petsicon blogOur blog about petsicon, the pet health lexicon

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

This week we worked hard on modifying and completing our business
plan, writing applications for competitions, producing screencasts
of our wonderful new petsicon and finding people to collaborate or
maybe hire (once we have money).

So with this finished and the applications sent we can once
again focus our attention to the really important things in life:
the development of petsicon

Last wednesday we started playing around with our Japanese version!!
I don’t want to brag but we must be the BEST team, I want to see
another company banging out a Japanese version of their site
in less than two weeks!!

Here you can see the first screenshots:

Everything basic is translated and our Japanese petsies
started testing immediately!

If you are native Japanese and want to help us, drop us a line and
we’ll give you a login and test account for the Japanese version!!

Today’s news: We wrote the 10th best business plan for the biggest
regional business plan competition in Germany, the
“Businessplan-Wettbewerb Berlin-Brandenburg”.
Ok, it’s not that impressive, there were 9 teams who wrote better
business plans than us, but on the other hand we wrote a better one
than the large majority of competitors

Anyway the business plan that we wrote a couple of months ago was
also based on our old concept and business model, only having
the “iDiDi”-module (intelligent disease-discovery) and trying to make
money only with online advertising.

All the judges gave us outstanding scores on product, team,
market analysis, marketing plan and the overall concept,
our only weak points were on how we will make money and
our 3-year financial plan but we think a three year plan cannot
be realistically made or predicted for a young internet company like
ours that is only at the beginning of its way. (But we’ll try anway)

But we have changed our concept or better say modified it in a way
that the former concept is only one part of the whole product
and had a lot of feedback for a better business model at seedcamp
which we incorporated in our plans.

So with these lessons learned, we, and I hope you too, expect
much more to come in the future and can’t wait for it!!