Want to buy a dog? This is the platform for you

Eric (00:03.163)
So Fion Osama, welcome to Innovators Can Laugh. How you doing today?

Sufyan (00:06.722)
Doing well, thank you for having me.

Eric (00:08.751)
Hey, my pleasure. I'm going to let the audience know a little bit about your background. So question for the audience, is there a better way to sell pets rather than using classified ads? Well, Sofyan believes there is. Sofyan is the co-founder of Honest Dog. It's a platform for anyone who is thinking about buying a dog from a reputable breeder. And with Honest Dog, they combine education, transparency, and vetting standards for future pet owners.

But prior to this, he held jobs at McKinsey and Company and also Amazon. And he was a power lifter too. Uh, at the age of 17 in Pakistan, he, he set the national record and he was going for the world record, but he got injured as I just discovered during the little pre-chat here. Oh, Sofyan, pleasure to have you here today. Yeah. All right. Well, let's start with some fill in the blank questions. The first one for you.

Sufyan (00:59.471)
to be here.

Eric (01:05.615)
is when you were a kid, you wanted to be blank when you grew up.

Sufyan (01:11.686)
I wanted to be a police officer.

Eric (01:14.967)
Okay, okay. When did that dream die? Okay. Was it when you moved to London and you're like, Oh, I don't want to be a police officer.

Sufyan (01:19.478)
very quickly.

Sufyan (01:30.098)
Yeah, yeah, it was, it was a short, my dad was in the military. So then I was like, yeah, I think law and order is an interesting space as well. Um, but yeah, and the scientists and the police officers, I know over time the scientists got bigger as I entered my teenage years.

Eric (01:47.179)
Okay, alright next one for you. Blank is an unusual food I consume.

Sufyan (01:57.263)
I consume a lot of mixed things that you cannot describe and I think no one has ever done that before. So there's no one food, it's just the philosophy of eating a lot of random things together.

Eric (02:10.307)
Okay, the craziest thing I ever did to make or save money was blank.

Sufyan (02:18.166)
walk an hour and a half to save like 10 cents on onions.

Eric (02:23.091)
Onions? Okay All right, I mean I can see if you said something like you know ice cream or you know peanut M&Ms but onions okay Okay. All right last fill in the blank here for you. The most interesting thing I did in the last 26 days was

Sufyan (02:25.913)
Yeah, student life.

Sufyan (02:48.298)
Cool. I did a rapid fire pitch for 17 seconds in front of about 350 people. Yeah.

Eric (02:58.599)
All right, how'd it go?

Sufyan (03:00.482)
Great, I mean everyone remembered, oh yeah guns, drugs and dogs, that's the three largest legal markets and that was the hook in the beginning.

Eric (03:09.412)
Okay, if it's only 17 seconds, let's hear it real quick. Do you still remember it?

Sufyan (03:13.806)
I was on the spot, but yeah, did you know, or guns, drugs, and dogs, those are the top three illegal markets in Europe. And we're building a better way for dogs to end the illegal and unethical dog business.

Eric (03:27.399)
Okay, this is so fascinating. I would have never thought dogs would be in the top three, much less the top 20 illegal things that are being traded in Europe. Okay, tell us more about that. Let's start there, Sofyan.

Sufyan (03:42.79)
Yeah, so in the past, the most common way to sell dogs was through classifieds. And every geography has their own. So in Germany, it's eBay Klein-Anzeigen, or classifieds, gum trees, Craigslist, and then equivalents. And they had really had no checks. And puppies are very emotional. They're cute. And you can breed one puppy in Germany is 2,000 euros, for example. So then a litter is like, oh, yeah, 12,000 euros. There are not that many easier ways of just getting a dog,

in these places and people want them at the end of the day.

Eric (04:15.951)
Yeah, you know, I saw something unfortunate in London. I think it was in July when I was there and my wife and I were there and I saw this man. He looked like he was a drug dealer and I think he was making a deal on the street as we were walking by. And I noticed he had a leash and a dog and the dog was a pit bull, a female pit bull because you could tell like she just had her pups. And I never even would have thought of this, but my wife said,

Oh yeah, I'm sure he's using that money from the drugs to just basically, uh, you know, buy dogs and breed dogs and then sell the pups for money. And I, I was clueless that could even be considered a possibility. But now that you say that, you know, illegal, illegal dog trade and everything, then I guess some people do use dogs in that manner. Unfortunately. Yeah. Now, my understanding is that you had a dog or a puppy as a kid and

It died unexpectedly. Was that, was that what happened?

Sufyan (05:17.478)
Yeah, I was always obsessed about dogs growing up. And at some point, I got my chocolate Labrador puppy and I was so excited. And four weeks later, it died of parvovirus. It's something that a lot of puppies die from if they're not vaccinated. And it's one of the mandatory vaccinations. I didn't realize at that time what happened. But a few years later, I found that out. I was like, it could have been prevented. And that kind of broke me. And I felt so guilty and started reading all the stuff on dogs. And yeah.

That kind of changed the trajectory of my life through some indirect means of just learning and reading so much on every topic afterwards, not just dogs.

Eric (05:57.243)
Did you end up getting another dog during your childhood, Sophia?

Sufyan (06:02.11)
Actually, I had many dogs. I had a lot, because in the military, you move around every few years, and there were a lot of dogs that also were street dogs, that I would just attract to dogs. And somehow, dogs are attracted to me as well. So a lot of dogs were hanging out. But somehow, that experience of, OK, this was not just a dog that came, but this was a gift, sort of, of an eight-week-old chocolate Labrador puppy, a breed, and all of those things. And

Eric (06:07.759)
Mm-hmm.

Sufyan (06:27.334)
Yeah. And somehow I was old enough to be a full caretaker of it. So I was like, this thing was relying on me. I fed it three, four times a day and I took care of it and all of that. So it felt like my responsibility and something that, yeah, the thing was reliant on me and I let it down at the end of the day.

Eric (06:44.303)
Oh yeah. Don't be hard on yourself. I mean, you didn't know, you didn't know any better. My first dog, uh, that was given to me, my parents named them lucky because they said I was lucky to have them. Um, I don't know what happened to them to be quite honest, but I think I had about three dogs, uh, as a kid growing up. My kids want a dog, but I'm reluctant to get one because we live in an apartment and I know I will be a hundred percent responsible for walking, feeding, and picking up the dog poop.

And as long as I'm still wiping one of my kid's butts right now, because he's still young, I feel like that's the one, you know, dealing with one poop situation is enough. I don't want to add more to that right now. Yeah. Okay. So you're, you mentioned that you were thinking about being a police officer, but the science, the science part of you kind of tick over, how did, what was the idea of creating, uh, you know, on his dog? Like, how did that come into being?

Sufyan (07:23.464)
Yeah.

Sufyan (07:41.606)
Yeah. So I came from wanting to be a scientist, really good at really hard sciences and so forth, and then realizing that doesn't add much value to the world in short terms. There's research that takes 20, 30 years for it to be in mainstream. And I want to solve problems. And then business is the way to solve problems. And also reading from books and financial independence and making money while you sleep, and it doesn't make sense to exchange hourly wages, your time.

And so forth. So I had that mentality since I was about 15 and wanted to start a company since then. So I had this perspective that one day I will create a company and be an entrepreneur of some sort. So then the next 10 years or so were very much dedicated to that goal of coming to Germany and studying business as well and doing internships and startups in the Berlin and the startup ecosystem, and then getting some fancy logos on.

on the profile as well to build credibility. It's going to be on a pitch deck someday, like very early on. And basically, two years ago, I was working at a VC, and that was the hype or the bubble where everyone was raising. And one of my friends that I worked quite intensely with in university, he was like, let's start a company and let's just idea it a little bit and see what problems are there that we can solve. And initially, we were looking at all the traditional B2B SaaS and looking at industries and conducting.

research. And then randomly out of nowhere, this thought came like, I've been in Germany six years now, and now I might be stable enough to get a dog. How does that work? Because I couldn't even take care of myself properly for that time. So let alone of a dog. So I kind of just buried that interest very deep down. And it came up and my co-founder's grandma in Vienna, and they were talking about their dog and how he also has memories of dogs.

Eric (09:16.507)
Yeah.

Sufyan (09:33.346)
triggered me to look into this topic a little bit. And then when I found that Craig's List equivalents in Germany, that's the main way. And then also hearing some crazy stories of people getting sick dogs that cost 500 euros a month, they have to pay for the rest of its life. And so for certain conditions and health insurance is dropping them. And this thought came back, like all of this is preventable and me suffering from it and knowing that

It's such a huge problem. It affects millions of lives, not just pets, but humans. There has to be a better way. Like there just has to be. And it felt like all the learning and knowledge in the, in the background I had in that, like, I want to give it a go. I want to try solving it.

Eric (10:16.817)
When did the platform go live?

Sufyan (10:18.958)
It went live about a year and a half ago, so in June last year.

Eric (10:22.595)
Okay, how did you get your first customer, Sofyan?

Sufyan (10:25.762)
We got a cold calling. I mean, it's a marketplace at the end of the day, so there's supply and demand. And initially, starting with the supply side, and that was a lot of cold calling, mostly my co-founder, because my German is still not that fluent. And on the demand side, it was simply paid media or Google Ads.

Eric (10:46.659)
Yeah, now I know what you mean about speaking a foreign language. I tried making a reservation at a restaurant the other day here in Bucharest and my wife, she grabbed the phone from me and told the lady, Oh, my husband met at two o'clock, not, not eight o'clock or something like that.

Sufyan (11:05.678)
Yeah, I'm also actually learning Romanian too, because my wife's Moldovan. Um, yeah, I've been in Bucharest and also, yeah, around a few times.

Eric (11:09.568)
Oh really?

Eric (11:14.639)
Oh wow! You know, I went to Kisino or Chisino or Kisino this summer. Have you been there yet?

Sufyan (11:22.467)
Yes, and I'm also going on Sunday.

Eric (11:25.443)
Okay, have you gone to the underground winery in Kraikova? Come on, Sofyan, that's the thing to do. You gotta go check that out. It's like magnificent. It's like this underworld city. There's miles and miles of roads and millions of bottles of wine. They've got a cinema, they've got a church, but the best thing is the wine. Do the wine tasting. It is absolutely fantastic. I mean, the Moldavian wine, so delicious. It is so delicious. Yeah, yeah.

Sufyan (11:28.509)
Not yet.

Sufyan (11:54.728)
I haven't been to an underground city so that itself sounds quite exciting.

Eric (11:59.292)
Yeah, bring a jacket because it was quite chilly. I forgot to take one, but it was, it was quite chilly. Yeah. How interesting, how interesting you guys meet in Germany or. Okay. Very, very cool. Okay. So you got the supply side a little bit. You got some initial customers and what were some of the big hurdles? Uh, you know, we're getting this thing launched.

Sufyan (12:04.142)
Keep that in mind.

Sufyan (12:22.826)
I think launching was quite quick. There's low code, no code. You can build a platform, cold calling, spending some little money on ads gets you a lot. The biggest challenge here is just finding a scalable business model that doesn't hurt the long-term growth of the companies. How do you even make money from pet transaction at this point? The dynamics are quite interesting. So that's a challenge that we're still trying to figure out and a lot of experimentation. How do we solve the problem best, but at the same time?

scale, be in a position to get product market fit and start scaling rapidly.

Eric (12:58.023)
When customers find out about the platform, what do they like most about it? What gets them excited?

Sufyan (13:03.458)
So there are two types of customers. One that have had a dog and know a little bit, they pay immediately. They're so excited to talk and, oh, wow, this is so cool. And then there are people who don't understand the gravity. So there's a lot of awareness problem. And for them, if there is a sign-up wall or a paywall or things like that, it's like, oh, yeah, but I can find this somewhere else, too, and don't appreciate that this is literally the world's best and most vetted breeders.

on this platform and you're going to save so much money in the future and time and costs and heartache by getting it from a responsible source. Because at the end of the day, that's the, that's the most important thing in a, in when having a pet is having it from a good place, because that's how you ensure that one it's healthy and it won't end up in a shelter as well. So essentially people don't realize the amount of work and effort that go in, but people who do they're like very loyal and like

like true fans very quickly.

Eric (14:01.211)
Okay, now you said the best breeders globally, so are some of your breeders that are using the platform, are they also outside of Germany?

Sufyan (14:09.602)
They are outside of Germany. Right now, we have breeders in about five geographies, mostly in Europe. But it's also the vetting standards of the breeders is the highest in the world right now. And we want to make that somehow spread that across. But right now, we're really working on refining it until it's easy to also measure. Because you can have the standards, but making sure you have the right documents and the right way of testing is a different challenge that requires a lot more than a digital platform.

Eric (14:39.623)
Got you, got you. Okay, what are some of the top two or three vetting standards that a breeder must have?

Sufyan (14:48.022)
Yeah, so it all depends on the parent dogs as well. So there's of course some documents that they know, they're educated about how to raise and breed dogs and so forth. But the most important thing is all the parent dogs are checked because dogs have over 500 genetic conditions that are often lifelong and threatening and all preventable. So it's a lot of things with genetics. We work a lot with biologists and so forth. So having the right genetic tests and examinations from the vets is...

one of the most critical things that you need to know when getting a dog. Go to the parents, ask for the male dog and the female dog's genetic history because it is quite important.

Eric (15:26.951)
Okay, this stupid question here. I know there's sites like 23andMe or something like that where you can find out your genealogy. Are there sites like that for dogs?

Sufyan (15:36.702)
Yes, and it's quite big and growing as a business segment as well. Find the heritage of your dog. But what we talk about is simply, do they have a specific gene that makes them blind, or things like that, or blood-related conditions and heart-related conditions and so forth.

Eric (15:53.995)
Okay, this is great because now the new owner knows what to look for and knows how to treat the dog that they essentially are about to own. Tell us one or two success stories from people using the platform for the first time and finding their dog through your platform, Sofyan.

Sufyan (16:13.866)
Yeah, it's success. All looks the same. It's people who had been abandoned or like, because it's dodgy. Sometimes you get deposits. You asked to pay the deposit before you get a dog and they never hear back. So there was one person, she lost a dog recently and a lot of people when they lose their, they're quite depressed and sad. And oftentimes they go and jump one line and try to look for another one. And then they're very like easy targets. So if someone asks for money, they're willing to pay it. They're, they're grieving.

And that person, they got scammed a few times and then he come to honest dog and called us and we were able to connect them to, because it was a very emotional call, it wasn't just go to the platform and apply, it was sharing the story. And then they got a dog very, very quickly. And it was, it felt like that person was suffering and now the person is not suffering anymore to the, to the same extent and they're not being exploited, but God helped instead. And that sometimes I think about is, is an interesting thing to do as a business.

Eric (17:03.332)
Yeah.

Eric (17:13.881)
Yeah. Now, what are, are there plans to expand internationally? Are you just going to stay in Germany for a while?

Sufyan (17:19.53)
We have to expand internationally because most dogs, at least in Germany, come from outside Germany, from Poland and Romania and so forth. So this system really needs to be spread wide and far to have the maximum efficiency and efficacy. Yeah, because in the end, our mission really is to ensure no dogs are in the shelter. And to do that, we have to go to the source and we have to go far and wide and also do a lot of education. So yes.

Eric (17:49.611)
All right. What are you excited about in the next 12 months for Honest Dog?

Sufyan (17:54.594)
I'm very excited to start scaling and expanding to different countries. We're in this stage now for about seven months now where it was focused on monetization and getting the unit economics right, essentially. And I feel like we're extremely close. And so that's the next stage coming, which is a lot more on the scaling side.

Eric (18:14.935)
Okay, okay. All right. In terms of 2024 projections revenue, do you mind sharing that?

Sufyan (18:22.826)
We haven't done that yet. It's at pre-product market fit. It seems like a little bit of a throwing a dart in the air.

Eric (18:24.931)
Hahaha

Eric (18:34.517)
Yeah, yeah. Well, how else are you getting traction? I know you did co-calling in Germany, but to go internationally, are you guys going to try different tactics? What's your plan? Yeah, yeah.

Sufyan (18:42.57)
Yeah, so breeders are often organized under clubs, which have like a global parent and then the regional parents and then so forth and then like country organizations and then breed. So it's like a little umbrella. And we are working with basically the head of that big umbrella. It's in Germany, it's called VAUDEHA or VDH and FCI and they're in all countries. So if you do go to another country, that's the first step is asking them or partnering with them to get the supply side on the platform.

And then demand is quite effective to do through word of mouth and also just paid search. And we're also currently in the process of creating a movement around ethical standards and more transparency in the system. And we're hoping that spreads far and wide once we publish the research, also collaborating with universities and professors.

Eric (19:34.623)
All right. All right. Okay. Any questions about Honest Dog that I should have asked you but didn't?

Sufyan (19:43.15)
Phew. A lot of people ask you when are cats coming. Exactly.

Eric (19:49.607)
Cats? Who cares about cats, man? This is a dog podcast, man. There's no cat startup founders on this show. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha.

Sufyan (20:00.849)
I like dogs way more so rather expand other countries with dogs than go into cats.

Eric (20:06.135)
Yeah, man, a cat, you look at it and you can just tell it's plotting ways to kill you, man. There's no love from cats here. Okay, let's do a couple of rapid fire questions. The first one for you is blank is how I want to be remembered. How do you want to be remembered? Safian.

Sufyan (20:12.098)
Cats are evil.

Sufyan (20:28.15)
contrarian that ended up right in the long term.

Eric (20:31.507)
Okay, all right, and the next one for you, the Academy Award for Blank goes to Sefian.

Sufyan (20:46.26)
a big prank.

Big professional prank.

Eric (20:51.036)
Okay, okay. Have you done one recently? Did you do one on Buster or anybody else from the Sigma community?

Sufyan (20:57.958)
Not yet. I was reflecting in last year, I've done fewer pranks than normal, at least in a professional context. If you have your own company, it's a bit more different.

Eric (21:09.435)
Hey, okay. Here's, here's an idea for a prank, right? I got one for you. Okay. Instead of stock options and bonuses that, that you would give new hires, you can give them blank instead. What would that be?

Sufyan (21:24.394)
dog up.

Eric (21:26.331)
Dog options, doggie treats. Maybe some doggie treats, huh?

Sufyan (21:30.97)
We also have special colors and things like that.

Eric (21:35.171)
There you go. I like it. All right, Sofyan, thank you for coming on Innovators Can Laugh. I will include a link to Sofyan's LinkedIn profile as well as Ana's dog in the show notes. Sofyan, this has been a pleasure. Thank you. Yeah. Everybody listening, you enjoy this. Hit that subscribe button and tell others about it. I appreciate it. That's how we help the show to grow. And until next week, this is Eric signing off from Innovators Can Laugh. Thank you.

Sufyan (21:47.998)
I'm here Eric. Thanks a lot.

Eric (22:03.723)
Oh man, that was good.