Catching Up with John from Spot Dog Walkers

We’re taking a journey down memory lane and catching up with some of past Summit winners and companies that have received funding from our syndicate. 

Today, we’re checking in with John Minchin (JM) from Spot Dog Walkers, who is actually in the middle of a fundraising round right now and secured a side deal from our investment syndicate in Summit V!  

TNT: Hey John! Thanks for chatting with me today. So how’s life been since winning the Summit? 

JM: Hi! The Summit couldn’t have come at a better time for us. We managed to close our fundraising round in August 2021, just as so many new Covid dog owners were preparing to return to work. The investment allowed us to scale from a 1-person team (so just me) to 5 employees, plus we’ve managed to increase revenue by more than 2.5 times since.

TNT: Very cool! Congrats, that’s a lot to do in just 1 year. What’s next for you and the team? 

JM: We’re going to be proving out 2 large and very different (from Calgary) new markets, Toronto and Vancouver. We need to know with X number dollars, we can get a market of 1M, 3M, or 6M to X number of users and revenue within 6 - 12 months. Once we have that information, we should be in a good position to efficiently deploy capital into new markets of any size.

And like you mentioned above, we’re in the middle of raising a bridge round. This round is going to help us to hire a few more employees, double our marketing budget, help us grow, and more importantly, help us learn faster. 

TNT: That’s really exciting! Ok, so obviously you did a lot of pitching last year with your first round, and you’re doing it again now… in your opinion, what makes a really good pitch? 

JM: For me, it breaks down into 2 main components. 

#1. Lead with your strengths and tell YOUR company’s story… rather than trying to fit your pitch into someone else’s template. For example, if you have revenue, growth, customer acquisition, and retention metrics, do you really think an investor watching cares that you have a hacker, hipster, and hustler on your team?

#2. Be honest. Don’t call website visitors users, or LOI’s revenue. You’re not going to fool anyone into making an investment.

TNT: Great breakdown. Ok, last question for you, John. What are some of the biggest lessons you've learned as a founder/startup?  

JM: The most beneficial thing we did was get to revenue right away. We were charging people for our service pretty much from day one. 

V1 cost less than $6k to get into people’s hands - the customer experience was terrible, the service was unreliable, and it was far from perfect, but it was in people’s hands. 

We’ve made thousands of changes and improvements since, and nearly every one of them has been driven by customer behavior and data. 

So my lessons are to get revenue in as soon as possible, don’t wait for your product to be perfect, and listen to your customers and improve your product. 

TNT: 100%. Customer feedback is always valuable. Thanks for sitting down with me today, John, and good luck with your bridge round. 

JM: Thanks!