Jordy & Jahna McNamara took a novel approach to starting their app company, Critter. They decided to quit their jobs, pack up everything and take a cross-country road trip in a van. Their road trip allowed them the focus and freedom to finally start the business they’d dreamed of.
Traveling for months out of a van isn’t the easiest way to start a business, but it got them out of their old routine and into a new one, and they were disciplined enough to work hard almost every day on their new business. It also had the unexpected benefit of getting lots of in-person customer feedback with a geographic and demographic breadth that would be hard to replicate.
Critter was born because Jordy & Jahna wished there was an easy way to summarize everything their dog Lucy needed for various caregivers. They found themselves writing the same information over and over on scraps of paper, and knew there must be something easier.
Creating a new app and a company around it was right up their alley – Jahna has a software background, and Jordy a consulting and business background.
The app launched in October 2022, and for now is free. But they are exploring “freemium” tiers and other options to help monetize the business. Their long-term goal is to create a suite of apps that would also include pet professionals as well, such as vets, groomers, and boarders.
It’s a fun story about how to navigate the hassles of living in close quarters and moving constantly while trying to start a business together. It’s tthe ultimate challenge in being flexible. But then, that’s what the couple says is one of the keys to a successful road trip, but also building and marketing an app from scratch – have an overall plan, but stay flexible!
Below is a transcript of the show on The Savvy Entrepreneur Show, but you can go here if you’d prefer to listen to our interview!
Doris Nagel 0:10
Hello & welcome to another edition of The Savvy Entrepreneur Show.
I’m Doris Nagel, your host for the next hour.
The show is dedicated to entrepreneurs and small businesspeople and has two goals. First, I want to share helpful information resources. If I can help just one or two of you out there not make some of the mistakes I’ve made or have seen, then I’ve been successful.
The second goal is to inspire. I found being an entrepreneur confusing, lonely, and sometimes downright depressing and discouraging.
To help with both those goals, I have guests on the show every week who share their stories and advice.
This week, my guests are a dynamic husband, wife duo, Jordy and Jahna McNamara, who are the Co-Founders of a company called Critter. So what is Critter about? Well, I’m going to let Jordie, and Jahna explain what this what the business is about and how they came up with this idea.
Jahna & Jordy, welcome to the show! Thanks for being on The Savvy Entrepreneur this week.
Jordy McNamara
Thanks so much, Doris. We’re excited to be here. Thanks for having us.
Jahna McNamara
Yes, thanks so much for having us!
Doris Nagel
Absolutely. I love husband wife duos! It’s always fascinating to me how people decide to go into business together. But before we delve into some of that, talk about what Critter is — I love the name, by the way. But what is Critter and what does it do?
Jordy McNamara 1:46
Basically, Critter is a mobile app that makes it easy to manage and share pet care responsibilities. The idea is that our app can connect all of the different people and all of the different aspects of your pet’s care in a single central location.
What that means in practice is that, with our first version, you can track any key activities related to your pet. You can share things like updates and instructions for their care with anybody who needs to know about your pets’ care.
That could be day-to-day within your household, or if you’re leaving your pet with somebody else and you need to provide instructions for the care. So that’s the first version of Critter.
Doris Nagel
I’ve been a longtime dog owner, so I have a personal interest in hearing what this is about. But I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve written out instructions on scraps of paper for various people who are helping take care of my dogs – everything from the vet’s number, or what they like to eat and how often to feed them and how much, making sure they get their meds — all that stuff, right?
Jahna McNamara
Exactly.
Doris Nagel
So the idea is that you input this just one time, and then you can then share it with whoever has the app – maybe your neighbor, or your relative, or pet sitter, or dog walker – whoever?
Jordy McNamara 3:04
Yes, the idea is I as a pet owner sign up for the app, and I add my pets to my account.
We have this concept of a care circle. And you as the pet owner then invite whoever you feel belongs in your pet care circle to join you. You invite them to download the app, and then they’re able to participate in the app with your pets’ care. Anybody in that circle has access to see a timeline of events and activities that are related to your pet’s care, as well as what we call a care plan.
You pet’s care plan is where you outline all of the different instructions — the things you hit on, Doris — the medications, the feeding, walks, or whatever it might be. So it’s an easy place for me as a pet owner to maintain instructions over time and easily share it with anybody who’s invited to the circle.
Doris Nagel
How’d you get the idea for this business?
Jahna McNamara 4:08
The idea came from a problem we experienced in our own life being pet owners. We have a dog named Lucy. And typically we leave her with Jordy’s parents anytime we go out of town or something like that.
And every time we left her, we would write up a long list of instructions to remind them what medications she was taking, and when and how to give them, her walk schedule, feeding instructions, and just other miscellaneous things they needed to know.
We’d write it all on this piece of paper and leave it with them. And, inevitably, there would always be something we forgot to include or things that we needed to clarify.
And so like, every time we would come home, we would always just say to each other, “There really should be a better way to kind of maintain and share all this information.”
Doris Nagel
Would you also be able to invite your vet or groomer to join the circle? I’m not sure what their response would be if I asked my vet to do that!
Jordy McNamara 5:10
No, but that’s a good question. Because that is our long-term vision.
I think everything we’ve described so far is really Phase One in terms of what our initial product will be, and who it is geared towards, which is the pet owner.
But our long- term vision is to build software for pet professionals – for your vet, your dog walker, or a trainer, a groomer. So anybody who professionally work with pets, we plan to build software for them.
And at that point, they would then get the benefit of our pet owner app becoming their kind of de facto customer application that they can interact with you through. So I think if you went to your vet today and said, “Hey, join my circle,” I think they’d be like, “What are you talking about?”
Doris Nagel
I love my vet, who is an older lady, but I’m not picturing her wanting to download an app just for me.
Jahna McNamara 6:03
Yes. Our idea has evolved over time. We started out thinking our app could do chatting and sharing, but professionals would be long term. Originally, we were thinking we’d just use it in our own lives, and it really solved the problem that we experienced ourselves being pet owners.
Doris Nagel
What’s your revenue model? Are you doing ads? Are you hoping people will pay for this? Or how are you structuring it?
Jordy McNamara 6:30
I think this is an area that will definitely take shape and firm up over time. There are a lot of different directions we could go, so I anticipate a little bit of experimentation with different approaches and ways of making money.
To start, everything is going to be free. So when we launch our app – and we’re in the final stages of launching the app right now. We anticipate it becoming available at some point in September in the Apple app store, as well as the Android app store.
Doris Nagel
Wow, that’s right around the corner. Jordy! We are September one here as we speak today!
Jordy McNamara 7:06
It is definitely right around the corner. We’re testing it now and it’s in the final stages.
When it does launch, it’s going to be free to you as a pet owner. I think next year we may explore doing a “freemium” model, where you have to pay for a subscription to unlock certain premium features for pet owners. And that’s probably our starting point as we think about getting to profitability.
But I think ultimately, the biggest opportunity and the most obvious way to generate revenue, is by providing that software piece to pet professionals that we touched on. It would be software that allows them to run their business, providing things like scheduling and payments and account management, customer communication – all of the kinds of functionality that they need to run their business and interact with customers.
We think we can design and market that piece of it and deliver it all through our app that pet owners are already using.
So we see that as our most likely revenue model, but we are going to kind of play around with different approaches over the next year as we build out more functionality.
Doris Nagel
Certainly, the pet industry is big. And it’s one that people have shown a lot of willingness to spend crazy amounts of money on. It costs more to have my dogs’ teeth cleaned than it does to have my own teeth cleaned! And we willingly shell out lots of money to buy them memory foam beds and all kinds of toys and treats and high-end dog food.
My guess is there may be some of the big pet supply companies that might provide you with some good ad revenue, just because it’s a place that’s already targeted for those kinds of people.
Jordy McNamara 9:07
Absolutely. That’s definitely on the table as something we’ll explore.
So when I say will experiment, we talked about having potentially a premium set of features. So removing ads could be an example of something we would do. That inherently provides an opportunity to earn revenue through ads, but then if people want them removed, they have to pay, among other types of features.
Doris Nagel
How are you planning to reach your customers? I’m glad I heard about it. But how will other people who are pet owners find out about this?
Jahna McNamara 9:44
I think one of the great things for us in reaching new people early on is that there is kind of a built-in growth opportunity for us within the app. The whole idea of the app is really centered on sharing care. So as an owner, I can invite other people – your pet circle — which is really anyone who participates in their care.
So, for example, for us, we invite people like my parents, who will take care of Lucy or Jordy’s parents, as well as anyone else who might help us in different ways.
Pet owners really get the most value by inviting other people to join them and use the app. But obviously to take advantage of that, we have to get our first users on board.
And I’m a big believer that, early on like this, it’s OK to do things that don’t scale. So right now, we’re focused on personally going to where users are. We’re physically going to places like dog parks or pet stores so we can spread the word, making people aware of the app.
We’re also virtually participating in online communities for pet owners, like Facebook groups, and Reddit forums — places like that so we can start getting some feedback, too.
Doris Nagel
I haven’t looked, but there’s probably Meetup groups that are full of nothing but people who love dogs or cats, or whatever the pet is.
Talk a little bit about both of your backgrounds, and what makes you tick. Give people a flavor of how your background — each of you — led to this venture and prepared you for it and made you want to do this.
Jahna McNamara 11:24
I had an interesting path into the tech world. I originally studied Food Science in undergrad and thought I wanted to go into the health field, maybe eventually go to med school or dental school, but I eventually decided against those and actually went back to school to get a master’s in computer science.
I have always been more of a math person. And so I started my career as a software engineer. I worked at a bank right out of my master’s program as a software engineer. Then I worked at a couple of different startups in Chicago after that.
So I got to experience really different types of companies and cultures. I feel like I got a good base of how startups work. And it started me down this path and feeling like I could do a startup of my own.
And, you know, Jordy and I have really complementary skills and experience to pursue this, and we both have always wanted to be our own boss.
Jordy McNamara 12:20
That was such a huge thing for us to be able to feel comfortable taking the leap and leaving our jobs to start this.
I started out my career in consulting, which I think really just fit my personality and my interests. I was really able to get a good foundation across a lot of different areas. I was constantly learning new skills because I was constantly switching projects and switching clients and industries.
I started right out of school, working on projects that were in the information security space. And then I eventually transitioned into business analysis, product management and design for software projects. And then eventually, I worked in mergers and acquisitions advisory as well before becoming a product manager at McDonald’s.
To Jahna’s point, with her technical experience, and my own experience, which was focused on more of the functional areas around software, I think we were able to at least start with a good foundation to build from.
Obviously, there’s so much to learn, but having that good mix of skills and experience for this type of company has been a huge help in the beginning. And it’s allowed us to get to the point where we’re just about to launch a pretty robust — I think it’s pretty robust — mobile application without a ton of outside help.
And I think just really wanting the autonomy is what’s motivated us to start a company, and the opportunity to build something from scratch. Something that is fundamentally ours, and that we can do in a way that feels true to our values, while following the approach that we think is best. So I think that’s just been a lot of fun.
Doris Nagel
Talk a little more about how you decided to start it together. At one level, it’s pretty intuitive. You’re sitting across the kitchen table, or wherever, and you’re kicking around ideas.
But on the other hand, there are lots of stories out there about how difficult it can sometimes be.
I’m living, breathing proof of this. I went into business with a very good friend and ended up – unfortunately — not friends anymore. And the stories are legendary about that.
So talk about your process, and how you got to your comfort level with going into business together.
Jahna McNamara 14:54
The biggest thing for the two of us was that we both independently just really wanted greater ownership over our work, and what we’re working on day to day. It’s something we both wanted.
And we had a shared idea about the company should be run, so the opportunity to try and make that happen was really appealing to both of us. We really liked this idea of building something — starting at zero, and growing it into something, having true ownership and not working for someone else.
It’s an idea that really stuck with us for years, and that we had talked about for a long time.
As far as committing to work on the business full time, and together, it was a mix of personal and professional things that we thought a lot about.
I think having like a good partnership as husband and wife, we knew what it would be like working together.
So you need to think about getting into it with the right partner.
But one of the things we discussed was just what it meant for each of our careers — would it be a distraction or slow us down if the business didn’t work out? And also what our backup plan would be if we had to go back to normal jobs.
So yeah, we had a lot of conversations. We talked a lot about financially how to make it work, how far we’re willing to take it, and what the implications were for our savings.
I think the other thing that we talked a lot about is that we’ve been planning to start a family and the travels that we wanted to take, which we haven’t talked about….
Doris Nagel
Yes, we’re definitely going to talk about your trip of a lifetime.
Jordy McNamara 16:43
Like Jahna said, we knew that our skills are pretty complimentary, as are our working styles. And we made sure that we were going in with open communication. Of course, you want to start a business with a partner that you’re compatible with.
Doris Nagel
Talk a little bit more about your complementary skills. You’ve talked about your programming and consulting skills, and knowledge of business processes.
But talk about the other skills and roles that you need to run to start and run a business. Are there things you’ve discovered about each other? Maybe things one or both of you are good at that you didn’t realize? Or maybe things that neither of you are good at, so that you’ll have to come up with a way to address that?
Jordy McNamara 17:17
From a really basic skill standpoint – obviously, I’m simplifying it this — you have somebody who does the technical stuff and somebody who does all the other stuff – the business stuff.
And I think that’s where our skills and kind of experience were complimentary. I think a lot of times, people have business ideas, but they don’t have the technical skills to build the software.
So I think we had a built-in advantage, because Jahna does have the experience actually building software. I’m not a programmer. I can’t code or anything like that.
But I’ve spent basically my entire career working with teams who were building software and doing kind of everything around it. So I’ve experienced designing software, rolling it out, testing it, working with engineers to get this software built.
So I think with that experience on my part, and then her expense experience actually coding fit really well together. And that really helped us get started.
But then there’s so much more to starting a business.
Doris Nagel
There’s layers and layers.
I found, for example, that I was really good at technical stuff, and I had a good working knowledge of business processes.
But I didn’t know how to build a website. I didn’t really understand how to do A and B testing for marketing. Or how to design and build an effective social media campaign, or what billing software I needed to use.
There’s just a ton of stuff like that, right?
Jordy McNamara 19:05
Yes, I similarly lack that. So it’s definitely been a journey. I feel like I learn something new every week.
And Jahna can speak from a technical perspective, but I think she probably feels similarly. When you’re building an app from scratch, there’s 2 million things that need to be taken care of.
Jahna McNamara 19:27
I think it’s just hard in general to have one person do everything – say, if you’re founding a company by yourself. So I think it really helped to have two people.
But we also had our separate spaces. Yes, there’s still so much to learn, but at least we had our different expertise in those two different spaces. And we don’t really overlap, so I think that really has helped a lot.
Doris Nagel
They say two heads are better than one. And I believe that, especially if the two heads work well together already.
We alluded to this in passing, but the two of you took a pretty unusual approach to planning and launching your business.
I told Jordy that your trip of a lifetime reminded me of the old movie, “Lost in America,” where the husband and wife take their nest egg and go on this incredible cross-country journey in a van.
And your trip sounds a little like what you did.
Why did you decide to do that? And how did that help you get started with your business?
Jahna McNamara 20:36
I think we need to take a step back for context – the pandemic, and COVID was going on, and we really wanted to get away.
During that time, one of things we were able to spend a couple of months working in Maine. We rented a house on the coast, did a road trip out from Chicago and spent a couple of months working remotely.
And we’ve always been big travel people. But I think that like experience opened our eyes to the idea that we could explore some different travel opportunities, and that we could do that while working. Plus we also had this idea of wanting to start our own business.
So when we decided to really commit to work on Critter, we asked ourselves whether we could we do it while traveling. We looked into a few different options. One of the keys was that we needed a cost-effective way to travel. Obviously, if left our jobs, we wouldn’t have income anymore.
And we really enjoy hiking, and national parks and things like that. And so we kept coming back to this idea of doing van life for a while — basically traveling and living out of a converted camper van.
So we decided we could focus on building out the initial foundation of what would become Critter while driving around the country to different cities and states, getting the best of both worlds.
Doris Nagel
How long was your trip?
Jordy McNamara 22:06
When we started out, we thought we would be gone anywhere from six to 12 months. We didn’t have a set timeline.
It ended up being about six or seven months total, because as Jahna hinted, we did have plans to start a family.
And once Jahna got pregnant, the van was not ideal. We came home not too long after that, but we were on the road for about six or seven months.
Doris Nagel
Talk about your experiences on the road. You’ve got to have a funny or interesting story from that trip. When you travel that way, you, it’s definitely different than staying at a Four Seasons Hotel!
Jordy McNamara 22:58
Honestly, living out of a van is such a funny sort of experience. You learn to really become adaptable. And you learn a lot about what it means to live in a small space with two people.
One funny story I remember happened I think on our second night. So it was really early in the trip. We hadn’t perfected our daily routine and how to really travel like that.
Anyway, we were in the western part of North Dakota. We were parked overnight in a really beautiful area on BLM land. That’s, that’s the Bureau of Land Management, which is public land managed by the government that you can mostly park on and camp overnight for free.
We were right outside of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. We had Lucy with us in the van, and I would walk her one last time every night, and it’d be dark out.
This was just our second night, so we were still getting used to things. That night, I took Lucy out and it was really dark. There was essentially no light pollution, so you really could not see much of anything at all.
So I’m walking Lucy. It’s dark, and I think I maybe had my phone out with the flashlight on. But it’s not really that effective. I’m following this path near where we’re parked in these beautiful rolling hills, but I can’t really see too far in front of me. And I’m just absent -mindedly enjoying the walk because it’s really nice out.
But at some point, I look up and I see these two, two yellowish like ovals and I think to myself, “Hmm, you know, those sort of look like eyes.” But I just shrug it off and keep moving, hoping that it’s nothing. So I keep walking.
Then I look up again, and all of a sudden these two ovals become four ovals. I look around and all the sudden I see eight ovals and I just kept discovering new sets of them. And they were all just staring at me. So I held the flashlight up further in front of me and I just see this this large dark frame of a body and it starts to move!
I kid you not I yelled at the top of my lungs and just started running in the opposite direction, back towards the van. I was holding on to the leash and just sort of freaking out. I tore open the van door and I picked Lucy up and I just slammed it behind me. Because I was genuinely really scared.
Doris Nagel
That’s understandable. Even around my neighborhood, there are fairly good-sized coyotes that prowl around. Mostly they’ll leave you alone because there’s plenty of rabbits and garbage and stuff for them.
I don’t know how big your dog is, but little dogs like mine are potentially in danger. And if you had a whole pack of them approaching you, I’d be nervous even here, much less out in the middle of nowhere.
Jordy McNamara 26:13
I was convinced that this was an angry herd of buffalo.
The best part of the story, though, is that in the morning, I kind of I tentatively poked my head out, just to look around and see if any animals were still around.
And I just started laughing. I see this very peaceful pack of cows. And they’re casually grazing in the area. And there was actually a wire fence between us. I mean, I think I just interrupted their sleep that night. I don’t think I was in any particularly serious danger.
But I learned a lesson: bring a more powerful flashlight in the future. I also bought their spray to carry when I went out at night.
Doris Nagel
That is a pretty funny story.
I’m curious whether you think that the experience of traveling together cross country in this van while planning out how you were going to launch the business was freeing in some way? Do you think how you approached the business was somehow a little different than it would have been than if you were just sitting across each other at a kitchen table?
What do you think?
Jahna McNamara 27:53
Yes, I think it’s fair to say the trip affected the business in both good ways and bad.
I think for starters, the lifestyle was really great. Pretty much every day, we would wake up early. We’d make coffee and go for the hike. Then we’d work from early afternoon into the night.
It was just a really good, relaxed, productive atmosphere for us. And it was pretty conducive to just getting into this good, healthy mindset, I think being out in nature was really good for that, too.
Beyond that, the travel also us to get out and meet people all across the country and do some market research in a way that we really wouldn’t have been able to otherwise.
So I think in all those ways, it was really positive – getting informed on product decisions, getting into a good mindset and all of that.
But at the same time, it definitely wasn’t easy. Traveling while trying to work can be difficult. Living out of a van was an incredible experience — one of those once in a lifetime type of things. I don’t think either of us would ever trade it.
But at the same time, it was difficult at times. It took time to adapt to living with two people in such a small space and making it all work.
Doris Nagel
I’m sure you had to go shopping a lot more often. It’s not like you can like go to the store every two weeks and shove it all into this massive refrigerator, right?
Jahna McNamara 29:30
Exactly. And we had to learn to cook in a small space. We had a little fridge, but it was not the same as being home.
And there’s always something that goes wrong. It could be something big, or just rather small.
Doris Nagel
I’m sure there were inevitable wrong turns or getting lost. My sister and brother-in-law did a van vacation for about 10 days. And they said that one of the things that they didn’t expect was that navigating sometimes with this big vehicle and parking it was quite an adjustment.
Did you find that, too?
Jahna McNamara 30:02
Oh, yes. And logistically, when you’re trying to see a lot of different places, it requires a lot of planning.
Because you not only have to plan to get where you want to go, you also have to find a place to sleep every night, places you can park, a place to fill up your water tank, and just all these other aspects that normally you don’t really have to think about much, right?
So that definitely took a lot of time and energy on our part, and particularly early in the trip. As time went on, we kind of got in a groove, and it got easier. But those things were definitely distractions that made it more difficult to fully dedicate to our work and our business.
So things moved a little slower in the beginning.
Doris Nagel
What have been some of the biggest challenges that you’ve faced so far in getting your business started and set up?
Jordy McNamara 30:52
One of the biggest things — and we kind of touched on this a little bit earlier – is that, once you get into starting a business, you realize just how much goes into building a truly full-scale production-ready application, and more broadly, just how much goes into building the business.
Like we talked about, we both have experience building software, but that was part of a team.
When it’s just you, you realize how much exactly goes into it.
I think one of the biggest things was just realizing how much you don’t know, and how much you need to learn. And also realizing also that there’s no built-in mentorship. There aren’t other people in the company that we go to ask questions.
I’m not a marketer. I’ve really never done anything in marketing, but I have to learn it. So who do I go to? How do I learn that?
There’s resources online, but it’s not the same as you know, when you work at a company, you know, there’s somebody who’s like, career is marketing, and you write in there and talk to them. And so, you know, it just like that was one of I think, just like the biggest, like early obstacles, was just like kind of realizing, you know, you’re on your own and I think doors I think you said that it can feel lonely sometimes. And I think that’s part of it. It is just me and Jahna, but neither of us have marketing or accounting experience, or some of the many other different areas we’ve never done, right?
So that can be a mental challenge just to stay positive when you’re running into all these new areas that you need to tackle and learn.
Doris Nagel
You made an interesting observation. I think there’s maybe a misconception amongst people who are starting out that think, “If I just had a co-founder, it would all be collegial, and I would never feel lonely or confused.” And I just I think that’s a misconception maybe some people have.
Because you can have a co-founder, or you can have two or three co-founders, and you can still feel lonely sometimes. Because you have your own things, you’re responsible for, and decisions that you need to make.
You can’t have a big confab to talk about everything, because nothing will get done, or at least they won’t get done very fast.
Jordy McNamara 33:36
I think that’s spot on. It’s funny, but it’s almost like you’re lonely together.
I think you’re right, though, because there’s certain decisions that each of us has to be able to make on our own. Jahna, for example, is constantly making technical decisions for the long term, like scalability and reliability of our app that I know nothing about. And we can talk about the implications of certain decisions, but at the end of the day, she has to make those decisions.
And if I tried to run every decision I need to make past her, I’d be constantly interrupting her and getting in the way of her progress.
There are a lot of things that we’re highly collaborative about. And there’s a lot of things we do discuss.
But there’s still just so many different things that need to get done that, at the end of the day, sometimes you are on your own to just make a decision — maybe run it by each other to make sure it sounds good. But then, keep going.
Doris Nagel
The journey can still be lonely and discouraging at times when you don’t make the progress that you’d hoped to make, whether you have a co-founder or not. You’re lonely together, as you say. You’re discouraged together.
You referenced resources. Through your journey so far, what have you found to be particularly helpful resources? Where do you turn when you when you need help with things? Are there groups? Are there certain people in your life? Is it mostly Google? What have you found helpful?
Jahna McNamara 35:14
Definitely a lot of Googling. That’s probably true for any entrepreneur when it’s something you don’t know about. So yes, lots of research on Google.
I wouldn’t say any resource particularly stands out, but one of the best things has actually been Reddit. There are a ton of sub Reddits that focus on topics related to entrepreneurship, as well as software engineering, and startups, and even specific topics like email marketing.
Oftentimes, we would post a question there, or search if anyone else has asked it before, and have really learned a lot from people there who are pretty helpful sharing their experience. That’s been a great resource a lot of times.
We also participated in Y Combinator – not their accelerator program itself, but they also have a summer startup school curriculum. You can take it online. It’s a free program that anyone can sign up for. And they cover like general topics related to startups. We thought it was pretty useful just to learn about a wide variety of relevant topics for creating a startup. So that was a good resource as well.
Doris Nagel
If you had an easy button for finding answers, what would it look like? What do you wish was out there that’s not?
Jordy McNamara 36:39
For me, it would be great to have dedicated forums where you can interact with other founders who have gone through things before.
Things like that sort of exist – like Jahna talking about the startup school program through Y Combinator. That was also useful from a networking perspective and just meeting other people that were also founding companies.
There are also Meetups in Chicago and other cities for founders. There are Reddits and sub Reddits for startups and entrepreneurs and things like that, so you can pick their brains. But you don’t always know who you’re talking to or what their experience is.
So I think the biggest thing that would be a nice to have would be a bigger network of people who have done this before. We’re lucky in that we have some family and friends whose brains we can pick on some different types of topics.
But just having a bigger, better network to talk through some of the unique problems we faced would be a nice to have.
Doris Nagel
Interesting.
I started following Critter and I noticed your blog. I follow most of startups and small businesses that are guests on my show because I just love the stories. I love watching businesses, and what happens to them over the years and how they grow and morph and pivot and get acquired or close up shop.
And so I noticed that you’ve been posting on LinkedIn about your journey.
What prompted you to do that? That’s an interesting idea. And I’ve certainly enjoyed reading a couple of the posts that you put out there.
Jordy McNamara 38:36
First, thanks for following along. We appreciate it.
We call what you’re referring to as the Critter Blog. It’s not the most creative name, but it was to the point.
The idea came from what we were talking about just a little while ago. I knew that I didn’t have a lot of experience with marketing or PR or anything like that.
But one of my takeaways in this journey was I need to use the skills I have. And one thing I’ve always really enjoyed doing was writing. In fact, at one point, I had considered pursuing journalism as a career, I was the editor of my high school newspaper. So I’ve always really enjoyed writing, and I’ve had a couple blogs in the past that people enjoyed reading.
So the idea for the blog came down to how can I leverage my writing skills. The original concept was that we were going to try to build a waitlist up until we launched. We were going to publicly announce the launch of the company in June, which now we’re planning for September.
But I thought, let’s build that waitlist of people over the next three months who will be our initial testers. I didn’t have any big goals. It wasn’t like we needed to get 2000 testers or anything.
We just wanted 100 to 200 people to sign up for our waitlist and become early testers of the app. Because, like we talked about earlier, we thought that initial 100 to 200 people might invite their partner or their kids or their parents or whoever helps with their pet care to the app as well.
So we thought we might have our first couple 100 users kind of organically that way. So the question was, how do we build that waitlist?
I said, “Well, okay, I like writing. I think I can do it pretty well. And I think that story of building a startup from scratch can really be really exciting and interesting.”
Doris Nagel
it’s absolutely genius.
What kind of response have you gotten from it? Have people offered suggestions or signed up?
Jordy McNamara 41:14
It’s been good. I mean, it’s not as if we have a distribution list of 1000s of people or anything, but I would say that within a week, we had we had passed the 100-person mark on our waitlist.
Doris Nagel
Wow, congrats.
Jordy McNamara 41:32
Thank you. We had planned to build that slowly over a couple months, but we got over 100 people in a week. And I think part of that was due to posting to the blog and sharing our story.
We post an update every week or so, and we probably have over 100 people who read it every week. It’s a good mix. There’s been really good engagement, and we get really good open rates. Normally, when you send out a blog post, you would maybe expect maybe 10% of people to open it. I don’t know, I know the percentage is not super high.
Doris Nagel
I’m guessing it’s lower than that, given the amount of sheer garbage that there is — pardon my editorial comment.
Jordy McNamara 42:20
I agree with you. But every week, when we send it out to our distribution list, we get about a 75%, open rate of the people have signed up.
Doris Nagel
You’re getting exactly what marketers say that you should look for: you don’t need big numbers. What you need is a small tribe of raving fans. And that sounds like that’s just exactly what you’re building.
Jordy McNamara 42:47
Exactly. And every week it grows just a little bit.
We have plans to explore more ways to market the blog. We haven’t been too aggressive with that so far, but I think we can do more with it, just to publicize it a bit more.
But it’s been fun. And it’s been a way to build up a base of content so that when we do launch, there’s things we can point to and have a really good foundation of content for people who stumble across this later on.
Doris Nagel
Not only that, but you have a record of your story, which is great. I can’t tell you the number of people who have been in business a number of years, and then the years all start to blend together. And so you’ve actually made a great record for yourself. And who knows, maybe it’ll be great fodder for a book someday.
Jordy McNamara 43:47
I actually hadn’t considered the aspect of just like keeping a record of the business. Probably a lot of people don’t do that, and I think that’s an interesting benefit I hadn’t considered.
Doris Nagel
How have you been funding all this? And what are your plans for funding for the future?
Jahna McNamara 44:14
Right now, it’s 100% from our savings. We both quit our jobs last year and had saved up money intentionally do this. But we are thinking about pursuing a friends and family round of fundraising as initial rate way to raise some capital from within our network.
But I think our focus is trying to bootstrap our way to profitability as quickly as we can, so that we can be self-sufficient.
Doris Nagel
And does that look likely based on your projections so far? You don’t need to get into the nitty gritty of your numbers. But one common theme among entrepreneurs that I’ve interviewed on the show is that it takes longer, and cost more than you think it’s going to take to get started.
Jordy McNamara 45:03
I do think that’s fair. For us, it’s hard to project because we haven’t launched our app yet to really see how it goes. We don’t yet have like a number of users or growth rates that we could look at and say, “This is good.”
I do think sometimes that companies launch an app, and they just kind of hope that people will find it and like it, and obviously that doesn’t work. You have to get the word out, and you have to get users and like we said earlier, refine our revenue model.
like everything’s going to be free in the beginning. The way we look at it, we really need to be able to fund the next two years to give ourselves enough runway. We need to build up a big enough user base and get to the point where we have software for the pet professionals that they’ll pay for.
We think that’ll take at least another year, if not — to your point – maybe even be longer. We don’t know what we don’t know at this point. I think it’s hard to say whether the business is going to quickly get to profitability.
But that’s our goal. I think the biggest thing is just next year focusing on experimenting with different ways to make money.
That might be partnering with different brands, maybe selling pet products through the app. And we’ll be experimenting with advertising and premium features — just building a bridge until we get to the point in our future. Because I think there are stronger opportunities with that software for the pet professionals.
So we’ll see what happens. I think we have a lot of mixed feelings about fundraising from like venture capital. I mean,
Doris Nagel
I saw your blog post on that topic, and I agree with you. It’s a terrible dilemma, right? Yes, you get mentorship if you do it right and you’re lucky.
But then you’re not the only one driving the bus anymore. And there’s a certain amount of freedom and fun that comes with being able to just follow the path wherever you think it should go, right?
Jordy McNamara 47:27
Exactly. And I think with everything going on the economy right now, it’s not even a particularly good time to pursue fundraising like that That’s why I think we may start a friends and family round. That may be enough to bridge that gap for the next couple of years. And hopefully, that gets us to the point where we can really implement a true business model.
Doris Nagel
Share a little of your vision with my listeners. What will Critter look like three years from now, if you’re successful?
Jordy McNamara 48:10
In three years, we’d like to have built out a really great suite of tools, both for pet owners, but also for professionals. I’d imagine we have everyone from your dog walkers, to vets, groomers, pet daycares, shelters, maybe even breeders or boarding places – really, anyone who works with pets– using our app and having it be that central place where they can interact with their customers.
All of them would consider Critter to be a really indispensable tool — something that really like helps them in their day-to-day life, as a pet owner, and as a pet business. That’s our goal.
Jahna McNamara 48:57
Yes. We view critter as a platform for pet care. We want it to be a resource for people day one.
It’s about tracking activities, making sure that the dog gets walked, the medicine is given, foods given– all of that, and also that anybody taking care of your pet can really understand what they need to do and when they need to do it, how they’re supposed to do it. That’s really kind of the day one functionality.
But we envision a world where Critter is a resource for training, it’s a resource for learning from other pet owners, with forums where you could ask questions and get answers.
And also, a way to organize every kind of every just aspect of your pet’s life. And to be able to interact with all the different people you work with.
Today, for example, we have an account that we log into with our groomer. We have an account that we log into with our vet. We had a dog trainer who sent us via email with links and videos and instructions, and I still reference it.
But wouldn’t it be great if I had one place where I could keep all of this information and interact with all these people so that my pet’s life was organized.
And I think if we’re successful, that’s what Critter will be.
But there’s a long way to go before we get there. And we recognize that.
Doris Nagel
Based on your journey so far, what advice would you offer to other people who are thinking about starting a business?
Jordy McNamara 50:43
That’s a good question. And Jahna, we should both chime in on this one.
I think the one piece of advice that jumps out at me is to have a plan but be responsive. Because things will change. I personally feel it’s really important to map out the different steps that you expect to take and have a high-level timeline for when you think things will get done by.
I think you should also have a budget and you should track finances carefully.
But what I’ve really learned in this first year as we we’ve geared up and started building out Critter is that things change. You learn new things; you realize that something’s going to take a lot longer than you expected. You have to get insights from user interviews.
And sometimes you realize, “Okay, this thing I was thinking I was going to do, I don’t think it’s actually going to be very valuable.”
So you have to be nimble, and you can’t get too married to your original plan.
It’s important to have a plan, but I think you also need to be really responsive and trust your gut. Trust your gut when it when it tells you to change your plans or reprioritize things.
Jahna McNamara 52:12
For me, one of the biggest pieces of advice I have is to acknowledge and really accept the mistakes that you make, and just learn from them. Because they’re going to happen, and you’re not going to going to make the perfect decision at every step of the way. It’s just not realistic, you don’t know everything.
But it’s important not to dwell on it and just accept that this is just part of the journey. All of it is productive, and you’re always learning.
And in a similar vein, accept that there’s going to be a lot of things you just don’t know, no matter how prepared, you are, or how much an expert you are. There’s a lot you’re going to do wrong and a lot you don’t know. So I think it’s important to just accept that and not look at it as a negative. I know I can be hard on myself about some of that.
Doris Nagel
I’m raising my hand on that one — for sure that resonates with me.
Jahna McNamara 53:07
I think a lot of people see mistakes as wasted time and wish that they had done something differently. But in reality, maybe you would never have learned what you learned along the way.
All of it takes you on the journey to where you are. And I think it’s not a negative. It’s so productive. You’re learning these lessons.
I think that’s what’s important. And just being willing to learn and seeing it as a positive. Just work on being able to rebound from it, keep moving forward, and don’t dwell on it too much. Don’t be too much of a perfectionist about it.
Doris Nagel
I think those are two great pieces of advice.
If people are interested in learning more about Critter or becoming a subscriber to the app, or maybe just chatting with the two of you about your journey, what’s the best way for them to connect with you or find more information?
Jordy McNamara
To find out more about Critter, the starting point would be our website, www.critter.pet. And the website for the Critter blog that we talked about is critter blog.substack.com.
You can also find us individually on LinkedIn, either at our Critter company page or our own personal pages. We do tend to post at least weekly updates there.
We’re pretty open to connecting. My email is jordy@critter.pet, and Jahna’s is jahna@critter.pet. So feel free to reach out.
And then of course look for the Critter app, which is available in the app stores.
Doris Nagel
Thanks so much for being with me this week. I look forward to seeing the launch of Critter and watching your company grow. It’s been fun hearing some of the challenges and how you approached it. So I appreciate you sharing that.
Thanks so much for being on the show this week.
Jordy McNamara
Thank you for having us. It was it was a lot of fun. Yeah,
Jahna McNamara
Yes, thanks so much. We really appreciate it.
Doris Nagel
Before we wrap up, I want to put in a plug of my own.
Check out my website, thesavvyentrepreneur.org, and also my dedicated YouTube channel called The Savvy Entrepreneur Radio Show. In both places, you can listen to and even download recent past episodes of the show.
I encourage you to listen to some of the past shows.
I have been blessed with some amazing, amazing guests. And I promise you if you listen to some of the shows, you’ll get some valuable tips. So like my channel, comment on it, follow it and support the work of lots of your fellow entrepreneurs.
Thanks again to all my listeners. You’re the reason I do this. My door’s always open. I’d love to hear from you with comments, questions, a great guest — send them my way to dnagel@thesavvyentrepreneur.org.
Be sure to join me again next week, but until then, I’m Doris Nagel, wishing you happy entrepreneuring!
Leave a Reply