March 2008 marked six consecutive months of profitability for Dogster, Inc. With our signed media orders and current growth patterns, we’re set through Q3. Our expenses are as high as they’ve ever been thanks to a 16-person staff, highly scalable tech infrastructure, great offices, talented contractors and important licensing deals. With this team and resources, we accomplish more in a single week than what our 8-person team in 2006 could complete in an entire month.

Our return to profitability is a result of a multi-year concerted effort of working directly with great advertisers and a great community partner, having a thriving user base that values our virtual currency, gifting and subscription programs and constantly expanding and improving our programming and product. Revenue does not simply land in a startup’s lap; it takes a ton of effort. Fortunately, we love this kind of work.

It would take 7 more months to match our longest profitability streak (13 months that ended when we started investing the proceeds of our Angel Round in the fall of 2006). However, we are keen to invest all the profits back into our master plan and take advantage of our unique position.

To all our site members and users, please know that you are at the heart of our future, and it’s going to be great. We cherish that we’ve been able to become a nationwide, and global, trusted property for pet lovers, but there is so much more we could be doing for and with everyone.

Addendum:
Followers of the industry will know that just earlier today, Fred Wilson, a VC/blogger we deeply respect, wrote a post about the disappearing options for young companies to get liquid. We see things as less bleak, less black and white.

Question for you Fred… Isn’t liquidity cyclical? The solution to this temporary down cycle shouldn’t be legislative or regulatory (though Sarbanes Oxley could surely do with some loosening). ;) The solution is to invest a portion of your portfolio in companies with the ability to become profitable (ahem, like Dogster, Inc.!). If our investors really need liquidity for some reason, we could always pay dividends or offer incremental buybacks. The tax treatment isn’t always as nice and the returns get harder to calculate, but these sorts of historical investor payments work just fine.