petsicon blogOur blog about petsicon, the pet health lexicon

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!!

We went to the Mini-Seedcamp in Berlin because we were looking
for funding but what we found was much more valuable:

inspiration and ideas

And that is exactly what we needed! We met some smart people with
great ideas and open minds and I think they woke up the real entrepreneurs
in us. I came up with a plan which only requires a small amount of
money right now. At the moment we are buzzing with ideas and energy,
one of the VCs, Ivan Farneti, said something at the panel discussion
about startups in Silicon Valley, how they work harder than startups in Europe
–and probably that’s true, but this comment inspired us to shift gears
into what our team calls “petsicon gear 2.0“!

Personally, I am so enthusiastic about some of our new ideas I
had the night after Seedcamp that as of now I can’t sleep because
of excitement and use that extra time to come up with new ideas.
My girlfriend is little bit worried because I am forgetting to eat
but I’m never hungry and when I eat I want to get back to work.
(My theory is that I’m naturally high on endorphins which prevent
me from feeling hungry)

I use a moleskine notebook to write down all my ideas and in the
past week I have filled up almost one whole book which makes
about 150 pages of ideas

On a technical note, we decided to implement our product in html
and have some great ideas for which we are making plans on how to
implement — the bad thing is that our next milestone, the launching
of cat and dog in English and German, has to be postponed until the
middle of August, then it will come online first with dogs in English
and German, and for now only the German site will get cats as well.

We also decided to put our complete content in a nice and
organized html-form on our website and integrated bookmarking
and recommendation tools so you can bookmark and recommend
us to your friends and colleagues. These are steps that we think are
pretty easy to implement so expect this to happen within the next 10 days!

We also took Inma Martinez’s really good advice to do customized
graphics for the individual dog breeds which we are now doing,
the first step is to make graphics for the 5 most popular dog breeds.
The other races will be made after that little by little because our
graphics department is notoriously understaffed. (Meaning our two
friends, Vera and Mick, who helped us so much and did a lot of the
graphics, have to earn money and are busy with their jobs right now )

So please be patient with those customizations, they will come.

We also now have a twitter account so for the latest news follow
us at twitter.com/petsicon or check (and track-) back to this blog!

Hello everyone,

As you might or might not know, we are a company that is trying to
create the best pet health service on the internet.

For this goal, the petsies (our team at petsicon) are working tirelessly
on improving our service.

We created this little blog to provide you with news and updates about
our product and us and we will also be writing about our little family
here at petsicon.
Please contact us at suggestions ( a t ) petsicon (dot) de if you have any
feedback, suggestions or praise because our mission is to create something
that people find useful (ok, we also like to innovate and create new stuff
but that isn’t a contradiction, isn’t it?)

Thanks also for everyone’s support, we really appreciate every little contribution!