Each week in the New Tech Newsletter we feature a Spotlight Q&A with founders, angels, New Tech alumni presenters, and other people or companies in our community we believe you’d like to learn about. Reach out if you’d like to recommend a startup, founder, angel, accelerator, or New Tech alumni presenter for us to spotlight for the PNW tech community!
This week we spoke with Lorien Clemens Co-founder & CEO of PetHub, Inc.
What is the most valuable thing you’ve learned since you first presented at NTNW?
It’s so hard to condense all we’ve learned into one thing! Picking the lock on customer acquisition was key for us, though. Though we began our journey trying to market directly to pet parents through ecommerce and traditional retail channels, we realized that a more powerful and effective way to acquire customers was by helping municipalities replace their old-fashioned stamped metal license tags with our fully customizable modern ID that link to our centralized data platform & suite of services. For PetHub, this meant we could tap into existing large-scale tag distribution programs, and for municipalities, our tags gave tremendous added value and validation to their pet licensing and rabies tag programs.
Did the pandemic cause your company to change/pivot your business model or strategy?
Unlike a lot of businesses, we were fortunate to not be impacted as severely as some businesses, though we certainly experienced shifts. The hardest impact for us was the inability to attend in-person conferences, tradeshows, and events, which helps drive our sales pipeline. But, we still were able to adapt, switch our sales interface to digital & virtual platforms, and still beat our yearly goals. Over the past year we added more positions on our team to keep up with the demand of adding over 800 pets a day to the site.
What is the most innovative way your tech solves the problems of your customers?
Our powerful platform that links customizable digital ID tags to a suite of services is what sets us apart from other pet ID options. Our centralized hub of pet information (medical records, behavioral notes, vaccinations, emergency contacts, and more) allows pet parents to access powerful lost pet prevention and recovery tools. Because our software gets lost pets home quickly, owners are encouraged by industry officials (government agencies, shelters & veterinarians) to join our website. This gives them peace of mind and saves municipalities and veterinarians thousands of dollars per year because we take care of ID driven lost pet calls, our software tools keep pets from every entering shelters and give tremendous additional value and validation to regulated ID tag programs. Over 600 communities across the United States use PetHub IDs for pet license or rabies tags.
What is something interesting and unexpected that people would be surprised to learn about your company? PetHub is more than just ID tags. Digital pet tags & lost pet recovery tools were simply the first applications we built with our centralized data platform. Our mission is to make it quick and easy to find and use your pet’s data ~ “Protect. Share. Nurture.” PetHub’s suite of services help pet parents use their data in three major ways: Protect uses the data as part of a suite of lost pet recovery tools. Share allows pet parents to easily connect with third party apps and services through web API & integrations. And Nurture is all about personalized content that provides helpful pet parenting information from trusted industry resources.