits of PETspot so they choose our site to find their next pet (the demand side).
This is the classic conundrum. People weren’t willing to use a marketplace unless there were already other users on there (creating critical mass). But how do you get people on there in the first place?
We knew we had to put in a lot of manual work to get our first customers on board. We leveraged every channel possible and started cold calling, banging on the doors of pet shelters, building relationships with the community, and even messaging sellers on other platforms to try us out. We also got in touch with family friends and our social network to drive potential buyers to the site.
Things finally pieced together after a month… we had our first successful transaction on the site!
Starting The Startup Journey
Q: You’re exposed to a fantastic incubator at UTS — UTS Startups. What kind of support did you get from there?
We would not be where we are today without the mentorship and support from the team at UTS Startups. I can go on for a whole day about all the wonderful benefits, but I’d like to highlight a couple that has made all the difference for us:
- There’s a dedicated team at UTS Startups to track your progress, needs, goals and provide introductions to support and opportunities (including mentors, funding sources, potential customers and opportunities to find co-founders)
- Being immersed in a community of like-minded people in a free-to-use co-working space. As founders, we all bump into the same problems — it’s unbelievably useful when you can turn to your shoulder and start bouncing ideas off a neighbouring founder.
For aspiring entrepreneurs, so long as one of the founding members of your team has been a UTS student in the last 12 months, you can apply to it!
Q: Students often find it ‘risky’ to work for a startup, let alone start their own thing — what’s your advice?
Like many, my co-founders and I were unsure about whether our idea was ‘good enough’. Out the door, this negative mindset was clearly not doing us any good. Yet, so many young entrepreneurs feel the same way.
The root cause, in my opinion, is that our education system sets students up for a stable, traditional career. We’ve grown up in a structured learning environment with a structured career pathway— it’s no wonder why it seems so difficult to jump on the startup journey.
I’m sure everyone has their reasons for tossing up career choices. For me, I really dug deep and realised that my passion for innovation and entrepreneurial flare sat above and beyond the corporate 9 to 6cubicle. If you’re on the edge about this decision, I highly recommend giving Gary Vaynerchuk (Gary Vee) a watch:
Q: What’s one of the most pivotal moments in your life?
The day my co-founders and I decided to commit to PETspot full time.
The one thing that held us back more than anything was trying to go to work and/or University full time while also running PETspot. As the work-flow began to grow, we made the collective decision that we needed to dedicate more time and focus on the business.
Imagine how much weight fell off our shoulders when we could finally spend the majority of the week on the Startup. It wasn’t an easy choice, but having our team come together for a unified vision has set us on an exciting journey.
My advice to future student founders? Try your best to manage both, even if it means doing Uni part time! Since then, I’ve been able to chase this opportunity and I’ve never looked back.
This piece was written by David Zhou of Textbook Ventures — we organise startup events, write newsletters, and share tech jobs for student entrepreneurs across NSW.
If you’re looking to buy or sell a pet of your own why not try the PETspot platform which you can visit here: https://thepetspot.com.au/
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