'If you're not embarrassed by your first product launch you have waited too long'

MYSELF AND MY brother always knew we wanted to go into business together. It wasn’t ever a matter of if we would launch a company, it was more about what idea we would eventually go with.

When I was finishing up my business management degree at college in 2014, my brother Timothy was working in the finance sector in Berlin, he learned a lot out there but decided it was time to move on. So he came back to Dublin from Berlin and straight away we both just started talking about business ideas.

There were a few ideas that were pipe dreams. One of them was a marketplace for buying and selling art, but that’s actually a really competitive space so after brainstorming for a while, nothing seemed as concrete as the first idea we came up with – an Airbnb for dogs.

We had already identified the problems people have getting a person to look after their dog through our own experiences and after fleshing out the idea and doing more research we couldn’t believe how outdated the space was.

Roughly one in five of households in Europe have a dog, so it is a huge industry, but it was still largely untapped. We have seen with taxis and hotels, those industries have been massively disrupted by Uber and Airbnb, but the dog care industry was nearly untouched.

Out of that, House My Dog was born. We built a website and went with the ‘Airbnb for dogs’ model.

Timothy and James McElroy (right)

Hindsight

When you’re first starting up, I think a lot of the time you want things to be perfect or better before you launch a product or feature for your service. We have learned over time that with our new products, we should have just launched them straight away rather than trying to get them perfect.

Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, said if you’re not embarrassed by your first product launch you have waited too long – we’ve taken that to heart and learned to always be iterating the website to improve the service.

There is no point waiting it out until a new feature or product is perfect because, to be honest, you will probably never reach that point. The best way to launch a product is to get it out there and make the changes as they come and then start adding improvements. Ultimately, your customers are going to tell you what they like and don’t like about the site.

We recently added a dog day care service to the website and looking back, maybe we should have just done that earlier. We were trying to get it perfect for a bit too long.

Also, our mobile website, we spent far too long waiting for it to be perfect and user friendly before launching. In hindsight, we should have just gone ahead with a functioning model and tweaked it when it required some care.

This is what happens when you run a startup. You want to get new products out there, but worry about it bombing.

But the catch is by putting a new product out there, you learn infinitely faster what the problems are. We can test each new feature on the site hundreds of times, but users will always find all the little issues you never even thought to look for.

Highs and lows

Hitting some of our milestones, like our first thousand customers and then from that going to 10,000 users, those have been big highs since launching in 2014. Also expanding the service to the UK was also a big moment for us because it wasn’t our home market.

However, with the ups, come the downs. It goes without saying that startups are an emotional roller coaster and it can be disappointing when you launch a new feature on the website and you’re convinced users will like it, but then it doesn’t really work out.

One specific feature we got rid off comes to mind. Originally we made people sign up and place a payment up front before they could contact a sitter, but then we found that more people were paying when they could actually contact the dog sitter before then move to payment.

We also made the search engine a six-step process at first and would match a person to a dog sitter, but we found people just want to be able to search as many sitters as possible rather than being recommended one – like the way they browse hotels.

Ambitions

The next step for us is to scale further into the UK and we also want to launch into the German market, but further down the line we are eyeing up bringing other services like dog walking to the site.

We’re also in talks to add ‘e-tailing’ to the site, which would let dog owners purchase accessories, food, bedding etc. Ultimately we want to become a large pet services marketplace. But adding all these services is costly.

So we’re in the process of closing out our seed round of funding now, but have found raising money simply isn’t something you can just dive into in Ireland as a startup. You have to get to a point where you can start talking to investors properly. This country is not like America, you can’t just go out and raise a €1 million seed round pre-revenue.

Just before the summer, raising the seed round took up a lot of time and it quickly became our day-to-day job just to prepare to raise the investment. You do slightly take your eye off the business, but its important to trust the team to look after the running of the business when myself and Timothy are travelling.

It’s important to be able to share the load because it can make everyone’s time far more effective. We have grown to a team of six and hired people who love the idea and want to work in a startup. It means we work really well together and at this stage, I’d say they know the business as well as myself and Timothy do.

James McElroy is the ‎co-founder of House My Dog. This article was written in conversation with Killian Woods as part of a series on business mistakes and what can be learned from them.

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