ZINOpreneur of the Week: Tom Arnold of PetHub

Tom Arnold and Ullr

Our ZINO Society featured ZINOpreneur Member this week is Tom Arnold, Founder and CEO of PetHub.

Following due diligence, Tom Arnold and PetHub were recently announced and recognized this week as the ZINO Annual Angel Investment Fund-2012 fund allocation winner for the ZINO Marketplace Investment Forum which occurred a couple of months ago.

We asked him to share the answers to a few questions about himself and his company, PetHub.

• What is your one-sentence elevator pitch? . . .

One-liner: We get four-legged family members home faster and safer through digital ID tags that link to a free online profile with options for GPS location services,  “Amber Alerts,” and emergency medical insurance.

Longer elevator ride includes: Success stories can be found at http://PetHubFound.us

Tom Arnold with ZAAIF-2012 check.

Longest elevator ride includes: Fan videos can be found at http://PetHub.tv

• How did you come up with the idea for your company? . . .

I was managing a software project for Microsoft in India for 3 months and felt out of touch with my pets. I wanted very simple updates and photos letting me know how they were doing and notifications if anything went wrong.  This grew into a much bigger vision for a central information store for all my pets’ information coupled with a state of the art retrieval service.

• The word that best describes your company culture is . . .

Passionate.  We’re all pet owners at PetHub and we’re focused on creating solutions that we ourselves want for the animals we watch over.

• How are you different from your competition? . . . 

First and foremost, we were the first out with a QR code ID tag and first with GPS notifications and email alerts.  We helped create this category of service and we’re ahead of our competitors when it comes to continual innovation.  Second, we’re software experts so we know how to build robust, reliable and scalable software platforms.  That means we can scale quickly and have planned for a global presence.  Candidly, our competitors copy our surface-level solution of a tag and a free profile (which I suppose is a compliment) but we’ve focused on building a platform / SaaS approach that empowers large pet industry players to have a turn-key solution.  We are essentially the software behind a variety of industry players whose solution is “Powered by PetHub.”

• What is the biggest challenge you face? . . .

I see two equally-sized challenges:

1)   We need to build our sales & marketing team which is what our Series A raise is all about.  We have advisors in the tech and pet industries who are keeping us moving forward, but we need a dedicated pet industry executive to own our sales & marketing initiatives, who understands the industry and can help us forge partnerships.

2)   There is so much opportunity, it’s a constant challenge to pick the top-3 initiatives and filter the rest. The industry is $56B in the U.S. alone with so many sectors that we can work with: pet food, insurance, veterinarians, shelters, and many more potential channels.  “Discipline” is the keyword we live by followed closely by our favorite phrase, “Keep It Super Simple.”

• How much money have you raised to date? . . . 

We were lucky to have family and friends who seeded us with $1.3M that’s been used for R&D over the past 3 years to get us to a scalable and proven product.

• If someone gave your company $3 million tomorrow, how would you use the money? . . . 

We would use that to scale faster, broaden our focus on partnerships, and bring in talent sooner than our current timeline allows.

·         Why will your company be successful? . . .

A few reasons:

1)   Experience: I’ve personally been through 3 bootstrap start-ups so I feel like I know what the road ahead looks like.

2)   Team: We are a group that is not only passionate about what we’re working on, we’ve brought the right talent to the team.  Jim Collins, author of “Good to Great,” compares a business to a bus. You get the right people with the right attitude and passion on the bus and you get them into the right seats.  If you realize you have someone that doesn’t fit either into one of the seats or have the correct attitude, you help them off of the bus.  After 3 years of building and refining this team, we have an incredible group of people and we plan to continue to raise the bar as we invite more people onto the PetHub bus.

3)   Customer Focused: We love talking to and interacting with our customers.  It comes through loud and clear as we are at nearly 28,000 fans on our Facebook fan page having jumped nearly 14,000 fans within the past two months.  We are quickly nearing a critical mass.