Dogster friend Kay Luo is the Dot Com Bomb this Halloween!

I hope she didn’t scare Cisco & Lefty too much! Woof!

Listening to the audio cast of my talk at the Future of Web Apps Summit I confirmed something that struck me at the time and something that got Shanti’s attention too.

In my talk’s introduction I explain how Dogster, Inc. achieved profitability in July 2005 and that we were (and still are ;) on track to generate over $1,000,000 in revenues in 2006. These aren’t earnings mind you, but a million in revenue is still a pretty good number for a young company and I thought there might be some crowd appreciation. But there wasn’t, so I moved along to my topic which was discussing that Dogster, Inc. had just closed a $1,000,000 Angel Round, to which the audience of about 800 breaks into a spontaneous applause.

Why is it that a young business generating $1M in revenue in a year isn’t impressive, but raising $1M from investors - in a growth market nonetheless - is? It’s as if the crowd did not realize that by generating $1M means we in effect built our own fund, and instead of diluting our equity position we increased it significantly. Don’t get me wrong, we cherish our Angels and they are helping us make great things happen. Yet I suspect all of them would have passed on the investment had we not shown how Dogster and Catster were both real services and real businesses.

Take care entrepreneurs and engineers. No matter what the talk, this is still The Old Economy. Making a successful business is still much more work than just having a good idea or making a killer product. There’s room for many winners, but you have to make it to the finish line first. Even in our crazy-fast industry, an overnight successes still takes about 4 to 5 years. Your customers, your product and your sustainability have to always be your top concerns.

UPDATE: Old friend David Galbraith wrote an excellent piece on why sustainable companies matter now more than ever just hours before I penned this entry. You should read it.

Russell Brent is a life-long Californian and long-term San Francisco resident who is now the new Dogster, Inc Office Manager. Russell deeply impressed us in the interviews and one his references went so far as to say it took her two years to fully recover after he moved on.

Russell has already mastered our Quickbook accounts, our HR service, our shipping, our phones, you name it. He even helped to throw a great, flawless party. We’re all big fans and if you stop by the office I bet he’ll be the first to
greet you.

If you’re lucky you may even get to meet his beautiful and placid poodle, Marcel, who has been on Dogster.com since April 5th, 2004. Wow!

Russell with Marcel and Mochi

Welcome Russell. We are so glad you are here!

Woof and meow! We’re on the hunt for a 2-D illustrator for a fun contract project. Ability to present finished designs in clean digitial formats is a big plus. Please contact Ellen at Dogster dot Com to know more.

Carson Systems, producers of the excellent Future of Web Applications workshops posted a complete audio recording of my 45 minutes talk on Passion-Centric Web Communities.

I’ve been told that it’s easy to move through my presenation slides while listening along to the audio.

• » Complete audio recorded by Carson Systems
• » PDF version suitable for downloading. (25Mb)
• » Flash version for web viewing. (25Mb Opens in new window)

Thanks to everyone and everydog for helping us celebrate the fact that more than 300,000 pets are making their virtual homes on Dogster and Catster. It was a wooftastic purrrfetly swell time.

Our good friend Chris Heuer took some excellent pixs of our most popular guests:

Brian Oberkirch is one of the freshest and most postive minds trying to get to the bottom of what makes today’s web applications popular and useful. I was honored when Brian asked if he could interview me because I knew I would learn as much as I thought I could share. And that was true to the case.

Listen to the recorded podcast to hear us discuss why: we waited so long to raise money, and why we we did in the end; object-centic sociality is the new black; ad revenue only ads up when you bring ad sales inside; sponsorship is the way to go; the community always comes first; your hatemail is actually free marketing research. Brian really knows what he’s talking about.

If these kinds of topics are your bag, subscribe to Brian’s podcasts or check out his site.

Let the people - not the pedigree - decide! ENTER NOW!

Last year we ran a furtastic dog and cat photo contest open to everyone for free. Eschewing stuffy contest we offered categories for the every dog and cat, like Best Jumper, Craziest Tail, Best Friends, Naughtiest, Best Dressed, Sport Fan, Stretch & Yawn etc, etc, etc. We came up with $20,000 given to winners selected from finalists by our celebrity judges or the coveted Best in Show with was 100% user voted. The contest was wildly popular and the were over 1.1 million votes cast for over 20,000 entrants.

Last week we launched this year’s version and there have already been 15,408 submitted entries and 488,164 votes cast. We’ve added a lot of AJAX and javascript to make voting and viewing entrants a lot faster. This year we’ll also have another $20,000 in killer prizes to give away and winners will be lavished with untold amounts of attention as the contest interest has already spread far and wide across the internet.

So check out all the categories and enter your best photos. Pets of any breed or lack thereof are warmly welcomed to enter. And anyone else can vote. The average entry quality is far above last year and what better way to kill 5 minutes that to laugh looking at hysterical pet photos!

Woof and purrs to all our sponsors: Dads Pet Care, VPI Pet Insurance, Holiday Inn, Wag Hotels, Isle of Dogs, Fresh Step and Conair Pro

Center Networks tested the customer services of 10 well known internet companies and Dogster.com was deemed Best in Show.

Since Dogster’s first public day, I decided to read and respond to every email, even though I hardly had the two hours a day it took me. If you don’t care about your customers’ experiences it’s very hard to have a successful customer-oriented business. After burning out a couple friends who thought they could handle the side work, Howard Rheingold introduced me to John D. Williams from the Rheingold & Associates Network who became Dogster’s first employee. John personally answers hundreds of emails a week and even his boilerplate responses are personal and caring. While responding with links and FAQ tips is pretty straight forward, what is very important to us is that each emotional concern, as trite or as ridiculous as it may seem, is answered with the sincerity and dignity that all our members’ deserve.

A trap many tech-focused companies fall into is a feeling that automation and cost-cutting are the keys to success which makes them view customer service as a overly human process that should be stripped down to a mechanized minimum. In the end I cannot tell you how many emails we’ve received that start “thank you so much for the thoughtful response, it’s so good to know there are still people that care about their websites,” or even better, “please accept my apologies, if I had known a real human would have sent me a real response I wouldn’t have been so curt in my first message.”

In today’s era of low-cost start-ups and everyone-is-a-company the more you can create a direct emotional experience with your customers the better off you will be. Your customers will stick by you through the bad times and cheer with you during the good. While automating code backups and server upgrades are brilliant ideas, automating the customer interface is a very risky indeed.

Thanks to Center Networks for taking the time to highlight the importantance of customer service and letting us shine up against some very big companies with some very deep pockets.

Saturday afternoon the 300,000th pet joined our online community! This is amazing. There are now over 300,000 cats and dogs pet pages playing together in one giant virtual petastic wonderland. There is no other place in history where more dogs and cats have been so close to each other.

While we’re agrregating usage data, I thought I’d share some more numbers about what our members are doing.