Let us surprise you first, readers!

Founded in 2021, The Vets which provides in-home pet care service in major US cities raised a whopping $40 million.

(If we are not bad in maths, this could be more than the total yearly revenue of all vet clinics here in our city of Burlington!)

But cheers to The Vets team for such a great and ‘rapid’ success.

Being a healthcare IT company and seeing the growth of a health tech startup, we’re really happy. And thus, we would like to give you (The Vets team) some cool suggestions for raising 3 times more in your next round.

(Dear other vets & readers, you should also read this. You might get new ideas for your pet care startup.)

Honestly, before writing this point, we asked all of our team members who have pets and almost 60% of them shared that they face problems while buying pet medicine.

These are the problems they shared:

• “I always have to visit 2-3 pharmacies to find the pet medicine I am looking for.”
• “There is no pet pharmacy in my area. So, I have to travel 25 miles.”
• “I have easy access to the vet, thanks to telemedicine. But when it comes to buying medicine for my pet, I have to go out of my home.”

We are sure these are the most common problems almost all pet owners face.

So, dear The Vets team, you must introduce a pet medicine delivery service. Since you already have a streamlined logistic network, you won’t have a hard time delivering pet medicine to the doorstep of pet owners.

Talking about the market, the US pet pharmacy market size is very huge – more than $10 billion. Even if you plan to grab only less than 5% of the market share, investors would go crazy for you!

It is great that The Vets – in addition to in-home pet care – also provides veterinary services by phone and email.

However, video visits would add value to the interaction between pet owners & vets and enable vets to understand the condition of the pets in more detail.

This would result in more accurate diagnosis, pet care and happy customers. Overall, having a video visit option rather than a phone call can improve the customer experience, clinical value of the platform and relation of pet owners and vets.

If you are serious about it, let us guide you through it. To add a video visit feature, all you have to do is integrate any communication API such as Twilio or Vonage.

And if you want to not try any premium thing, you can opt-in for WebRTC which is a free and built-in video calling capability of all the latest browsers.

People treat pets as their family members. They provide pets from toys to clothes. But here again, the same problem, people don’t have specific choices while buying items for their pets.

As a result, people either need to compromise with what they are looking for or afford what they are looking for at the cost of their time and money.

Since you are pet-specific, pet owners would easily put trust in your pet care products which you are selling through your eCommerce store.

And this way, you will become a super-platform for pet care with multiple revenue streams and a very large user base.

The fact is, there are millions of pet owners and not every pet owner is aware of The Vets’ in-home pet care services.

One workable way to attract a large number of pet owners is the community. Because every pet owner is fascinated by the idea of sharing his pet story and learning more about what other pet owners have to say about what he is facing with his pet.

Since joining a community is absolutely free and a new experience for pet owners, they would love to be part of it. And you? Well, you can utilize this community as a lead funnel and convert them into your customers.

Many SaaS products follow the same strategy.

Dear The Vets, you are selling very wonderful at-home pet care services. But when it comes to selling wow experiences, you somewhere lack.

For example, to book an appointment, users have to fill out a form and wait until someone from your team contacts the user back to confirm the appointment.

Even a delay of 3 minutes between the user filling a form and your team member contacting the user back to confirm the appointment can kill the user experience. Because now is the time of the on-demand model of everything. Users ask, and you deliver – instantly.

One very practical way to provide a wow user experience is the introduction of a chatbot.

Using a chatbot, users can book appointments in a very interactive way, by selecting a time slot, type of service and giving an address. And chatbot too can confirm the appointment by checking the availability – all automatically within seconds.

Imagine the outcome and cost-saving!

A mobile app is something The Vets must launch as soon as possible. Right now what they have is a good website.

But a mobile app is 100 times better than a website when it comes to user experience, features, revenue streams, and most importantly, branding.

With The Vets mobile app, they can let their users explore a variety of features such as live tracking, pet profile, telemedicine, notifications, promo codes etc.

Such features will enhance the brand value and give a competitive edge.

Rolling out subscription plans is a very good strategy to build a loyal customer base. You give your users an affordable service option for the long-term and in return, your users give you rare loyalty.

In the case of The Vets, they must launch subscription plans. One example of a subscription plan is $300 per annum for 3 pets and up to 10 home visits. With this subscription plan, The Vets can make pet owners having multiple pets its loyal customers by delivering value.

With more specific subscription plans targeting each group of pet owners, a healthcare startup can make more customer acquisition and a loyal customer base! This is as simple as that!