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!!!