David Thompson, '22 | Doggi (Pet Care Tech)

Describe your company: Doggi provides busy pet owners with the peace of mind that their pet is always well cared for through a combination of new and innovative hardware and software.

Target Industry:  Pet Care Tech

What is your role in the company, and please list team members' names and their current role in the company:   I am CEO and Anthony Cottom is CTO.

Why did you apply to Race To Revenue? What are you hoping to get out of this experience? I applied to R2R in order to work on my venture full-time, and to hit a few sales milestones in order to give Doggi momentum for a seed raise. I believe by the end of the summer we will be prepared to raise a fairly large sum of money in order to start scaling and producing.

Has there been someone who has helped you with your venture so far?  We've had lots of help along the way from innovative minds like Michael Wicks and Ryan Kreager on the tech side of things to VC partners and people who have raised in the past. We've also received lots of help from John Henry and the rest of the IDEA Center team in really easing our route.

What do you want to learn more about, relating to business development in general or your own company/venture specifically? I think it is going to be really interesting to find out how people adapt to introducing technology into pet care. There's a thin line that lies between supplanting human care for pets (which we have no intention of doing) and not being effective enough to assist in pet care. We're walking that line with an assistant approach. It's a group of tools to help pet owners when they can't be there, are going on vacation, etc. and it is a fun time trying to get the marketing right. So far I've been able to be there and describe the product to everybody and correct them if it is misunderstood, but as we scale up and out and that is less the case, if people misunderstand they just don't want it. The marketing approach is definitely the most unique position

Entrepreneurial fun fact: I don't know a single entrepreneur that hasn't pivoted actually. When I started I was like "This is the golden idea, I'm running with it for good" and then it changed pretty substantially like 6 months later. You'd be surprised what quality ideas you can come up with by taking crazy ideas and then doing the research on them and realizing the crazy thought may not work, but a very similar and doable idea does.

Favorite place to get tacos and what kind? I live on a little fisherman's island in Southwest Florida called Matlacha, so easily my favorite tacos are blackened grouper tacos from the local bar Hooked. (The owner is my neighbor so maybe if I increase revenue through word of mouth I can get some free food.)