The Hustle - 🐶 Capitalize on growing dog ownership

Happy Trends Tuesday!

Today we’ve got:

• 1 trend alert
• 1 piece of operator wisdom
• 1 startup sector you should know 

Let's get to it.

🚨 TREND ALERT

Houses (and yards) are getting smaller, but dog ownership is growing.

Dog parks are popular with owners, but an increasing number have reactive or unsocial dogs — with few options to freely exercise them. 

These factors are driving up searches for private dog parks.

Sniffspot fills this need by linking pet parents with owners of large yards and vacant land. Their site gets 100k+ visits/mo. and reviewers are raving.

But we believe the real opportunity lies in two areas:

1. Build a competitor: Sniffspot takes a whopping 22% commission, so there’s room to beat them on price. You can also increase revenue by partnering with pet brands to showcase products in-app, or by offering additional services like training packages, equipment rentals, mobile grooming, etc.
   
   
2. Become a dog park broker: Use Google Maps to find vacant plots and large yards, reach out to owners, sign them up, and manage their rentals for a fee. Throw in a splash pool and doggy obstacle course on each site, and you can charge $35+/hour. It doesn’t get easier than hosting dogs. One landowner told The New York Times: “Literally, I do nothing. We have a hose.”

🚀 HOW TO LAUNCH A PODCAST

🧠 OPERATOR WISDOM

Thanks to high acquisition costs, most ecomm brands are lucky to break even on a first purchase. So it’s vital to turn first-time buyers into second-time buyers.

One way to do this: Capture your customers in their most excited state via a bounce-back flow (a pop-up or email that fires off within five minutes of a first-time purchase).

Trendster Michael Galvin took us through the process:

• Why it works: The customer is still in their most engaged phase — they just bought something! So when you give them a deadline (urgency) and a discount (incentive) it attracts high open and placed order rates.
  
  

• How to do it: Your flow should show the customer specific products that are…

  • Best sellers (you know these products move)
  • Low cost (easier to impulse buy)
  • High margin (...duh)
    
    

In summary: Relevant offer + well-timed pitch + definite deadline = boost in repeat sales.

🔥 STARTUP SECTOR YOU SHOULD KNOW

Whether we want to admit it or not, each day we get a little older. 

By 2050, one in six people around the world will be over the age of 65. But infrastructure and technology haven’t caught up yet to support our graying planet.

To make those long lives easier, safer, and more enjoyable, a new crop of startups focused on serving older adults is emerging.

Read more about the startups getting in on the business of aging on The Hustle blog.

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