I just have to write about how excited I am that Disney & Dogster have teamed up in a promotional campaign for the release of the all new digitally restored 50th Anniversary Edition Lady & The Tramp DVD. What a classic film! I remember loving this movie as a kid and I can’t wait to watch this new edition which will be released February 28th.

Disney has been really great to work with. One of the best things is that they really get the Dogster community. When most potential advertisers begin conversations with us they are interested in banner advertising. Banner ads will do okay but when the message is integrated within multiple layers of the community the message is much more powerful. Steven has named our approach the “Integrated Brand Campaign” and it really works. Disney got this right away and here is how, together, we made this special event come to fruition.

First, we created a jump page featuring pictures of all the characters, information about the DVD and a link to enter a contest to win a 32″ flat screen TV. All the pictures of the cast (Lady, Tramp, Jock, Peg, Trusty and SI & AM) link to Dogster dog pages created especially for the characters. All the characters can now become pup pals with our community (Lady has 484 Dogster pals). You can send a private message to Lady and leave her, or any character, a bone. The characters are alive on Dogster! There is also a Disney Group created for all of our members who love Lady & The Tramp. It is now our second biggest group with over 500 members. From this group, the Disney team can message these enthusiastic members directly. We have also added a special placement in our monthly newsletter and a homepage feature section promoting Lady & The Tramp’s visit to Dogster in celebration of the new DVD release. This is the trick. We are promoting the event first and foremost. While users stir up old memories and get into the fun of playing with Lady & The Tramp, we provide integration points where they can buy the DVD. To bring the integrated community message full circle Disney links back to Dogster from their Lady & The Tramp page as well as includes Dogster in its promotional newsletter.

Lady & The Tramp’s visit to Dogster runs through the first week in March. Be sure to check it out, meet the characters, enter the contest and, if you’re like me, order a copy of the new digitally restored DVD.

All four of the engineers at Dogster met while working at Preview Travel - now Travelocity - primarily under the tutilage of CTO John Petrone. John taught us true IT professionalism: fancy code is nifty but bulletproof code is divine; remaining calm under intense IT pressures is a state of mind; code complete; mistakes happen; meritocracy is best and last but not least coding after drinks is always a waste of time ;>

John is currently the CTO at the massive AutoByTel and was recently honored as an IDG’s Computerworld Premier IT Leader of the Year. From a group of once-young pups on your old staff John, congratulations.

I wrote about John some more on my personal site.

I met a lot of smart, engaging people at the TechCrunch party last Friday night. After a quick introduction and a squint at my name tag, they would inevitably ask about the Dogster story. We love telling our story so with a smile I gave it to them: we’ve been around for 2 years; we have 200k pets and 175k humans; profitable for the last 10 months; a huge feature set; a successful subscription service; the most passionate members ever; a smart and ambitious team; and plans to take over the world. After a laugh at my final statment about taking over the world, one guy said, “That is a nice little niche you have there.” “Thanks,” I said as we moved on to talk about his business for a minute before parting. His comment, however, stuck with me the rest of the night and through the weekend… nice little niche you have there. Hmmmm.

In marketing terms, a niche is a narrow market segment that can be easily identified and served. In my view Dogster & Catster (and the upcoming pets sites/countries that we expand to) are much wider than a niche. We serve the greater pet community and this community is huge. Consider these statistics on the US pet industry:

63% of U.S. households own a pet (69.1 million homes)

44 million households own a dog (74 million total dogs in US)

38 million households own a cat (91 million total cats in US)

$36 billion 2005 pet industry expenditures

I suppose you could call it a niche, but from where we’re sniffing it is likely one of the biggest niches out there. Dogster & Catster plan on  serving this niche/industry/community and serving it well.  For behind every pet dollar spent is a human and animal who love each other and if there is one thing we know well is sharing and reflecting that love and passion with our community.

This weekend our sites grew by about 1000 new cats and dogs, but the big news is that our 200,000th pet joined the Dogster & Catster Community.  That’s right! At around 11pm Pacific time Saturday night a Swiss Mountain Dog/Border Collie named Sparky joined the ranks of Dogster pushing our “little” community over 200k.

It looks like the word is out about the best pet community on the web because all our metrics are now starting to kick into a higher gear.

We soft launched Dogster & Catster Groups just after the New Year. We were expecting a few groups to be made while we work out the kinks and get it perfected before really putting it out there for the mass community. Little did we know! A month and a half later we have 721 public and private groups. This amount of usage blew away our expectations and seems somewhat significant since AOL, for instance, has only 239 groups in their “Dog” category and 48 groups in their “Cat” category. As of this morning there we have 9,907 unique members in at least one group and 14,872 unique pets joining in the fun.

Dogster & Catster Groups allow members to gather around a shared interest. Some of the features include messaging, event scheduling, photo sharing and link sharing with a lot more on the way. We have some really great groups so far. The largest is a breed specific group “Maltese Mommys” with over 577 members. Even a paid advertisers’ group can be super fun as well as attract a large membership. “The Disney Group” promoting the 50th Anniversary Edition of “Lady & The Tramp” has 387 members. Another trend we are happy about is the numerous groups created around a locality like “Seattle Dogs”.

From a business side, there are lots of opportunities for advertisers and sponsors. Advertisers can create their own group to message users of their products and services directly like Disney has done. There are also opportunities for advertisers to target specific groups where their message is more potent and the community more interested. Also noteworthy, is that page views and Adsense numbers are moving quite nicely in an upwards direction for groups.

Most of all, it is really exciting to see how our members took to the groups so fast and are really making important, substantial connections in this way. This after all is what Dogster and Catster are all about: sharing the love of your pets, sharing information and experiences and making real, substantial and safe connections.

Since March 2004, Dogster has been serving Google AdSense ads. For a popular website they never really brought in much money, but at least it covered my hosting bills. AdSense was never a real revenue channel for Dogster/Catster, but it has been the ONLY bulk-advertiser we’ve used that covered our hosting bill each month.

About a year ago, AdSense started allowing publishers to share their revenue (though not their effective CPM) and Jason Calacanis started sharing how much could be made … forcing me to see how little we were making. We tried everything including custom color coding, custom placement, font and color coding, improved positioning, even switching over to Revenue Science for a couple months. I’ve attended publisher seminiars the GooglePlex, speak regularly with my AdSense rep, and even presented at to staff on two occasions. Yet no matter what we did, our daily revenue never broke $50 a day. The reason Weblogs Inc. makes thousands a day and we were making tens was because information sites draw in people hungry for knowledge who are much more likely to click ads in hopes of finding solutions. Dogster and Catster are primarily entertainment sites, and social netowrking sites have far lower click thru rates. Another problem is that pet words are proverbial dogs when it comes to click thru values, they don’t even compare to gadgets, finance and health issues.

Three months ago we bit the bullet and started displaying 336×280 ads, their best performing format, directly in our non-subscriber member’s pet pages. This was a move we thought long and heard about if the extra revenue would be worth a potential community backlash. Happily we received only a handful of complaints, but I’m sure it that was due to coordinating advance and concurrent explainations and very open communication channels on the matter. The result was we finally doubled our daily rev, reaching $100 a day for the first time. Nice, but hardly encroaching upon our real revenue channels.

Of late, however, we’ve seen a couple traditional companies entering the AdSense markets and we had our first $200 and then $300 day. This is still a mere fraction of what successful AdSense publishers make and I expect these companies to leave as quickly as they came. But it would be nice if it kept up. A company our size can always do with a couple extra grand each month to pad the primary revenue.

A couple weeks ago, Dogster Inc. had the pleasure of an evening IT session with LAMP-master Tony Guntharp. Tony co-founded the uber-geek Sourceforge and currently is coding up a storm at Feedster.com.

In the fall and winter of 2005 Dogster had completely upgraded our serving architecture to both web and database clusters, along with add email, squid cache we had become a 10 server operation, all being built, and run by two accidental system administrators. We knew we had increased capacity significantly but were not seeing our serving latency improve, in fact it had gotten worse. We combed thru every log file, tested our network, hardware, DNS, you name it without any success. It was a very frustrating period.
For months we had been seeking a LAMP consultant and found no one. But then Scott Rafer introduced us to Tony and it was the beginning of the end of our problems. Tony spent an evening with us at the control seat methodically going thru our entire server architecture. Debian, Apache, MySQL, PHP, bind9 were all found to be well configured, though Tony realized that though I had tried to initiate MySQL cache querying there were about 4 required ancilary config settings I had omitted, but it hardly solved our problem. For a while we thought the problem may be the very slow buffered disks reads Tony noticed using HDparm, but an eventual call to a friend who also used ServerBeach confirmed that was normal.
It started getting late, but Tony kept right in there, corssing off apps one by one. Turns out the silver bullet was a very inefficient phpAdsNew configuration caused by server hopscothc we played while going from 3 to 10 servers. Within 15 minutes we had the problem resolved and cut 50% off our page loading times.

So thanks Tony! You must be The Lone Ranger because you found the silver bullet no one else could see. Within a day we were seeing 20% increases in page serves simply due to the increased speed. We’re on target to server 12M pages this month, well above our 10M peak. It’s a shame we couldn’t meet our peak demand earlier, but bootstrappers gotta do it as best they can.

On Thursday night at about 7pm I sent out 1000 emails to a random sampling of our users. The email asked them to take five minutes and complete a survey about a recent media campaign that took place on Dogster. At 9am on Friday I checked the status of the survey and saw that 487 people had completed the survey. That’s 48.7% in fourteen hours! Better yet, that is normal for our surveys!!! I have not heard of any other site or group that has that kind of a response to a survey. It helps us make the site so much better too. Instead of just hearing from the most vocal minority, I really do feel like our community hears the voice of all its members or at least - most of them.

Everyday I am more and more impressed with the passion that this community has (even for surveys)!

For the better part of the past two years Dogster, Inc has just been Ted, Steven, myself (John Vars) and John Williams, our part-time, brilliant customer service Jedi master in Kentucky. Since it was just three of us at the office each day, we never really bothered with any titles. When we printed business cards we put “Top Dog” for Ted as he is the originator of the site and Steven and I just put our general areas of concern, respectively, “Business Development” and “Product Development.” We all thought it was quite silly to give ourselves more serious titles like CEO , CTO or VP. Even if we did give ourselves these types of titles, it wouldn’t mean much. Sure we have areas of expertise but it is all pretty mixed up with three people doing all the duties of a start up. Steven is deeply involved in Product Development as well as Ted and I are both deeply involved in Business Development. We all do accounting, legal, and PR as well as vacuum, clean dishes and take out the trash.

Times are changing though. Dogster, Inc is growing. Starting tomorrow we have 8 people getting a monthly check. Responsibilities are getting more specifically divided. In fact, for really the first time, we have actually given titles to the new employees.

I guess that comes with the territory and is a sign that the company is growing successfully. I must say that I have enjoyed the last two years being title-less and/or making a title up on the spot depending on the situation. I see now that those days are nearing an end but for now I will just stick to my customer service handle, “Wonder Dog.”

Tomorrow is an exciting day for us at Dogster, Inc. Two new full-timers start. First is Greg Olson who will be our Director of Systems. Greg and I went to college together, worked at Travelocity together and have been through many adventures. It is going to be such a relief to have someone dedicated to keeping the servers up and speedy and making sure that backups and monitoring are rock solid. Craig Walsey also starts tomorrow as Director of Media Sales. Craig has a ton of experience in licensing, law and recently sales. I suspect between Steven and Craig Dogster will have a lot of really interesting deals coming through the pipeline.

Last week was pretty exciting too as Ron Meiners started as our Community Manager and Scott Rafer, our business advisor, took a desk at Dogster HQ. Ron has been around online communities for years. He has a really positive outlook and a great energy. With Ron on board, Ted and I can focus more on our perfecting our product and our customer experience. Scott is CEO of winksite.com and is, by all accounts, a really smart guy. Since the rest of the winksite team is on the East Coast, Scott is taking a desk at Dogster and we hope his business saavy will rub off on the rest of us.

So with those four joining Ted, Steven, Moss and myself, we have 8 excellent people at HQ.