] HipMojo.com » We’ve Lost Our Mind, Here’s The Proof: Dogster (and Catster)

We’ve Lost Our Mind, Here’s The Proof: Dogster (and Catster)

I am not a pet person.  It’s not like dislike them or anything.  What I mean is that I don’t get why anyone would want a pet.  Sure, “it’s great,” if you don’t have enough to do, don’t have enough people to care about and don’t have enough responsibilities as it is…  Now that a good portion of the pet-loving and owning population will send me emails bashing me, let’s get on with the purpose of this post.

Up to at the very least 2003 and in many ways now and forever, we’ve always lumped Pets.com amongst the most overrated, bad ideas of the Web’s first merry-go-round, right?   You’re still with me.

Great.  Then why is it that the smartest, most knowledgeable, most accomplished and most connected (I drew straws to determine which blogger would get which adjective…) guys in the room are tripping over one another over Dogster (and by extension, Catster)?  Pets.com, by the way, boasted an investor list that included Amazon.com, Disney and Comcast. 

Is it that Pets.com failed because it was a one-stop destination for all pets… so Dogster and Catster will survive, thrive and succeed because they split the atom?

Come closer: you can’t split the atom; and you can’t make a failure a success.  Can’t you?  After all, Geocities became MySpace in the Web’s second era, but Geocities was a success then and Myspace is one now… if you take a bad idea in 1999 and bring it back in 2005, does it make it a winner?

We are dog freaks and computer geeks who wanted a canine sharing application that’s truly gone to the dogs. Such a site didn’t exist, so we built it ourselves. The fluffy love is backed with serious technology and years of coding experience under our collars. Dogster has since become more contagious than kennel cough.

Since launching in January 2004, Dogster.com (and its sister site Catster.com launched in August, 2004) have become the fastest growing pet destination on the internet and are now a top-five overall pet destination. Now serving over 1.5 million photos for over 300,000 uploaded pets by 260,000 members, Dogster and Catster serve more than 17 million pages a month to over half a million visitors. You can see more staggering stats on our home and statster pages.  Our goal is to allow for the purest online reflection of people’s love and enjoyment of their dogs and cats.

As long as our members keep thinking we’re the cat’s meow, we’ll keep adding features customized to just how they want them. For us this is the dream opportunity and we’ve never had such serious professional fun in our lives. Since launching, we’ve already added forums, classifieds, diaries, treats, private messaging, Gimme Some Paw, DogsterPlus, photo tagging, themed strolls, pet-friendly travel and pet-personality matrix. Despite all these awesome features, we feel like we just getting started.

I don’t know. I understand that Pets.com was at the time only selling pet food online and that concept was not exactly genius - since pet food is available anywhere and you don’t have to wait 5 days to get it.  I will also admit that Pets.com did not go out of business, it simply decided to cease running the B2C operation and give money back to its shareholders.  It raised $82.5M, by contrast Dogster was profitable off $100K and accepted a $1M by the abovementioned crowd.  But… 

Had Pets.com simply laid off staff, ran a barebones business, it would technically be Dogster, no?  Adding social networking functionalities would have come with time, etc.  Would that have made Pets.com escape the wrath of all of the monday morning dot com gurus?

I understand the desire of large media companies like CNET and Yahoo! to generate niche crowds along specific verticals, it’s something we do ourselves, but the more excitement I see around Flop 2.0 companies like Dogster, the more I think we have lost our marbles, and the dot com community is [once again] replacing the real estate crowd as Champions of Tulipmania IV.

For the record, I do realize that the dog-owning market is huge, people spend a lot more time online, advertising is a much more developed industry online and the folks over at Dogster seem to be having a lot of professional fun, which is more important than anything else, and that they will easily be acquired for plenty of dough and props to them for starting a company despite someone eventually pointing out that it’s Pets.com 2.0.

Who knows, maybe “this time really will be different,” and I “don’t get it.” 

Maybe in an ironic twist, Dogster will file for an IPO instead of being acquired by someone (or shutting down), grow to take over MSFT in market cap and acquire Google (and I own a dog and cat).

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Posted By: Ashkan Karbasfrooshan | Nov 13th

2 Responses to “We’ve Lost Our Mind, Here’s The Proof: Dogster (and Catster)”

  1. HipMojo.com - Main Street Meets Madison Avenue, Wall Street and Silicon Valley » What do Lycos and AdBrite have in common? Says:
    November 13th, 2006 at 3:21 pm

    […] Not much, but one led me to another.  Something must be in the air today.  This morning for some odd reason I thought of Pets.com, this afternoon I read about Lycos’ new foray, which got me thinking about flops and fads of the Web’s first push… that naturally led me to F*ckedCompany.com. […]

  2. Ted Rheingold Says:
    January 12th, 2007 at 5:35 pm

    Hey,

    Thanks for checking out the site and taking a hard look.

    Pets.com was a epic eCommerce play. Dogster and Catster are online communities bootstrapped and only augmented by user demand.

    Today’s our third birthday and 2006 was a profitable year. It actually does deserve looking deeper if you really are interested in why one is a sustainable growing company and the other failed. They really have nothing in common in all.

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