sploot So Far 🐶
A bit of catching up, a few metrics, and the roadmap ahead.
Woof!
2024 is the year we go from a Delhi NCR based dog walking service to a
fullstack pet care platform with presence in 20 cities in India.
Let’s dig in :)
sploot Snapshots
A bit of background just to get you all caught up: we (Garima and Arnav) started sploot in 2019 when we realized the pet care industry had a sizable unaddressed gap - a service or community pet parents could turn to in times of need was missing.
We quickly realized this could be solved with a combination of tech and lots of dog lovers; thus the birth of sploot.
Founded in 2019 and secured the first funding round in 2022.
Have seen constant support from the likes of Info Edge, GRIP Invest, Indian Angel Network, Lets Venture, Supermorpheus and angel investors
Services are currently available in 3 cities - aiming to cover 20 cities by the end of October. We’ve also had a couple of recent wins. We extended our services to 2 new cities and are on the track to gain 20 walking subscriptions within a single month in Bangalore and received over 25 orders within half a month in Jaipur.
The longest customers have been with sploot for over 2 years with an avg. order value ranging between Rs 42,000 - Rs 14,000
The highest sploot partners’ customer retention ranges from over 1.5 years with net earning of about Rs 25,000
Future plans in scaling services and product sales
sploot: Fullstack Pet Care Platform
sploot is a full-stack platform that offers dog walking and grooming services, essential products for a dog’s needs, and a one-stop platform that pet parents can rely on to get chores regarding their dog(s) done.
We started with 2 offerings - a dog walking monthly subscription and a monthly food subscription and have now expanded to a 20-minute and 40-minute dog walking monthly subscription, 6 food recipes in retort packaging, and at-home grooming services.
Getting Funded
We dipped our feet into the funding world with our first Seed round in 2022. Another round was subsequently raised the following year. The support received was a culmination of investors like Info Edge, GRIP Invest, Indian Angel Network, Lets Venture and Supermorpheus angel investors like Akshay Chaturvedi (LeverageEdu), Yatish Talvadia (MilkBasket), Sanjay Singh (PayTM), Aryan Mhaiskar, KR Ilanghovan among others.
2019: sploot was incorporated
2022: Dog Walking + Fresh Dog Food pilots launched in Gurgaon with Seed Fund 1 from Info Edge
2023: Dog Walking expanded to all of Delhi NCR with Seed Fund 2 from Info Edge others
2024 Vision: sploot goes from a dog walking service present in Delhi NCR to a fullstack pet care platform present in 20 cities in India
Kicking off operations from Gurugram, sploot has also crossed domestic boundaries expanding our services to 6 cities.
Along with the geographic expansion, came a rise in our customer base - expanding to 5,892 lifetime customers.
Our longest customers have been with sploot for over 2 years and have spent Rs 3-6 lakhs.
An average order value of our longest customers range between Rs 42,000 - Rs 14,000 spanning across the walking, food, and grooming services.
Deep Dive into Services
One of our main focuses is our integrated dog walking platform. We have onboarded a total of 850 walking partners since the launch of the service. On average, sploot pups are walked over 1,300 kilometers daily.
Here’s a video that explains how our tech layer ensures customers get a more reliable service.
Of the 2,20,000 walks we have completed to date, the first half of 2024 contributed 81,300 to it - amounting to an average fulfilment rate of close to 80%.
In Delhi-NCR alone we tracked 17,000 walks last month.
We have managed this with proprietary tech which uses an in-house algorithm (we call it the “woof algo” 🐶) for supply-demand matching. All built in-house by a young and motivated tech team! (More on this in the newsletter editions to follow.)
While the service is a focus revenue stream for us it also acts as a major income stream for a majority of our walking partners.
Fun fact: We place the relationships we build with our customers (and their dogs) slightly above our numbers. This means, unlike other booking platforms, sploot’s dog walking service operates a bit differently. When a customer subscribes to the service- a walker is booked specifically for that pup. Every walk done with that pup is with the same walker. This not only helps the pup get acquainted with their walker but also ensures job security for the walker throughout the booked period.
This in turn converts to partners having a high customer retention on the side of our walkers as well and high walker retention on our side. The highest sploot partners’ customer retention ranges from over 1.5 years to more than a year. Their net earning ranges from over Rs 25,000 - Rs 20,000 with 8-10 walks carried out per day each.
Additionally, we have walking partners who have been with us for well over 2 years. Check out one of the interviews we did with one of our partners, Sumit, below.
On the partner onboarding and management side, we are able to create hubs for cities and track partner activity through our “Mission Control” dashboard. Sharing some screenshots below to give you a glimpse of that.
The tech for this has been built piece by piece over the last 12 months, by carefully studying the nuances of running a service subscription in India. As a result of this, we now have a scalable tech solution that can be leverages across geographies for any service.
The sploot Community
The community has been one of our focal points since the beginning and we have successfully built one of over 25,000 members in Delhi-NCR with ‘Sundays with sploot’ as a driving factor.
We have conducted 115 ‘Sundays with sploot’ and have seen participation from 6,950 dogs and dog parents.
Our emphasis on community has also translated to a high overall customer retention- seeing an upwards of 80% retention of active community users on the app.
The community congregates, discusses, shares on the sploot app. We have city and interest-based groups where a dog parent can get answers to questions, and find friends for their dogs (and themselves). We have tools to help them track their dog’s walks, upload medical records, set reminders, and learn about their dog’s behaviour.
The Vision Board
Now a bit about the road ahead.
We experimented with our ideas on products, services, and community in Delhi NCR. This has given us an opportunity to understand what our audience looks forward to and what works for us as well.
Here is our game plan:
Expand Community: From Delhi NCR to the rest of India, we expand our location-based community as a precursor to revenue streams launching in that city.
Launch 20 Cities in 4 Weeks: Use dog grooming as the launch vehicle, with dog walking quick to follow.
Build Product Catalogue: Leverage Q-Commerce + D2C boom to launch food and product collections that serve our community.
Stay tuned for updates!
Garima and Arnav
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