September/October Newsletter

Hello Friends!

Greetings from Pawtify! We hope that your summer has been full of good health. Please forgive us of not sending a newsletter sooner but we have been busy with some new and exciting news. First, we want to say thank you for following our journey thus far, we appreciate all the support we’ve received this year. As the Covid-19 pandemic continues, we are carrying on virtually and safely to meet our milestones for Pawtify and the Geekdom Incubator. The last couple of months have been quite a ride as we have been in the middle of pivoting our business model and technical product. We learned through more discovery and collaboration with COSA Animal Care Services that their shelter management system has some unseen restrictions on data use and access that prevent us from developing a pet match notification system. This halted our growth for over a month and we fully believed that was the end of the road for Pawtify. 

Yet with much encouragement from Geekdom staff to push forward we sat with our creative minds and figured out a way to press forward amongst the inability to develop a pet matching system. We realized that much of moving forward will take discovering more and educating ourselves. We were enlightened by ACS that education is key to helping the community with rescue pets. We now are in the process of collecting data through surveys to both rescue shelters and potential adopters. Our long-term goal will be to bridge the gap between rescue shelters and potential adopters by improving certain processes and create a streamline experience for those adopters and shelters staff. However in order to achieve that level of service; we will first attempt to gather and measure information through surveys for animal shelters through enabling potential adopters to answer relevant questions and evaluate the outcomes.

 

Ultimately, Pawtify's goal is to transform the adoption process for shelters and pet parents alike. Help us achieve that higher goal. We want to thank Geekdom and especially Joyce Deuley for the constant support while we navigate the pivoting process. We were very grateful that we have such positive resources to reach out to during this Program. 

So what have we been up to? Well June and July were the pivotal months for learning that we couldn’t touch ACS data and then transforming our business model into an education/survey data analytics platform. In August, we had our Quarter II Geekdom Incubator Presentation, where we presented our new pivot concept and layed out the game plan execution in Quarter III. During August-October, we plan to fine tune the problem statement and solution statements of this new concept and perform some validation of the new concept by collecting customer and user feedback. If you like to provide us with some assistance, we’d love for you to take our Potential Adopter survey and forward along to your network! We’ve been circulating this survey through the Geekdom newsletter and social media posts to help fine tune some points on adoption behavior and what will be useful to build into the new concept/technical solution. 

We also have been working with some awesome mentors (thank you!) to refine our business and revenue models so we can better validate our new concept as well. This will all be included in the next presentation to stakeholders in November. If any of this speaks to you and you have ideas or what to provide feedback and knowledge, please reach out to us! We’d love to hear from you. 

During these months as well, we will be continuing our technical solution development. We have continued to work with our contractor Jordan Leslie, a San Antonio based software Developer who is working on the front-end technical development of Pawtify. Based on the validation we’ve been receiving from the surveys and working with our mentors, we will update our user stories and wireframes and continue to develop our “new” thin vertical slice in order to provide a demo to our stakeholders at our next Quarterly Presentation meeting in November. 

Thank you so much for showing interest and support in our Progress! We look forward to keeping you up to date in the near future! Please feel free to reach out to us if you ever have suggestions, questions, etc., we’d love to hear from you!

Team Pawtify: Emma and Laura