From nutritious food to walks, petcare startup sploot wants to help you be the best dog parents
Entrepreneurs Garima Kaushal and Arnav Sahni want their petcare startup sploot to become the go-to user manual and social media platform for dog parents and experts.
Ask any dog parent and they will tell you that their pet is the key to their happiness and the most important part of their lives, but not everybody can take care of their pets in the best possible way.
Due to their hectic lives, many often fail to prepare nutritious meals and have to rely on store-bought dog food. Sometimes, they may even need support in taking their pets out on walks.
This is where Gurugram-based petcare startup comes in, aiming to help dog parents with its subscription-based fresh food delivery and dog walking services.
“I saw that dog parents tend to make the same mistakes again and again. We wanted to become the go-to user manual for them. You get a dog, get our app, and we’ll tell you what to do every step of the way,” Garima Kaushal, Co-founder, sploot, tells HerStory.
Launched two months ago, these services are priced at Rs 3,000 per month each, and the startup also offers free access to nutritionists with its food delivery subscription.
For its dog walking service, sploot allows users to choose the number of walks and preferable time. At present, it works with 35 dog walkers on a freelance basis, and by August 2022, it aims to increase this number to 150.
The workings
Growing up, Garima always wanted a dog for a pet. However, it was only when her younger brother succumbed to leukaemia several years ago that she decided to finally get one to ease the pain of her loss.
Little did she know this would lead her to entrepreneurship.
As a dog parent, Garima often reached out to other parents for help. She also saw how her parents had difficulty deciding on a treatment for their dog, who injured his leg, as different vets had different opinions.
In 2019, she and her college friend Arnav Sahni joined hands to launch sploot with a digital medical diary for dogs. Gradually, the startup began to build content around dog parenting.
While the medical diary continues to be an in-app offering, Garima realised it alone was insufficient as dog parents would update their pet’s medical records once in a while but not engage regularly.
The startup then decided to educate pet parents on two training courses — Puppy Basics and Dog Obedience 101. It has trained 20 cohorts of pet parents in the last two years.
With 29,000 followers on Instagram, sploot has broken down its courses to focus on topics, including potty training, separation anxiety, actions to take when a pet goes missing, caring for a senior pet, and helping an injured street dog, among others, through its content.
At present, sploot has a thriving community of about 35,000 pet parents registered on its Android and iOS apps.
The Gurugram-based petcare startup also acts as an aggregator platform connecting experts—canine trainers, nutritionists, veterinarians, and volunteers running boarding centres for pets—with pet parents.
(Representative image)
An end-to-end platform for pets
Bootstrapped with the founders’ savings of Rs 35 lakh, the early-stage petcare startup has raised a seed round of $500,000 from Info-Edge backed Redstart Labs in 2022.
As first-time entrepreneurs, Garima and Arnav faced a challenging journey with a great learning curve. “Neither of us has a tech background, and we are building a tech product. We are approaching it from a pet parent’s perspective with a dedicated tech team,” says Garima.
At present, sploot has 15 full-time employees, including the co-founders, who create content, community, and services around pet care.
According to ResearchAndMarkets, the Indian pet care market is expected to reach Rs 7,500 crore by 2026, thanks to a changing lifestyle, urbanisation, and increasing pet ownership.
With peers like TimeForPet, BarkLoot, and Doggie Dabbas, sploot makes the most of its social media presence to market its services and stay in touch with pet parents.
Moving forward, the co-founder says the sploot app will design separate profiles for pet experts and service providers to connect with dog parents.
In the end, Garima hopes sploot becomes a one-stop app for all problems related to dog parenting—be it products or services.
Edited by Suman Singh