A quick update and plans for the future
WheresMyPet launched nearly a year ago. At launch, I planned to continue improving current features and developing new ideas but in reality I’ve done far from that. I’ve done a few feature improvements but not much more. To be honest, it’s tough to have a full-time job along with other responsibilities and projects and take on a project like WMP. On top of that, it’s very disappointing and discouraging to deal with current animal shelters and government agencies which refuse to cooperate or even link to us. There’s so much potential to help pets find their home but these agencies, whether for lack of interest or plain laziness, decide to not help us help them.
Having said that, I’m very pleased to have had the reception WMP has had! With the tiny bit of ads I’ve placed and interviews I’ve given, the site has been growing at a slow but steady pace. WMP will continue to be here and I promise to do my best to improve the site from this point forward. I have some cool features and improvements on how to better find pets and still want to develop an iPhone/iPad/Mobile application.
My first step is to monetize the site. I have some ideas on how to generate some income to fuel the improvements and developments to the site and would love your feedback. Please keep in mind, posting a lost or found pet will always remain free! I firmly believe that recovering pets is a right and not a privilege and WMP will never charge for that service. Below are three immediate ideas that come to mind:
- Advertising
- Featured Listings
- Pro Accounts
Advertising. I’ve always been against running advertisements. I believe it takes away from the experience but I decided to start off with some small advertising on the home page to see how well it performs. I would prefer to partner with a company that would lead to a better ad experience for users but for now it’s a step in the (financially) right direction.
Featured Listings. While posting lost or found pets will remain to be free (forever), I thought a featured listing would be useful to some people. The idea is that for a small amount of money (say $5) a lost or found post on WMP could be featured (meaning it will be highlighted and stand out similar to some ebay posts).
Pro Accounts. This one I have to think more about but the idea is that for a small amount of money (say $5/month or $19/year) users could have the ability to do other things on the site. Some possible ideas would be letting users create a profile for their pet (similar to facebook) and removing all ads. The main purpose behind Pro Account users would be to help continue the growth of the site (you could say they would be supporters/donators). I would like to offer these users a benefit for their financial support though.
If you have any ideas, comments or feedback feel free to email me directly at contact [at] wheresmypet [dot] com. THANK YOU!
It’s challenging to offer help.
It’s challenging to offer help. Honestly, I thought I would spend the first couple of weeks improving the design and prettying up some of the code (backend and frontend) of WheresMyPet. However, since the site has been pretty much solid I’ve spent some time approaching the Humane Society, Best Friends Animal Society and a number of Animal Shelters (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and my own local Miami Animal Shelter) and have been greeted with a cold shoulder.
At least Best Friends was nice enough to write me saying they post third party links on the website.
To be fair, these organizations probably deal with hundreds or thousands of requests from third parties (like WheresMyPet) that try to take advantage of their services. I’m not. It may be hard to believe, but my goal for WheresMyPet is to genuinely help people recover pets and reduce the amount of pain and hurt that families endure during these times.
It’s only been a few weeks (about 17 days) since I first emailed someone about WheresMyPet so there is still plenty of time for us to convince the large organizations that WheresMyPet is serious about recovering pets.
Want to help? Contact your local animal shelter and ask them to create a FREE account and start posting found pets or to at least place a link to WheresMyPet on their site so people can create their own posts.
Be careful with SCAM websites that charge you to just post a lost or found pet! Case in point, amberpetalerts.com - despicable to take peoples money with little to no action.
One unsatisfied user on (soft) launch day.
Saturday I wrapped up some of the last things I wanted to get done on WheresMyPet before I started emailing people. I did some quick google searches and emailed maybe 10 people which had recently lost or found pets.
The good news: 7 people signed up and 2 posted lost/found pets. MUCH better than I expected!
The bad news: One unsatisfied and bitter user. Below is the email reply from the person who will remain anonymous.
Please do not contact me getting my hopes up just to find that your website is unable to perform the task of uploading his JPEG photo that has been used in every other site. Please don’t do that to people that are desperate and then just get frustrated again.Thank You
When I read this email my soul dropped to the floor. I felt I had failed. After years of going back and forth with the website and then starting from scratch again less than a month ago to read this on the very first day I start approaching people was like a being thrown a bucket of cold water. I was partially in shock for the first couple of seconds.
I quickly replied with the following:
I sincerely apologize that the website didn’t work. Please understand
that this is a project developed solely by myself and completely out
of my own money to help people recover their pets - for free. It was
not my intention to disappoint you, only to help recover your lost
pet.
If you can, please send me your jpeg image and I promise I will get it
working. Developing a site like this isn’t easy so feedback like yours
is very important to get the site working properly.
Again I apologize and I DO appreciate your email! Feel free to call me
with any questions or concerns: [phone number]
I’ve yet to hear back from this person but what I learned is this: Losing a pet isn’t just losing a dog or cat, it’s losing a family member. People are emotional and if something doesn’t work the way they expect it to their emotions do the talking for them. I’m sure some time in the future this person will understand that my intentions truly were to help and were never meant to get her hopes up and leave her hanging.
Losing pets is a very sensitive topic and people will react differently every time. This email encouraged me make sure I worked on a few things on the site to avoid any other possible issues. While there will always be technical problems and glitches, I must do my best to make sure people in distress are able to post for the help they need, when they need it.
To make matters worse, I haven’t been able to replicate the error and no errors were logged on the server. I’m assuming the photo was either too large (a maximum of 1 megabyte per photo is accepted) or the image was a file-type I didn’t explicitly allow. If you encounter any similar issues, please send an email to contact [at] wheresmypet [dot] com so we can get to the bottom of it!
While I’m upset at myself for something like this happening, I’m sure that for this one disappointed user there will be hundreds or thousands of happy users when WheresMyPet starts to reunite families with their beloved pets. A new goal for WMP is to not have anymore unsatisfied users. :-)
The blog
I’m setting up the WheresMyPet (WMP) blog with the hopes that I can share the in’s and out’s of developing the website to the point of launch and the journey after. I’ve never been one to keep a blog up to date but this isn’t really my goal here - my goal is to let you take a look inside and keep myself motivated when I want to drop development and move on.
I’m choosing Tumblr as the home of this blog as it allows me to quickly post snippets, tidbits and nuggets of the development and design behind WMP and focus my time on launching the site. This sure beats me worrying about hosting, maintaining, securing and eventually updating the blog on a system like wordpress or expressionengine. For more info on my choice of Tumblr, read here.
For more information, visit the site at http://wheresmypet.com or the twitter feed http://twitter.com/wheresmypet
For more information on me (Tony Carrera), visit http://tonycarrera.com or my twitter feed http://twitter.com/tonycarrera
