Starting Wag As An On-Demand Dog Walking Marketplace With Jason Meltzer | EM Group Chat #195

Welcome back to Everything Marketplaces, where we talk about founders and leaders from some of today's top marketplaces. So this is episode 195, which is really great group chat we just had with Jason Meltzer. Jason was previously the co-founder and CEO of Wag!, which is a marketplace for on-demand dog walking, sitting, and related pet care services. Wag! has notably raised over $300 million in venture capital and scaled to become one of the largest pet care marketplaces. So this is a great chat with Jason. We're going back to the founding story and first steps of starting Wag!, how they solved the cold start problem. We got to learn how Wag! evolved as it scaled. Jason shared some of the biggest challenges with it as an on-demand and hyperlocal marketplace, what it was like raising over $300 million in capital from SoftBank and how that changed the trajectory of the business. Share some of his key learnings from Wag looking back now. We also had a great group Q&A. I really enjoyed this conversation. You're going to find it a great watch to the end. So Jason, Wag is a marketplace that many of us know of and is often being referenced in the community when we're discussing hyperlocal marketplaces. So I'm really excited to have you join us here today. And I want to start off by saying huge thanks for taking the time to do so in advance. We have a lot that we're going to dive into with all of your experience starting and scaling Wag. But before we do, I thought it'd be great if you can start off by briefly sharing your background for those here that might not know you.

Pleasure to be here. Great work with everything marketplaces. I recognize some of the names tuning in, but I was born and raised in Los Angeles and always been entrepreneurial, doing odds and ends. Graduated with a degree in business and psychology, worked in some Fortune 500 companies doing software sales, did a little stint early in a startup as a BD. That company failed. And then I found myself sort of like in a quarter-life crisis, was down in Santa Monica, saw people walking dogs all day long. I was like, who are these people? You know, I used to walk dogs as a kid for my neighbors when I was little. I was like, is this a job that adults do? And Sure enough, I found out it was and it could be a very lucrative, lucrative one. I launched my first company called Surf Dog LA based in Santa Monica, had tremendous success, caught the attention of some folks who came down from Silicon Valley who had sort of the initial concept behind Wag, but looking for a leader to step in and take the reins. I came in as the first CEO, co-founder, My parents put in the first angel check, you know, and we got started in Los Angeles and, you know, had the chicken and egg problem and all the marketplace problems. I think our edge in the early days really was like me having already been a service provider in the category, in the market that we were going after, gave us a huge edge in the beginning. I was the first CEO, held that title for almost a year. We raised some capital, things changed. I was with the company through 2019. We raised close to half a billion dollars in venture capital. We went IPO in 2022 on NASDAQ. Since then, I've advised, you know, marketplace startups and other pet startups with various exits, one being BasePaws, which is a cat DNA company that was acquired by Zodus. And I really, really love giving back to founders, helping marketplaces, helping early-stage companies, uh, participating in the community. And right now, currently working on a new startup that is kind of real estate-backed. It's called Live Work Pet, and we're building the first pet-centric community for top pet parents where all of the, you know, the services and experiences that we've come to expect as pet parents are actually provided through the building And so really excited to eventually maybe share more on that. But that's, that's me. Sorry if it took too long to share, but that's where I'm at.

And that's a really great background. So thanks for sharing with us. And it sounds like quite the, you know, founder journey with Wag. So a lot that we're going to get into here. But I did want to kind of go back to the, you know, the very beginning for Wag. And as you kind of mentioned, you know, the cold start problem that we all face, you know, when starting a marketplace, you know. So how did you initially solve for this with Wag?

It's always with marketplaces. It's funny. It's usually like the opposite advice for any other startup, right? You can't think about scale day zero. You have to think about guerrilla tactics and, you know, single-player mode as a founder even, right? So again, we had a bit of an advantage because I had already run a successful pet care market business and software service in the area. So when we launched LA, I already knew like how to market on Facebook and like I already knew how to sort of generate demand. It was very guerrilla tactics, right? We would find what we called like honeypots. Like we would go to Runyon Canyon with like a person, one of our co-founders dressed in a dog suit and like give out free dog walks, have them sign up. This is before the app was even ready to like collect signups. We'd let people sign up a pad of paper and we'd say, hey, we'll email you when we're ready to launch and we'll give you a free dog walk to try the system. We actually got our, one of our first like real investors that, that day doing that from just being present in LA. So like we sort of had an edge on attracting our initial demand where for us, the more trickier part for me in particular, like I had hired dog walkers, but most of them through like referral, word of mouth. So the supply side, we needed to unlock it and unlock it quickly. And, you know, We got fortunate that we discovered like Craigslist ads really worked well for us for quite some time. Actually, they were cheap, they were effective. We basically, you know, really took a lot of what Uber was doing at that time. They were, they were marketing on Craigslist to find supply side. We tried like job boards. We were also fortunate enough to just to find that when we posted ads for consumer demand, We also were attracting supply. A lot of supply was interested, which is, which was unique for us because we sort of thought that our supply side was a certain persona. And what we realized is that taking care of pets is like, you know, extremely wealthy people think of it as almost like a side hustle that they would want to do. So the ads that we were targeting towards, you know, people who would pay for these services were interested in Participating. So, um, again, we kind of got lucky, lightning in a bottle. But, um, that was our cold start issue. We really didn't have much of one. Uh, so hope that helps somebody out there. Like, make sure you really narrow down your market, focus on what you already have experience in, right? And do the opposite. Like, again, we were literally there in a, in a costume. Signing people up on paper, but that converted, right? When the second we launched, we called and emailed all those people. And that's how on day 1 when we launched the product, which was like December 26th or something like that, we had customers day 1.

Those are some of my really great examples of, you know, doing the things that don't scale in the beginning and that kind of guerrilla tactics as you mentioned, right? So, and you did also, you know, mention as far as like on the supply side, like that kind of being, you know, like the hard side to kind of solve for. And I can imagine there was a lot of maybe like education kind of going into it. Like, so teaching people how to be like a, you know, a dog walker and be successful through your marketplace. So could you maybe share a little bit more about that? Like the role that kind of like initial education played with on the supply side?

Absolutely. And just sort of point of reference, I would say that was the harder part for me as CEO founder at the time. But as we scaled, obviously demand side became much more challenging. We could talk about that later. But, you know, how the process was like, again, it was just learn by doing and not taking any breaks. For the first year, we were in the office 365, 7, like, you know, every day, Monday through Friday. Didn't take a single day off doing this. We were manually onboarding these dog walkers, interviewing them face to face, having them in our office/home in West Hollywood, you know, recording their, um, you know, running back checks, background checks manually. You know, it was a constant iteration. And eventually, you know, as we started making things work in Los Angeles, we decided we wanted to scale to the next market. We had a playbook that was working and it kept evolving. And, you know, I think there's so many more tools. I did a little bit of research before this call, just like, hey, like, what are some of the most up-to-date marketplace trends of 2025, right? And I was kind of like, Really excited to learn that there's a lot more tools now, like AI for the liquidity. There's, you know, like background checks and, you know, easier ways to get identity verification insurance, things like Persona, StellarFi, CoverDash. Like this stuff was not around when, when we launched. So it was an extremely manual process for a long time. But Eventually, we really made it like a machine where we could, you know, we would get like hundreds of thousands of applications. And because there's so much trust involved specifically in our marketplace, like we really, you know, we used to pride ourselves that it was harder to get to be a dog walker on Wag than to get into Harvard based on applications.

Yeah.

And on the note is, you know, trust as well, I guess, you know, I can imagine that, you know, trust was something that you kind of had to build as far as like with, you know, pet owners. So that way they would trust, you know, Wag. So could you maybe share about like how you initially kind of built, you know, trust, were able to kind of scale that up on the demand side?

Trust is like kind of falls into brand and falls into— it touches consumer experience, customer service, right? We talked about having insurance, like we made sure that every walk was insured and bonded. We used, you know, through the design element, we overinvested in customer service from day one, you know, and that became one of our biggest departments at a certain point. For better or for worse, but you know it was just willing to like if something were to happen in LA, for example, a dog wouldn't go back in its crate. A dog was loose in MacArthur Park. Like literally myself and other the executive team would run down there, and you know I had a background in pet care, so I'd be the one kind of leading that. But you know putting dogs back in their it just in their crates was like. Maybe for another time I could share a really interesting story, but like it was that level of hands-on experience. You know, you called Wag, you got somebody on the phone. That's how you build trust. And then through brand awareness with the partners that you pick, right? How you present yourself to the media. It all wraps up and helps to build that trust. And all of the marketplaces on here, I mean, Wag was maybe like the highest necessity for trust. Because we're dealing with like your kids and your home. But trust is really important for all the marketplaces to gain users. And convenience was, is like the second one, right? Trust and convenience is really the main drivers from my experience in marketplaces.

No, definitely. And as you mentioned too, it, it also kind of varies based on the nature of the marketplace as well, right?

So, yes.

And then you mentioned as far as, you know, kind of scaling in a new market. So, and, you know, when you initially kind of launched in LA, you know, when did you start to like look at new markets and what was that kind of like expansion playbook like?

It was actually, I mean, for me personally, it was really, really exciting because I'd always, prior to Wag, I was thinking about, I found out we were pregnant with my first daughter and I had just read Tim Ferriss's 4-Hour Workweek and lifestyle businesses and that my lifestyle was changing. So right before Wag happened, I was looking at sort of franchising Surf Dog and I was thinking like Fight Club, just go to a market, find a manager and launch. With Wag, it was like, it was really exciting. I mean, even though, you know, my wife was like 8 months pregnant, I'm traveling all over the country. But it was really awesome to see, like, when we landed in San Francisco, you know, I would talk to some of these customers and they were like, you know, my husband's a busy venture capitalist. He's always busy and traveling. And, you know, we just had a baby and I would've had to like get rid of the dog if it wasn't for Wag, where I can so conveniently just like contact and bring here and take the dog out. It's like having those one-on-one conversations was really exciting and scaling. And again, I mean, we were very strategic. We knew we had a playbook and we had a market share in Los Angeles. We knew San Francisco was not only a big dog market, but if we wanted to raise a real seed round and not just collect money from like, you know, my parents and people we meet at the dog park, you know, we needed to get the attention of Silicon Valley and the San Francisco crowd. And So it was very targeted. We really pissed off our landlord because we'd have like hundreds of dog walkers waiting outside our apartment to come in and interview. But, you know, again, it was just like, it was just all hands go for the first year. No one took any breaks.

Definitely. And I think that's going to be relatable to many here. So, and, you know, as far as like with that, you know, that playbook, I like ended up being on— did you use like a GM kind of model in markets to launch them, like similar to like an Uber, or how did you actually like launch new markets?

Yeah, we did. I mean, so for the first one, again, we would actually— the executive team, me and my, and my co-founder Josh, we actually, uh, moved, got a, you know, a 1-month rental and manually did everything we did back in Los Angeles but at higher speeds and higher rates. And, you know, we were like, okay, we have like 30 days to do this, let's see what we can do. Uh, part of that though was getting a GM. So we did have a GM, uh, in San Francisco. These were not necessarily like General manager types for a regular, like you know this was like a restaurant GM. This was someone who was like young and hungry, but also had experience like working with pets. So a lot of them like kind of came in through applications as a dog walker, and in because we were manually reviewing all of them at this time, we would be like, oh wow, this person has like she worked at like a doggy daycare or she worked at the SPCA. Like maybe there's more there. So we would say, hey, you know. We're looking for a city manager, someone who's really good with pets and understands the issues, how to talk to pet parents, and that's how we would install them. So typically, like younger, you know, more hungry GMs is what worked for us. And then when we expanded to New York as our 3rd city, because it was like, okay, now we had a playbook, now we had the attention, now we had some funding. Like, if you can't win New York, then like what makes you think you could win, you know, the ultimate market share? And so when we launched there, I got super lucky because I, again, I flew out, you know, we got like our first 100 dog walkers on the platform. Uh, you know, we started doing some of the early ads and a friend of mine from ASU who was a pharmacist said, dude, why didn't you ask me about this role? I said, 'cause you're a pharmacist. Like, you know, like you've like did a, you have a career, you know, this is a startup. He's like, yeah, but you know, I love dogs and I missed the boat on Warby Parker. Put me in, coach. And so he and I got like a, literally a desk the size of, you know, a twin bed and launched the New York office. And again, same issues of like hundreds and hundreds of dog walkers lining up outside the office of the green door.

Those are really cool stories to hear about. And we could probably have like an entire kind of conversation, you know, if you were to kind of COVID each stage of the company. But, you know, could you briefly kind of walk us through, you know, how Wag evolved maybe as it scaled and what some of the pivotal moments for growth were?

It was like a market-by-market strategy. And like every time we did a market, we were looking at like, how quickly can we get to these dog walkers? How quickly are we seeing liquidity? Are dogs getting matched? How much revenue are we generating per market? Right? And then once we realized we could really launch big markets at a time, we thought, okay, can we start launching 2 markets of like tier 2 markets? Could we do like an Austin and a San Antonio at one time? Right? Once we were effective with that, we, you know, we were still kind of doing the same process of like hiring a manager, flying someone out there to sort of facilitate and teach. And eventually we got the crazy idea. This is after we, you know, I would say when we got to like our B or C round, right? We already established we could grow and now we're looking at like super scale, right? We're like, can we launch markets without anybody? Like, can we just virtually Launch markets, virtually onboard dog walkers, virtually verify everything we did, and and we were successful at that too. And then all of a sudden, like wow, like we could literally just kind of launch a market whenever we want to. Obviously, demand became again, as I talked about earlier, right? Demand ended up becoming the the crux of our existence. You know, as most marketplaces find. Got very expensive when you try to scale aggressively. We, you know, we did have disintermediation. There was leaky buckets. The industry was, you know, social media. It was really getting busy then too. Now it's probably even harder. So it's not an easier game by any means now than it was then. But, you know, those were the challenges we faced. And again, I hope that answered your question if you want to dive a little deeper on that. But that was You know, in a nutshell, our story.

Yeah. No, that's really helpful. Sounds like lots of challenges as you, as you scaled. You mentioned one that I, that I did want to, you know, kind of double-click on a little bit, which is disintermediation. Right. And so, you know, I can imagine that this is something that you kind of faced with, you know, booking a dog walker once and then kind of like repeat booking, kind of going off platform once they kind of establish that relationship, you know. So like, I guess how did you kind of, you know, initially solve for this and, you know, try to prevent it as you scaled as well?

One of the benefits of Wag! is that, again, we were able to establish trust Trust is crucial for this business, but then that all are you know that also became our Achilles heel because it was how do we establish trust with the business and not necessarily with the service provider, right? And so if somebody was using a lot of on-demand dog walks, then that was less of an issue. Like you don't typically like fall in love with your Uber driver or your DoorDash person, right? But the people that had this recurring model where they saw the same person every day, which was very common. Very common to my previous business, but the way I handled it sort of on a mom-and-pop was like I established a connection, me personally, I onboarded them, kept track of everything, and then sort of shuffled it out to my staff, you know? So I was still POC. At WagScale, that was nearly impossible. We did a lot of emails that were like, I think we had like a whole email team that had my signature on it as CEO or co-founder, chief dog officer. You know, sending like hundreds of thousands of emails a month. You know, we talked a lot about the insurance. We talked a lot about the, you know, the customer service, right? Like, that is how we did our best to confront this. In those days, there wasn't a lot of great software or any sort of AI tools to be like, oh, this person was, you know, booking 3 times a week. Now they're down to 1 a week. Now they're down to 0 times a week. here was their dog walker. They have other clients maybe doing this. Like, I'm assuming that kind of software exists or someone's building it, but like at the time we didn't have that. So it was a huge problem, you know, it was a huge problem. I'm hoping it's less of a problem now, but that was really, it was a real issue for us because we spent so much money acquiring these customers, you know, And then it's really easy for the dog walker just to leave a card behind or, you know, discount their services. We tried using loyalty programs, credit card, you know, like memberships. I think we tried every trick in the book available to us, and it was a really hard thing to quantify and therefore a really hard problem to solve.

It's definitely something that we're always discussing here in the community that we're all facing as marketplaces to one degree or another, right?

Like I said, it does seem like there should be a solution to this. I mean, I'm not the tech genius here, but like, that would be my initial sign is like tracking usage of like these nodes. Look at each of your service providers as a node, and that node should be getting stronger with time and not weaker with time. And if this is a weak node, then that's a problem. And, you know, we're going to message all of their previous customers, give them maybe a $100 gift card to come back. Like, if I was a at the helm, like I would be hyper aggressive on solving this problem. It's worth it.

Yeah, I think it's kind of worth noting in the story is, you know, raising over, I believe over $300 million in capital from SoftBank, you know, so could you share a little bit more about, you know, what led to that and how that potentially changed the trajectory for Wag?

Yeah, that's a tricky thing to unravel here, but, you know, and with all honesty, like my partners led most of that Execution, you know they had to fly to Japan. They had a meeting with Masa-san, just like all the stories you hear. You get like you know two minutes, you know for like three hundred million dollars. Obviously, that's a bit of a cliché, but it's kind of like there's tons of diligence afterwards, right? Listen, they they have the power to really connect you into. You know, a global opportunity. I personally think that Wag wasn't quite ready for a global opportunity at that time. I think we should have proven that we could scale one international market on our own, just like we had done with all of our previous markets in the US before sort of going in that direction. I'm not sure how much more I can share on that whole topic, to be honest.

Yeah. Another note, the nature of competition, right? And you briefly kind of mentioned it before. But, you know, with others kind of in the market. So could you maybe share a little bit more about, you know, what it was like kind of competing in some of the markets and, you know, maybe what some of your biggest learnings are around the competitive nature of marketplaces?

Absolutely. I mean, again, I think we were somewhat fortunate. There was other pet care sort of marketplaces at the time. The thing is, is like we took the niche that they weren't focused on, which again is a great, you know, focus for us marketplaces, find the sort of The niche that's there that no one's really, really executing on. And for us, it was dog walking. They were both well known for boarding and sitting type solutions, which are higher sort of ticket prices but lower volume. We were like, let's go after the volume piece, which is the dog walking, which could happen. I had clients, you know, before Wag! that were using me 2 or 3 times a day, 7 days a week. So the demand is certainly there. And in terms of just like, you know, ousting your competition, I mean, I do think it's— we were lucky in a few different ways. We understood home access was a crucial part of our business, right? Like, it's sort of like finding the weakest link in your chain, assuming you're at scale, and solving it really, really well on the earlier side of things before you even launch is a great way to sort of really give yourself an edge. Right? Because without that home app, there's actually— people don't know this— there was another dog walking platform that literally launched like a month after we did. But there's another Santa Monica dog walking company. They had raised like millions of dollars pre-launch, right? They had like IDEO design their app, which we, you know, they spent like millions. We spent like $10,000 on ours. Well, way more well-funded, had the billboards way before us, and they went under really, really fast because they didn't understand home access. They didn't understand like sort of the take rate that would work with dog walkers. They didn't understand what branding meant, right? And how like trust and convenience and like the human-dog bond was just kind of missing, right, from that experience, I think. Um, but yeah, I mean, but honestly I think the other edge is just like, focus on your own business, right? Don't worry about what the other guys are doing so much. Be aware, right? But don't necessarily change your strategy and tactics because they're doing something different. Wait to see if what they're doing is actually interfering with what you're doing. Then be like, okay, how do we play this? Do we want to copy them? Maybe. Or do we want to differentiate ourselves? If your enemy is coming and it's a race to the end and they go right, You typically want to go left and find your own path that way. So hope that helps.

No, I'm glad you mentioned that. As far as the tip here, that's going to be super helpful and always good to reiterate as well. So, so we've covered quite a bit with, you know, your experience starting and scaling Wag. But, you know, if you were to like look back now, you know, what would I guess be some of like your kind of key learnings from Wag?

As I think the 3 pillars for a successful marketplace, and again, I'm sure you all know this already, but I think it really does come down to convenience. Trust and price, right? If you can win on all three of those, you're gonna have a very successful growth chart, right? You're gonna have a ton of problems like facilitating all those three things and making sure that that continues as you grow. But the demand for your product and service will be there. I think other key learnings are really important that you have a great team around you, like ones who can. Help build everybody. You're better, you're stronger together than you are apart. Listening to your— really listening to your customers and really listening to like customer service. The people who are getting the most contact with your users are more valuable than your CMO to have conversations with.

It's gonna be a helpful learning. So hopefully we don't have any CMOs on the call, right?

So, hey, I love my CMO. I'm just saying like, You know, the CMO knows what they're doing. They're like, they should be talking to those customer services people even more than the CEO is, right? But the CEO really should be talking to them because they understand what's happening on the ground directly with your customer base and probably your supply side. What is— why are there so many tickets coming in for this? Why don't we— we can solve for this with more bodies. We could solve this with more tech. We could solve this with a repositioning of the business model. Like that is, that is the most important tentacle of your operation, of your octopus.

Definitely. And I want to make sure we could spend some time, you know, have a chance to learn a little bit more about, you know, what you're building with Live Work Pet now before we kind of get to the group Q&A. So could you maybe share more about, you know, what you're building now?

Yeah. So I mean, this was not something I was cooking up for a very long time, honestly. I was at a private dog park in LA. I was invited by an investor and was chatting with folks, and what I kept hearing from the people who were attending was like, I feel like I live here. I feel like this is where my dating pool is. This is where I work now. Like, I come here as my third space with my dog. And I already knew people would spend gobs of money on their dog, love their dog to pieces. Like, the connection was obviously there. But I was like, why, why do people have to travel to a dog park? Why do people have to like travel to a groomer or to a boarding and sitting? That's always the hardest part of any, I think, dog ownership experience, which is why all these Global on those services have sprung up. And I was like, well, if I just bought a building and I provided all those services out of the building itself, it had its own dog park, its own boarding and sitting. It provided dog walking and sitting and grooming and training packaged into the rent. Like, whoa, what a community that would be.

Yeah, that's really cool to hear about. Sounds like a cool opportunity and a different type of undertaking, being more kind of vertically integrated there.

Yeah, I would say it's like the smallest marketplace ever.

You'll probably get to get a few questions here with other founders building in the pet care space during the group Q&A. So, so we're going to jump into the group Q&A on that note here in a second. But, you know, right before we do, do you have a few kind of tips maybe for founders looking to start a marketplace today?

A few tips? Yes, it's going to suck and you have to embrace that suck and it's going to suck a little bit less almost every day, hopefully. So expect the, the suck to be super high when you first start because it's, it's the most challenging business model, I think. You know, all the hardware people talk about, oh, it's hardware, it's so hard. But like, there's a lot of, like, there's a lot of, um, how-tos when it comes to hardware for the most part. But these marketplaces, the problems we're solving, there's a lot less information out there and a lot less You know, you can't just like GitHub how to solve demand for supply and demand, you know, issues on these niche marketplaces. So, you know, just have a really good team, be very passionate about what you're doing, talk to your customers, talk to your team, don't surround yourself in a bubble, you know, and like really, really, really understand. I think, I think a lot of marketplaces should just be like SaaS products and a lot of SaaS products would probably be better as marketplaces. So, you know, like, understand, like, would you be the number one user of your product? And if you wouldn't be, then like, maybe you need to— what would— what in the product would you be the number one user of?

It's gonna be a helpful tip. So a few good takes in there as well. So we're commonly discussing like, you know, SaaS versus kind of marketplace and, you know, taking that approach as well, right?

You have to know your product market fit, right? And there's some great articles. I posted one recently on my LinkedIn. All about product market fit. I found this great chart that like, you know, it doesn't, it doesn't give you the answers, but it certainly gives you like the right understanding of where you are in that journey, right? Super crucial in, in marketplaces. But yeah, just, it's really tough. It's a tough business, Grant.

Yep, definitely got, got a lot of head nods for that. So, so cool. So we're gonna get to the group Q&A. Hey, Anna, do you want to come on? I saw you raise your hand.

Where did you start when it came to building out your trust and safety program? Maybe like the first step, how— I don't know how to start building, basically. A trust and safety— yeah, that's, you know, when it came to trust and safety, it initially started with like, let's have insurance and, you know, insured and bonded. And let's make sure that we communicate that in our press releases. in our product, in, in sort of the initial swipes, like every walk is secured and bonded. That was like the initial, like, trust and safety at that time. Then we started getting all of these inbound customer concerns, complaints, issues, problems across the board, right? And so then we realized, okay, like when these issues come up, we needed to like, it was such a draw on our existing customer service unit. That we—I came up with this idea of like separating a team and calling it the Eldart team, which was like really short for like lost dog and rescue team. But that really was like—it was like our best customer service agents who were the best at solving trust and safety issues. You know, and things would get elevated to like a common you know customer service request would just be like, "Hey, my dog walker's late." Okay, well that's like a pretty minor thing. You could kick that down like the most junior of officers and just be like. Oh, I'll check on where they're at and get back to you, right? And then there's like super high-risk customer service issues that would get tiered and sent to a different sort of line, you know. So like trust and safety is something— it's a square one start— starting point, Anna. I wouldn't get too obsessed over it, right? Because once you're up and running, it's gonna be very clear what problems you're really gonna be solving. And they're going to want to build solutions around that.

That's a great question. Hey, Jason, I actually had a question that a founder sent me in advance and wanted to ask, and it was around kind of standardizing the marketplace experience on Wag. And they mentioned as far as like, like introducing the lockbox. So are there any specific things like that maybe that kind of helped like standardize the marketplace experience for people using Wag?

You know, we looked at Zazzle, right? I believe they're world famous for their customer service or like Nordstrom's, right? Costco, you can return any item for a year. You know, we knew that customer service was, you know, it was obvious day one was gonna be like a big part of our, you know, corporate structure. So we, we didn't, we didn't cheap out when it came to that, right? I mean, we really spent the money and if issues came up, like we would, you know, pay for whatever it needed to be paid to solve the problem as quickly and as beneficial to our customers as possible. And, and that established trust, that established safety as well, understanding things will happen. And it's like not always the company's fault, it's not always the dog walker's fault, sometimes it's even like the customer's fault. Things happen, right? And you just got to be there to support it. So, um, other— maybe more important to your question about standardization, I would say that mostly surrendered— centered around our dog walker onboarding process and the screening that we did there, right? Um, and, and we really took that as far as we can go with the background checks. You know, we were, we were looking at this other solution that did not just background but like a social media— legally, you're not like, okay, this person's like not harming animals in any of their social media posts, right? Stuff like that we were able to deploy. And again, but there's just so many more solutions out there today to convey to your customers that you have trust and safety and standards that they should believe.

Definitely lots of solutions, kind of ways marketplaces are doing it now. But yeah, that's, that's going to be super helpful. So I appreciate it. Hey, Namrata, do you want to come on? Saw you raise your hand.

Thank you, Mike. Hi, Jason. I'm Namrata. And a lot of what you said made a lot of sense to me. I'm building a vertical labor marketplace for culturally attuned domestic staffing. And what I wanted to ask you was, like, what I run into is a lot of flakiness and unreliability and communication issues as people talk to service providers. So how did you go around that kind of training or expectation setting or culture of engagement? And did you have to boot people off the platform? Did you run into those issues after the onboarding was done, after the screening and background checks and reference checks? and everything is done. It's the engagement part of the piece where you're not the point of contact anymore. And so, they're talking directly. Were there no-shows? Was there, you know, those kinds of things? How did you deal with those?

That was certainly an issue that we dealt with. And again, we built systems of alerts. We would actually call them directly. That also fell into the customer service department. Hey, you're late. And we would have an alert system. And then if they didn't respond, we would start— we created what we called a ping system where we would ping all the other available people in our network. Hey, like, and we may, you know, let's say our take rate on this job would've been 40%. We'll say, okay, instead of making $12, you're gonna make $16 on this walk, but we need you there right away.

Right.

So anything to keep the customer happy. Even if it means we make less money or we make no money, because we want them to come back. Like, our business was built on frequency. Not all marketplaces are necessarily, but for ours, it certainly was crucial. So we couldn't have, you know, no chinks in the armor. Um, I hope that's, you know, helps you, right? But I would also maybe warn you, we were focusing on one vertical, dog walking. Yeah. At first, I think if we were focusing on multiple at a time, there's it would have been extremely challenging for us to actually understand like the intricacies and tapping a network, right? Like because we only had dog walkers. If a dog walker was late, everybody else on the platform was a dog walker, right? But if I'm like a, I don't know, like a you know for home deliver. Like if not, if this platform is for plumbers and contractors. But that means your supply side isn't fully plumbers or fully contractors. So when you put out that request, do you have enough liquidity to actually service it? Right. So I would just maybe challenge you to like think about what your top sort of vertical is and maybe specialize on that first, solve this problem, and then go one at a time in scaling it from there.

That's a great question. Hey, Jason, I want to ask one last question that a founder sent me, and it was around key hires and some of the roles, you know, at WAG. So, you know, what ended up being some of the highest impact or kind of key hires for Wag and what functions?

This is just my perspective, right? I wasn't involved in every hiring decision. I'm sure if you ask other founding groups, they'd have different people. But I, again, I owe a lot to our customer service staff. Some of these people were just like, man, like they could walk into the most chaotic, stressful situation And handle it with such pros and confidence and solutions thinking with a time, you know, it blew me away. And most of our greatest hires, from my perspective, were like people that weren't necessarily experts at all, but just like willing to push themselves to be their best. I hear it all the time. In fact, like. I talked to a lot of people who once had, were once employed at Wag, and the ones who did really well were like, Jason, like you gave me an opportunity. Our first intern that I hired off of internships.com ended up becoming like our, like very high, almost at the executive level from an intern, our first ever intern, right? So I think like there is talent everywhere. You'd be surprised what positions make the biggest impact. And like, honestly, I've— besides like early founding roles, I've typically found like a new executive is not going to give you the most value.

Those are going to be helpful tips for us here. And I'll also reiterate the importance of, you know, customer service and, you know, team building and hiring. So, well, cool. So we're almost out of time here. You know, really appreciate taking the time to join us here for the group chat. We covered lots of ground, you know, with the highs and lows about WAGs. I really appreciate it. And, you know, being transparent and kind of sharing, sharing your learnings with us all here, even if they're kind of hard learnings along the way. And, you know, actually, I had one last question for you before we wrap things up. And that's my usual closing question, which is, if you could go right back to before you started Wag, you know, what would you tell yourself about marketplaces specifically?

I could go back. You know, I ask myself this question a lot, surprisingly. And every time I ask, I kind of get a different answer back for myself. Sometimes I'm like, don't do it. Just keep doing what you're doing. Like, stop. You are doing really well. You are making really good money. Your life is easy. There are no problems. No one's really like counting on you to solve crazy problems. Everything is manageable and doable, right? But then the flip side of me is like, wait a minute, because I— like, it was such a roller coaster that like, it's hard to say not to do that because it was so monumental and life-changing for me experience-wise. Thought-wise, like spiritually, you know, it really pushed me outside of my circle of where I was. But I think I'd have to just tell myself sort of what I iterated here today, which is like product market fit. Start as small and as scrappy and as unconventional as possible. Right? I was talking with someone recently, and they built this like. They're saying it's a marketplace. I think they might be more of a SaaS product, but it's, um, it's a system to help photographers. And, you know, he's like, listen, we're doing the online marketing and yada yada. And I'm like, that's fine, like, good luck. But it's like, where else can you— like, what do you do, like, go to weddings? You know, and we kind of like, okay, there's still, um, like photography stores where you get things, you buy cameras and sell cameras and yada yada. Like, I'm like, you need to like camp there. Every single day and talk to those people and onboard those people and remember who onboarded and ask them how is it going. You know, the most unscalable thing in the world is like having the executive team on site at a photo store. But that's really going to be the biggest wins for sure early on.

Well, that's going to be great parting advice for us all here and a way to wrap up the group chat. So, you know, Jason, once again, I really appreciate you taking the time to join us here today. And I'll include links to your socials so everyone can follow along and, you know, in the community post and then also in the recording. And thanks everyone for the great questions. Thanks, man.