petsicon blogOur blog about petsicon, the pet health lexicon

Ok,ok I know, we’ve been been lazy with blogging, but there was just
sooo much other stuff that we had to do AND we are now in super-focus-mode,
wanting to get our baby out into the world as fast as possible.
So this is what we’ve been doing:

First of all, I’ll not do the bold words anymore. This was meant
as optimization for speedreaders, but I don’t think that the majority
of the readers of this blog are actually speed readers, so let’s
try “normal”.

We are in the process of modifying our system so that we can have
more user engagement and interaction, meaning that people will be able
to share their knowledge with other users in a new and exciting way.
We’re particularly excited about this new idea and our vets are now
creating hundreds of new great information bits, or qnobits (short
for knowledge bits) for our users.
Those cover all areas of pet knowledge ranging from questions like
‘What things do I have to buy for my puppy?’ or ‘What can I feed my dog?’
to more medical questions like ‘How do I measure my dog’s temperature’
or ‘What do I have to do if my dog has flatulence?’.
Luckily our system is designed to be easily extendable and the new
module is fitting in greatly!

Furthermore our design crew, namely Mick and Vera, are redesigning
our site so expect more elegance and beauty coming soon!
We’re also getting more customized dog figures, i.e. breed specific
figures, we think you don’t want to be clicking on some generic dog
but rather on a graphic of your dog, so look out for your own clickable
dog breed figure soon, but we might need some time since there are over
800 dog breeds and there’s only so many figures we can make.

On another note we are very excited to announce that we have two new
additions to our Japanese team, a Japanese professor and veterinarian,
Ken Hayashida, and a practicing Japanese veterinarian, Toshiro Kaneko.
Their work has already greatly improved our Japanese content and
I hope that the Japanese team will keep the momentum going.
GO JAPANESE PETSIES!!!

We hope to start closed alpha-testing within the next month and are
excited to show our “knowledge machine” to everyone!
(That is everyone in the closed-alpha test

Oh, I almost forgot, you can now sign-up for news updates on
our site so if you don’t want to miss any of the exciting stuff that’s
about to happen, sign up here !!!

This is a small report on some things that we have learned to be very
important in the process of becoming an entrepreneur, although
I think there are more parts to follow since one thing we learned was
that we don’t know enough.

We applied to the Seedcamp week and were initially not invited to the
shortlist interviews, we were told that we were a “reserve team”, so
here’s where we needed what we think of as the number one quality of
an entrepreneur :

1. Tenaciousness
Yes, that’s it, most of the time nobody but you will be able to
SEE YOUR VISION and nobody will camp in front of your door to listen to your pitch, give you money or become your partner or customer, so GO AFTER THEM, CALL THEM, MAIL THEM, just DO WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO to get to where you want to go.

So we booked anyway and at the same time wrote the Seedcamp crew that they have to reconsider and listen to us!
We even thought about doing it Shaolin-monk-style, just going to the temple and waiting in front of it until they let us in.

Another attribute of entrepreneurs is:

2. Flexibility
If things don’t go according to your plan or your wishes, react and make
alternative plans. This is also what the first law of cybernetics says:
“The unit within the system with the most behavioral responses
available to it, controls the system.”

So we made some alternative plans and appointments in case we weren’t
invited. But 36 hours before the interviews we got a mail saying that they
found a slot for us and if we could be in London for the interview.
So we went there, our presentation was at the end of the day and I think
we woke them up which was good enough to get us invited to the
Seedcamp week.

During the Seedcamp week, everyday we learned something new which
we consider to be fundamental:
First day:
3. Focus
The guys from Pollenizer made us realize that focusing on one particular
market and a particular problem is the first step to conquering all markets
and solving all problems. If you’re like us, you probably start with a great
vision and how you want things to be in three years, but you have to come
up with a way to get there which we thought we already had but you can
always break it down into tinier fragments and more specific tasks
and strategies –> laser-like focus
Second day:
4. Entrepreneurship is an experimental science
Eric Ries pointed out that as a mathematician I use deductive reasoning to
solve problems or find answers but that that is not the way to run businesses,
entrepreneurship is an experimental science and therefore much more about
doing little experiments i.e. getting to know your customers, trying out different
features and then correcting the course according to the outcome and
factual evidence rather than deductively constructing chains of reasoning.
Third day:
5. Find important metrics:
To find out if your experiments worked or if you are making progress, find metrics
to measure whether your actions helped you advance in the right direction.
This also helps you clarify your goals because it forces you to come up with
quantifyable entities that correlate to your goals.
Fourth day:
6. Business is a little like war
The very insightful Fred Destin said to us that we have to devise a battle plan.
So business may be a lot like war, meaning that you have to identify your
competition, devise a strategy on how to conquer the market,
and then just execute it.

So to sum up the whole week in one word: AMAZING!!
We really learned AMAZINGLY much, met some AMAZING people and will
make the most of this experience by becoming an AMAZING company.

Thank you Seedcamp, Saul, Reshma, Alasdair, Stephanie, John and Mirwais,
and as we wrote in our “reserve-team”-reply, YOU WILL NOT REGRET IT!!!

Although from today it’s supposed to be rainy for a couple of days
we’ve had sunshine till now which made us buy a barbecue and actually
barbecue a lot for lunch since it’s a) tasty b) fast c) easy d) fun!!

So our one-week-Atkinson-diet gave us super-coding-energy and
we’ve made great progress on our new system:

The backend now is what we call our elegant potential giant in the
embryo stadium meaning we’ve constructed the framework and
some of the logic and structures, but that it still needs to be filled
with AI and data.
But still I am very satisfied with it, when I look and think about it, it
gives me the same sensation as when I discover or read a very elegant
mathematical proof, one of those that Paul Erdős would have called
“one from His Book”, the idea of god having a book with the best and
most beautiful mathematical proofs.
When I think about Erdős, this one thing that his friend said to him
always comes to mind: “a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee
into theorems”, so analogous to that you could say that
“a petsi is machine for turning bbq-ed meat into code”

The frontend is also coming along well, we’re programming in the new
Flex 4 beta, a great new framework which is much more ingenious than
the previous Flex 3 but not really finished, I guess it’s a transitional
version and the finished new framework will be Flex 5.
Anyways it’s much fun to program our new interface as well as some
really good new communication mechanisms between back- and frontend
that we have thought up.

So let’s hope that our progress will not slow down despite the weather
preventing us from bbq-ing

This weekend has been our slack-off weekend. On saturday we worked
only half the day and then went to see a soccer game in a pub around the
corner. And as with everything at the moment, this game also miraculously
turned out in our favour, the small team we were rooting for, Mainz 05,
the club of the city in which Christoph grew up and we finished high-school
together, a club that just ascended to the first league this summer and has
the smallest budget of all teams in the Bundesliga, beat the biggest, most
famous, most successful and of course wealthiest club of the league,
Bayern Muenchen.
This once again shows that David CAN BEAT Goliath.
And at the moment we feel like little Davids and we’re looking for our Goliath!
We’re just not sure who it is. Is it Microsoft or is it Google? Or is it some
pet-site-Goliath?
Anyway that’s what makes soccer fascinating. Soccer teams can basically
be seen as complex system, a field that I was and am very interested in
over the past years. It basically means that in a complex system such as a
soccer team, the whole is more than the sum of its parts. I’ve read
studies that say that in a match between two soccer teams of different
strengths, the probability of the stronger team winning is approximately
at 60% whereas in individual sports such as tennis, the probability of the
stronger player winning is at 90% (that’s why R.Federer has won everything
in the past years but Real Madrid couldn’t win the Champions League)
I believe that the same can be said about companies and the market.
If the right components (in this case people) find themselves than
they’re able to create stuff that transcends their individual and
collective capabilities. And applied to the market it in turn means
that the biggest companies with the most capable people will not always
win (Or in the case of Microsoft over the past years, never win

Other than that, I also got my RFID set from touchatag on saturday
and spent sunday afternoon playing around with it. Since they have
a cool API and it is a possibility for petsicon to enter the vet market
later, meaning to provide online medical documentation software
to vets, I programmed a little app that automatically logs the pet into
the petsicon system (and some more stuff that’s secret
Basically later the pet can walk into a vets office, a RFID reader would
read the RFID chip of the pet and if that office or veterinarian was authorized
before to have access to the pet’s data by the owner, the vet would
automatically get the medical history and all relevant data on his
screen instantly.

Pretty cool, huh?

The miracles of technology obviously don’t protect us from human
stupidity, in this case my stupidity, as I wrote a world-changing,
potentially literature-nobel-prize-winning blog-entry the day before
yesterday but stupidly copied some other mail correspondence in the
file and so this cute blog entry will be lost forever, and I don’t
remember what I wrote exactly.

Probably I was still raving about our first petsicon core team
photoshoot with our new friend Daisuke Nikaido, a Japanese
photographer who put up his tents here in Berlin recently to get a fresh
perspective and refine his super-photographing-skills as you can see on
our team pictures. Here a small sample:


It was a lot of fun for the four of us, especially with our Duisburg-
petsi Calle, who we can only meet every couple of weeks but who’s in
constant skype-conference reach and,as I mentioned in the last post,
still manages to do a great job.

Later we went to the best pizza place in town (some in the team say
second best) Il casolare, the rustic italian pizzeria run and founded
by Italian punk-musicians, to have our first petsicon company dinner!
(The three-star-michelin restaurants will have to wait until we
actually MAKE some money )
Furthermore our long lost brother, Andreas Mertin, our UK vet who we
had lost contact to for a few months while he explored the UK
veterinarian wilderness, must have smelled our reunion and surprisingly
also showed up in Berlin and joined our first petsicon party which
(unfortunately?) didn’t last as long as those parties that we had
when we young (that means when we started studying)
I could never have imagined that I would rather go to bed not too late
to be able to get up the next morning and work, but I’m happy to have
found something that is worth it.

We were also asked recently who we later want to sell our business to.
The answer of course is: “To NOONE!!!” (Yes, we know, that’s not
something potential investors and venture capitalists want to hear)
At least that’s our wish, what the harsh reality might bring we don’t
know and we’re also pragmatic and don’t see that as a dogma.
So I guess the core team is of the same opinion about petsicon
as Alfred Lord Tennyson who said in his famous lost-love-quote:
“‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
We love you petsicon and we’ll make sure never to lose you

Risking again of being accused of “sounding too enthusiastic” I want
to comment on what our team is doing:
Calle, our tireless future-super-surgeon, who also has the “petsicon gene”,
meaning he apparently doesn’t need to sleep and, despite having night- and
weekend-shifts all the time, produces marvellous content for us.
At the moment he is translating the content to English which Mike then
corrects to “native English”. This system works well and approximately 90%
of the content is already translated to English, “naturalized” and in the first
proofreading loop.
Mike, our US petsi and master of the Japanese language, is working fulltime
on the Japanese front-line, translating like a maniac, coordinating with the
proofreaders and other helping hands in Japan as well as reaching out into
his extensive network to find Japanese veterinarians, something that we can
report first successes as Mike managed to establish some connections, let’s
hope something good will come from that

I expect this weekend to be fun, as Calle will join us here in Berlin and we
plan to party “the petsicon way” because I think everybody in the team has
been so focused on working almost all the time that we forgot to take necessary
breaks and socialize but our team bonding weekend will do us good, we are
also planning on taking some nice group shots, so check our Team page for
even prettier pictures of us

So as I said before, the petsies are a tight team, I even believe the BEST TEAM,
and WE WILL NOT LOSE TO ANYONE whether they’re from Silicon Valley,
Napa Valley or Death Valley for that matter!!

So here’s the conclusion and challenge to other companies:
BRING IT ON!!!

Over the past few weeks, to be exact since we published large parts of
the content of the iDiDi in html-form, the little traffic that we had from
Google, i.e. users who wanted to try out the iDiDi-component of petsicon,
had unfortunately halved and it seems to have taken Google quite some
time to send its crawling army back to us.
This is all because we have a much more maschine-readable
/understandable structure of the html-part of the site now and
therefore deleted all that old stuff.
Now the traffic is slowly picking up again and we see good progress
in our rankings in the searches for relevant search terms (yippiee)

We felt that this step was necessary to increase our relevancy
to search engines so this shows that sometimes you have to
take a step back in order to jump three steps forward.

So this is what happened this week:
I was criticized for my writing style being “too American” (meaning
too enthusiastic) and one guy even wrote that our description of
the petsies on the team page (“the petsies are working hard to create
the best pet health site on the internet”) made him want to puke.

I therefore want to clarify one thing:
This IS NOT some kind of fake blog where marketing specialists come
up with polished sentences that sound good!
This IS genuinely HOW I FEEL!!! And EVERY SENTENCE is meant that way!!

And I WILL NOT APOLOGIZE for that, and will always defend our team
from unfair insults! It seems to be a German thing to want to discourage
ambitious thinking and look down on the maybe naive enthusiasm and
power of people like us.
That is why NOT A SINGLE MAJOR INTERNET COMPANY is from
Germany (don’t get me wrong, we have great internet companies here
but nothing that could compare to companies like Google, Facebook, ebay
or amazon) because we have to hear shit like that every single day and
I can imagine that a lot of people crack under that pressure and simply
give up their dreams to pick up regular jobs or worse, don’t even try
to go for their dreams.

We have the goal to create the best company on the planet (doesn’t
mean most profitable but that would be nice too) and are doing
everything possible to make this dream become reality and will not
stop to communicate this whether everybody likes it or not!

And this is also how I feel, and this obviously is not the standard
mushy marketing-guys-talk, but one of the core values that we try to
establish in this company is honesty.
I want people to be authentic and honest with their opinions and
we see that as a categorical imperative in the sense of Kant so that means
we don’t stop with that philosophy on our doorstep just because I am
afraid that it might not be liked by the world, we want this to become
a universal principle, but we start by implementing it in our company!!

We are very happy about all kinds of constructive criticism and are
all eager and willing to learn but don’t mistake kindness and enthusiasm
with weakness and naivety.

So I want to end this post with a quote from “Pulp fiction”, one of my
favorite movies:
“And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious
anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers.”
Let’s hope that that won’t be necessary

We are tremendously thankful to all you people who at the
moment are helping us with your advice and your experience.
It is a huge boost to the team that so many people believe
in our concept and in us.

We are currently finishing the fully translated Japanese
version and are at the moment actively looking for
“petsicon ambassadors” or “petsibassadors“ as we call
them:
We want win the most active and enthusiastic members
of the pet community to make our product even better! As “petsicon ambassadors/ petsibassadors” users will get free premium accounts (once we have those) and will
be able to test and review our newest unreleased
features that are still in development and therefore actively
contribute to and possibly change the direction petsicon
is heading.
So if you are actively engaged in your pet community and
want to get this exciting opportunity to get access to the
newest features our team came up with and therefore
help us shape this site, by all means send us a message
and get in touch with the petsies at petsibassy (a t) petsicon.de .

In other news we recently consulted with some really
helpful people who advised us on how to scale our service
and gave us an insight into the online advertising business.
Other people gave us hints on how to get users to our site
and what kind of questions potential investors will ask us
(Luckily we’ve already prepared that but will be able to convince
even more with even better answers and ideas)

So I’ll conclude this post with a famous quote from the movie
“Wayne’s world”:
“Petsi on, Garth!”- “Petsi on, Wayne!”
(ok, it’s slightly altered )

This week we had the pleasure to welcome two new
members to our petsifamily! A new veterinarian
and a new marketing specialist/lobbyist.

It is overwhelming and I am very proud about how our
petsies are willing to put their free time and effort
into our project, so I guess we are like Berlin,
the city petsicon is located at the moment, whose
motto is “poor but sexy” .

Further refinements to the flex-frontend have been
made, that means it now is with English content and has
a beauti- and simplified interface, and we’ve switched our
server from tomcat to jboss to prepare for the masses that
we expect (or hope for) someday