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.