About us

In today’s world, it is nearly impossible to assess the quality of current pet sitting services. There have been cases of pet abuse or even missing pets. Evaluating the credibility and quality of pet sitters is, therefore, a major challenge for pet owners. The missing trust leaves owners with uncertainty and sometimes even guilt when hiring people to take care of their pets. Therefore, most pet owners are heavily reliant on peers' recommendations when choosing pet sitters, pet hotels, or daycare.

FurrySitter aims to close this gap with a safe, reliable and trustworthy marketplace. The Airbnb of pet sitting. FurrySitter combines traditional pet care business (professional trainers) and technology (online personalized services) to bring pet parents a new pet care experience. We have the vision to bring happiness to the life of pets even though their parents might not be with them always.

Our challenges

Pet care marketplace is not a brand new idea with several market players in Canada already. With a high market potential, and without a dominating market leaders, we decided to go into the market, by placing ourselves in a different position in the market.

A customer discovery research was conducted for an initial understanding of customer key concerns about pet caring. However, uncertainties like contradicting customer feedbacks or customers unable to visualize the business value, hold the startup back from proceeding with MVP development. The project, therefore, focuses on market research to achieve product-market fit for the business.

Our objectives

We would like to use a design thinking approach will be used to step by step develop a product that resonates with customers.Through one-on-one interviews, surveys, competitor analysis, identifying customer segments and archetypes, we hope to learn, clarify, and validate the following:

• Validate market acceptance of the proposed product features of FurrySitter with customers and sellers (i.e. solution fit)
• Understand the priority of product features from the view of customers and sellers
• Analyze and measure the attractiveness of the points of differentiation compared to the competitors
• Define customers’ and sellers’ market segments and chalk out their respective archetypes
• Validate market acceptance of value proposition and messaging for each defined segment/ persona

In this way, FurrySitter has sufficient information for the building of MVP, defining a clear messaging strategy and value proposition with the ultimate goal to develop the “Go-to-market” strategy with the least amount of friction based on the analysis above.

Our approach and expectation

We hope to adopt a mixed method approach for market acceptance and product feature deep-dive, with the combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis to come up with the deliverables below:

• Quantitative survey
• SWOT analysis
• Perceptual mapping
• Market sizing
• Analyze of competitors’ online activities
• Customer archetypes and unique value proposition development
• A/B testing on messaging strategy

• An interactive wireframe of the website will be provided to the intern as the visual aid for their interview/survey. Detailed walk-through of the wireframe with the students at the beginning of the project will also be provided to ensure they can work smoothly with the wireframe and can interact with the respondents when necessary.
• There will be regular catch-up for at least once a week with the contact point from FurrySitter. We will provide mentorship to the students to ensure project is delivered on the right track without any hiccups. Feedback and comments will be provided to enable the students to apply what he/she has learned at university to the real business world.
• Dedicated email/phone will be provided to students for asking questions / seeking for advices in between each catch-up session and it will be reply within 24 hours to support a smooth progress of the project