Client: Gudog (formerly HouseMyDog)
Sector: B2C marketplace
When: Started 2018
Services: Platform & App development / CTO-As-A-Service
Gudog is the 2nd largest pet services platform in Europe with operations in Ireland, UK, France, Spain, Germany and Switzerland. In 2018 we teamed with the start-up to position them for international expansion. We did this by re-architecting and building an automated and intelligent platform and optimising the performance of their team.
HouseMyDog was established by two brothers, James and Timothy McElroy as a marketplace where dog owners could find dog sitters for their pets instead of using kennels. In 2017, HouseMyDog received Venture Capital funding to rebuild their prototype technology platform to enable them to scale their business beyond Ireland.
Threadable were recommended to the siblings by their investors as a partner with a track record of building enterprise scale solutions. Their investors believed we were the right choice to enable HouseMyDog to grow their business internationally.
We kicked off the engagement with a series of workshops. These workshops created space for everyone to work together and explore, analyse and challenge many aspects of the business. By analysing multiple data sources we grew our understanding of how customers used the platform. The key areas we focused on were:
The existing business model and dog owner & service provider acquisition and on-boarding.
The negative effect of costly and inefficient manual interventions with the existing systems.
How to generate new ideas on how to automate, streamline and improve the experience for owners and service providers.
The potential for integrating additional, innovative services into the platform for pet owners and service providers.
Threadable delivered an automated and intelligent platform to allow ths business to scale. This included:
We also helped to create a team within the business that was ready for the challenge of scaling the business internationally. This included:
Every aspect of the service provider process for joining the platform is now fully automated. This includes verifications, identity checks, document upload and OCR checks. This put an end to inefficient manual interventions which were slowing the ability of the business to grow and delivering a poor customer experience.
Dog Owner and Service Provider behaviours in the system are tracked and automatically fed into comprehensive algorithms to enable HMD to identify supply and demand gaps across the marketplace and drive subsequent SEO activities to automatically close the gap and grow the business.
Within 1 month of launching the new platform, House My Dog bookings began to increase. Within 6 months they had increased 10-fold.
The time to complete a booking reduced by 80% and the number of booking requests that required manual intervention fell 98%.
The business continues to scale and grow with minimal increases to headcount as the business blazed a trail of acquisitions across Europe.
reduction in bookings requiring manual intervention
reduction in the time to complete a booking
increase in booking within 6 months
