Meet Your Mascotte 🐶

Issue #93

August 20th, 2024

Quick Hits:

🐈 The story of NYC’s beloved Bodega Cats

🇯🇵 In Japan, renting a dog is an actual thing

💰 The most expensive dog in the world is…

🐩 Dont be ridiculous, everybody wants this

🦸‍♂️ A brave civilian rescued a man and his dog from a flood in Connecticut

This week we caught up with Bora Hamamcioglu. The Co-Founder & CEO of Mascotte.

What were you doing before Mascotte, and what led you to launch a startup in the pet care space?

Before launching Mascotte, I founded and managed a startup in the mobility space for five years, ultimately leading it to a successful exit. Following that, I joined a VC fund and most recently served as their principal. Experiencing both sides of the table—first as a founder, then as an investor—helped me develop my own theses on scalability, go-to-market strategies, building moats, and cultivating strong people and culture.

On a personal note, I’m also a dog dad to a 13-year-old Labrador. My experiences as a pet owner navigating the veterinary care system, combined with my background in startups and investing, inspired me to launch Mascotte. Having visited multiple vets as a client, founder, and investor, I saw firsthand the inefficiencies within veterinary clinics. This led me to create a model that addresses these pain points and enhances the client experience.

Last year, you raised $1.2 million, a milestone many founders find challenging. How did you achieve this, and what key strategies or approaches did you use? What advice would you give to other founders seeking funding for their startups?

When you receive an investment that early, about 60% of the decision isn’t based on the business, traction, or projections, it’s more about the personal traits that investors, especially institutional ones, are betting on—such as your drive, execution skills, and experience. Once you’ve established those relationships, it’s crucial to demonstrate that you have a clear vision, depth of thought, and a solid understanding of the market. Investors need to see that you’re not just passionate, but also deeply knowledgeable and capable of turning your vision into reality.

We launched Mascotte with a clear thesis: vets are missing out on revenue by not prioritizing client experience (CX). Our first goal was to prove that we could help vets generate significant additional revenue by improving their CX. The second was to show that our services are priced efficiently enough that vets would still achieve a positive ROI even after paying for our services. Lastly, we aimed to demonstrate that we could also be profitable by creating scalable and efficient workflows.

My advice for founders is to first identify a clear problem that affects many, then take a milestone-based approach to solving it.

The veterinary industry is facing significant challenges, such as employee shortages and increased demand for services. How does Mascotte address these challenges?

Instead of offering another platform that vets have to learn and manage, we provide human support that becomes a natural extension of the veterinary staff. We take on routine tasks and handle client communications in full alignment with the on-site staff, allowing veterinary teams to manage their workload more effectively without sacrificing quality. We’re here to lighten the load, not add to it, ensuring that day-to-day operations run smoothly and efficiently.

We’re not a remote staffing agency or an outsourced call center. We are an embedded operational partner that integrates dedicated teams directly into each practice, operating under a managed services model that brings extra oversight and accountability. This ensures everything is handled with the highest level of care, giving practices peace of mind that their operations are always running at their best, without adding the burden of increased overhead.

You currently operate as a B2B company working directly with vets. Do you have plans to expand into adjacent verticals, such as telehealth?

We’re seeing very strong interest from companies beyond veterinary practices, but within the pet care space, such as smart collar providers, pet food brands, pet insurance providers, and pet hotels and daycares. These businesses recognize the value of having our trained teams—comprising veterinary nurses, technicians, and receptionists with significant clinical experience—embedded into their operations and customer support functions. While we plan to stay within the B2B space, we are already onboarding more clients from the broader pet care industry, where we believe our unique model can add significant value.

How do you see AI potentially changing and enhancing veterinary care in the future, and how is it used at Mascotte?

Everyone knows how overworked and burned out veterinary professionals are, especially when they’re juggling the demands of keeping operations running smoothly. It’s no surprise that there has been a surge in start-ups offering platforms to help these overextended veterinarians and their staff.

But what I believe the industry is overlooking is that with so much already on their plates, it’s incredibly challenging—and time-consuming—for veterinary teams to continuously learn and adopt new platforms and features, no matter how beneficial they might be. In a world where everyone is handing a tired handyman yet another tool for their toolkit, we provide an extra pair of reliable hands—and we use AI to make those hands even more knowledgeable.

We equip our internal teams, embedded within our clients' operations, with the tools they need to stay sharp and informed, ensuring they always have the latest knowledge at their fingertips. We built Mascotte to be that human + tech layer in between. We take the time to learn these new features and train our teams with AI, so we can effectively integrate them into the work we handle on behalf of each practice.

What's Mascotte's mission?

Mascotte's mission is to improve animal health outcomes by providing veterinary practices with tailored support that reduces staff burnout, boosts client satisfaction, and increases revenue.

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See you Friday!