The Business of Compassion

Issue #81

July 9th, 2024

Quick Hits:

🛫 This tool can easily help you find out which airlines allow pets in the cabin

💵 Is Chewy the new Gamestop? Roaring Kitty holds $217 million of Chewy stock

🚙 Rivian wants your pet to be comfy. Its new patent uses UWB technology to track the pet's position and provide various automations

✈️ An inside look into the new VIP (Very important pup) airlines

This week we chat with Matt Krentz & Andy Bond, the founders of BestyBNB

What does BestyBnB do and what is your mission?

People in crisis, who want and need help, will often decline life-saving services if they don’t have a temporary home for their beloved pet. BestyBnB was created to remove these barriers and our mission is to keep pets and people safe, connected, and together while maintaining the vital human-animal bond.

The BestyBnB platform creates Crisis Care / Safety Net Pet Advocacy Programs to help Animal Welfare, Domestic Violence, Mental Health, Veteran Affairs, Houseless Services, and other Human Social Services Agencies secure safe, temporary homes for pets during their owners’ time of crisis. Our Agency partners have called BestyBnB an innovative, confidential Airbnb for Pets.

In the past few months, BestyBnB has enabled its agency partners to provide nearly 4,000 SAFE NIGHTS for Clients' Pets with a 100% return-to-owner rate. As of June 2024, BestyBnB accounts have been set up at 39 Agencies in 14 states.

You both came from the entertainment business, what company did you build prior to starting BestyBnB? How did that foundation help you with your current venture?

In 2013 we joined a promising tech startup focused on the entertainment and fashion business. This is where we sharpened our skills in product development and technical innovation. Together, with a team of technologists from Kansas City we successfully launched an application called “Studio Fusion” - a true first-of-its-kind software, offering enterprise-level technical solutions to filmmakers and studios to collect, manage, and analyze product data.

These powerful mobile and web-based tools were created to manage major studios’ assets (wardrobe, props, and set items) during development, pre-production, while on set, during production, and all the way to wrap. Multiple departments would use the technology to manage photos, scripts, budgets, and much more. Studio would utilize the technology more on a global scale as an inventory and assets tracking tool across multiple studio locations and productions.

Fusion’s clients included NBC Universal, HBO, Netflix, and FOX, among others. In the fall of 2018, Studio Fusion was acquired by the popular Hollywood Auction company Screenbid - a destination for fans to purchase studio-certified props, wardrobe, and memorabilia.

Most startups grow from a personal problem that a founder faces, however, your company came into existence after hearing a problem that was not a personal one but a serious one nonetheless.

In May of 2019, we first learned of the BARRIERS Pets can present to people seeking help and safety. This was first through the lens of Domestic Violence. We were listening to our local NPR affiliate and heard an interview with the Director of Grants and Housing at the largest domestic violence agency in the State of Kansas. The statistics we learned were SHOCKING:

• Over 50% of callers, who dial a 24-hour emergency hotline in need of immediate help, ended up hanging up the phone and declining life-saving services the moment they found out they could not bring their pet with them.

• As the interview continued, we learned that there are approximately 2,800 + Domestic Violence Agencies across the United States, and at that time, less than 5 % of those locations could accommodate pets.

• Of the callers who decided to get help and were forced to make a choice to leave their pet behind, 70% of those pets were abused, or worse, in retaliation.

Now, we had never heard of this crisis before, but it made perfect sense. Our families would never leave any of our pets behind. And no pet owner should ever be forced to make a choice between their health and safety and abandoning or surrendering their pet to a shelter. 

Once you decided to build it, you spoke with the person you heard on the radio and met with domestic violence advocacy groups and survivors. Why was this such an important piece of the puzzle for you?

So, after learning of this crisis, we decided to use technology to do something about it. We shared the vision of our technical solution with the person we heard give the above-referenced interview together with the CEO of that domestic violence agency. Their response was, “If you can do this, you will save lives. You will save the lives of people and pets in need.”

We also had close family and friends actively working, volunteering, or in leadership at Domestic Violence Agencies in St. Louis and just outside of Chicago and when we contacted them to see if this was a real crisis, they confirmed the reality of these barriers.

Next, we traveled across the country meeting with leadership at human social service agencies and with animal welfare experts to learn more about these barriers. Through this learning tour, where we gathered requirements to better understand the breadth and depth of this crisis, we became experts in pet advocacy and that’s how BestyBnB was born. Along that learning tour, we quickly realized that this crisis was not unique to Domestic Violence Agencies alone.

All types of Human Social Service Agencies and Animal Shelters faced similar barriers and we quickly realized this was a much bigger crisis than we originally had thought. We met with as many animal shelter managers, case managers at mental health organizations, and client advocates working with survivors to make sure we fully understood their workflow and pain points.   

Soon after, we leveraged our skills and experience in building very large and highly secure technical platforms so that every Human Social Services and Animal Welfare Agency could create a crisis care safety net pet program through BestyBnB.

You raised 2.5 million from a single investor at a very early stage, what was your pitch? What did you deploy most of this capital into?

IMPACT & SROI – Our initial investor held us to multiple standards when electing to support BestyBnB and our mission to remove barriers to services and keep pets and people connected. Specifically, the investor measured us not only on our business model, but the level of positive impact we would have on pets and people. With the investor’s support, we were able to utilize those investment dollars to build the BestyBnB platform, hone the blueprint for implementing crisis-care safety-net pet advocacy in communities across the country, and begin scaling.  

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Why did you decide to make this a for-profit business vs a non-profit org?

We performed a detailed analysis on this issue, and it became clear that to build the platform the right way on the timeline that would allow us to have the most impact on pets and people, we would need to operate as a for-profit, impact venture. 

You are running a marketplace business, what are some of the KPIs, operational and strategic, that you check on a daily/weekly basis to monitor the health of the business?

At our core, we are SAAS platform helping bring a digital solution to remove barriers in a way that hasn’t been done before. And because we are an impact venture, we are also measuring our SROI in addition to more traditional ROI milestones. 

What are the positives of working with a close friend?

Our relationship is a true brotherhood. We trust each other with not only our business ventures, but with each other’s families as well. Over the years, we have developed a very complimentary working style that is conducive to building efficiencies. We work very hard, hold ourselves accountable to each other, and enjoy spending our time away from work together along with our families. It is incredibly hard to build something from scratch; doing it with someone you trust and love like family makes those hard times a little easier to push through.

You reached the end, you deserve a treat 🍖

Be part of the pack - For more news, links, and entertainment follow us on social media (links below) and fur - ward this to your best human friend.

Finally, why was the puppy party so loud?

They turned up the sub-woof-ers!

See you Thursday!