[rdrd]

This is a good example of falling into the trap of picking something too broad, "pet lovers", which leads you down the rabbit hole of generating features you think the average pet lover is interested in and would find useful.

I think the B2C space is neigh on impossible to penetrate in the pet space, most pet lovers form sub-communities on existing social networks (see pets on Instagram or puppy101 on reddit), you would need something very special to be able to get the average person to maintain an app on their phone just to engage with other pet lovers.

I'd flip it on its head and look for B2B niche within the pet lovers industry if you're exploring pivots. A good example of friction I've found recently is pet sitting, dog walking and doggy day care, currently we have a pup which goes day care and we use 4/5 apps to manage this process - to find one we used Google, but then cross-referenced with something like Instagram to get a feel for how they are on their dog walks, to sign up we had to fill out a questionnaire via another web app, after accepting our pup they sent us a waiver/legals to sign from another app, after which they directed us to another app on the App Store to book/cancel day care each week, must be done by Sunday lunch, but it never reminds us... they send invoices each month via email, which we have to then hop over to our banking app to pay manually, they send us pups "report card" and photos via WhatsApp.

I'm sure a small pet walking business or individual dog walkers would happily pay X amount each month to provide an integrated services to manage a lot of this, but more importantly it would be very easy to validate whether this is something the market wants, by just talking to some of these independent pet sitters to understand what pain points they have.

[akbarb]

My co-founder and fiancée is a veterinarian and we met on a dating app. I never had pets before meeting her. I knew nothing about the importance of pets in their owner's lives. I turned out to be a crazy cat lover as she is lol but I always wondered why there is no filter on dating apps for pets. So, that's how the idea for this app came to me. Seeing other niche apps for specially dog lovers made me realize this app needs to be broader for any type of animal lover. The pet adoption section was added to attract shelters to use the app so that they can then help us by spreading the word to their network of individuals. We also have donation programs to shelters. I think a lost/found pet alert section is a must though. An app to only have that feature is probably too small. Anyways, that's how this app has become what it is today. It started as a simple dating app idea.

Your pivoting idea and B2B niche is something I have been thinking about as well. Very good example you mentioned. I will be thinking more about it. Thanks for your honest opinion

[paulcole]

> I always wondered why there is no filter on dating apps for pets

What were the steps between having this thought and diving into the project?

I’m guessing there’s a valuable lesson there.

[akbarb]

Well, I made a lot of mistakes and am more than glad to share them here.

As I mentioned in one of my comments, after having the original idea/thought I got too excited too soon. At the time I did not know mobile or web development and so jumped on Google, did a quick search and filled some forms on some mobile app developer companies website and literally hired the first company that called me back. Then spent about $6k for just logo design, wireframe and a landing page. That stage took about 4 months and then they gave me a $50k quote for iOS and Android app. I did not have that money.

That's when I came across Upwork and posted a job there. The quotes were much lower as you may know since most of the freelancers/agencies are based outside the US. I finally hired a company from Pakistan since their CEO personally called me and kind of lured me into not only giving them the job, but also told me he is interested in the project and he could be my advisor/mentor. Again, I got excited and thought that was a great deal. That ended up being the worst experience of my whole professional life.

Their company just broke apart in the middle of the project. Cofounders parted ways and the one who contacted me (the CEO), he said that all their team members left with the other guy and took the source code for our app with them. So I had to contact the other cofounder and have them share the code with a new team that the CEO hired. It was a mess and the project was delivered poorly and way after deadline. However, in the middle of all that, I decided to learn web and mobile development. So, I took a lot of Udemy courses and watched many Youtube videos. That was I guess the only silver lining and maybe I needed to go through the whole excruciating process to get there.

Anyways, long story short, after taking loans and spending about $35k for design and development of the iOS and Android apps, I had to redo everything else myself while having my full-time engineering job (I still needed to pay bills and had just got engaged. So no way I could quit that other job). It was a lot of non-stop 15 to 18-hour workdays.

This might not have been what you asked for, but I thought I'd share part of my story :)

[rdrd]

I appreciate your honesty, and sharing this may just save someone else from making a similar mistake with Upwork. So thank you.

Having read over this and a few other replies I would definitely say it would be worthwhile taking a step back now, don’t fall into the sunk cost fallacy and continue to burn through cash/time building things you think will help, spend a bit of time away from the keyboard, reading The Mom Test as others have suggested, it’s honestly a fantastic book, very actionable and probably won’t take you long to get through. That will put you in the right mindset for where you are in your journey and what you need to do next - which boils down to trying to validate some of your ideas, the correct way.

Finally you mention someone offering mentorship/advice, and you taking it, just be cautious with who you take advice from, the best person to take advice from is probably someone a few steps ahead of you, that means finding someone who may have just secured their very first bit of seed money as a solo/duo founding team, or an indiehacker who’s reached say $1000 MRR for a B2C app.

Good luck.

[akbarb]

Well said. Good points.

Yeah. Unfortunately, he caused more harm than help. I ended our relationship when I realized that he was not really the best mentor for what I started. I am going to take a step back and read some of these materials that you and others mentioned

[paulcole]

> why there is no filter on dating apps for pets

Did you ever stop to figure out the answer to this question or did you just assume that the other dating apps had all made a terrible mistake?

[akbarb]

I see what you're saying. The answer is no. I did not. I do share something with you though that this app is supposed to be for animal lovers. All that is there is related to what an animal owner or someone who is interested in animals might need and look for. Hence, the dating with the pet filter options, the adoption service, lost and found pets, etc. The original thought was that no other apps address these altogether. That's what makes this app different.

Now the question that I should have tried to investigate more is this: Do people really want all these features in a single app, or they were fine using multiple apps/websites?