Your ultimate dog helper: manage vaccinations, schedule grooming,boarding,training,vet, do health tests, find good products & much more
Barkily is an app for organizing and keeping track of your dog’s life (or dogs’ lives if you’re like me and have multiple pooches). And if you don’t believe a dog’s life warrants having an app for organization, read on ..
Let me tell you why I think the world needs Barkily.
Last year, I got a shock when I looked at the medication bottle for one of my five dogs. (Yes, five. I told you I love dogs.) There, on the label, it had warnings like:
How was it even possible that my dog’s medication had a label that was clearly meant for humans?
I could’ve just dismissed it with a chuckle as poor service from that one company, but as a true dog lover, I wanted to come up with something that would make sure this kind of thing didn’t happen again. It’s not that the label was dangerous to my dog, but to me, aside from being kind of funny, it also seemed pretty disrespectful to my dog.
Yeah, I said it: Disrespectful.
Just like you, my family and I don’t see our dogs as merely pets. They’re siblings to my children and they’re furry little bundles of joy to all of us. For the companionship and affection that they unabashedly bring into our lives, dogs deserve the best care we can provide.
The label on my dog’s medication made me realize that dogs are not getting the attention they deserve from companies. We should be doing a much better job serving these little (and not-so-little) sources of happiness in our lives. There should be a better way to show our love and appreciation for our pooches and that’s why I’ve recruited a wonderful team to create Barkil
Dog lovers know that there is much more that keeps their dog healthy and happy apart from obvious activities like eating, sleeping and going for walks or car rides. This is where Barkily enters the scene, which is more of a ‘Doggy Day Planner’.
When you join Barkily, you will be provided with a tag for your dog that includes a unique QR code for their identification. All the relevant information of your dog will be stored in that tag. To view the information related to any dog, a person will have to scan the QR code by using a device with QR scanning ability.
They will be able to see all the information that you chose to share about your dog via the QR code. But there’s a twist in the tale! You can opt to make some information public and keep other information private. This ensures that nothing but only the relevant information reaches the relevant person (information meant for the vet will not reach the groomer or vice versa) and not anyone else. This means no need to fill out countless forms with the same information every single time you visit a service provider or dog care vendor.
All this information is stored online. This way, you can easily access or update it from any device. Also, anyone can access your dog’s public information with their mobile phone’s QR code scanner, but only after getting approved by you.
When is it useful?
At Barkily, we understand that raising a dog can get really expensive. This is why we want to keep the basic Barkily app free for everyone to download. The idea behind this app is to make the world a better place for our pet pooches. It is all about reaching maximum number of dogs and their owners along with dog care service providers. Barkily being a free to download app, allows us to do that. After all, if our fur buddies can bring so much joy in our lives, then why not take the initiative and leave no stones unturned in keeping them safe, happy and healthy?
We expect Barkily to become something similar to a Facebook Login ID for your dog. Just like you use your Facebook profile to sign in instantly to a new website, you will be able to access a lot of services using the Barkily Login ID. This eliminates the need for creating a separate account every time (which can be quite time-consuming) or remembering each and every detail about your dog viz. its breed, age, color, vaccinations and other information.
In short, the Barkily Login ID will allow you sign in instantly to any website you want and all the information about your dog will be there automatically. Because the information doesn’t change from site to site or needs to be entered multiple times, the chances of an error is next to NIL.
Barkily isn’t just about helping the dogs in our lives. And apart from dog owners, it’s also about helping people associated with dog care. Hence, another goal that we want to accomplish with Barkily, is to provide a free platform for small vendors, which they can use for appointment bookings.
This means that professionals like dog walkers, dog sitters and dog groomers will be able to use Barkily as a business tool and make their lives easier. Did we mention that we’re not even going to charge them for that?
If we make it easier for these small vendors to run their business, more qualified people will join hands and offer their services at a reduced cost. This in turn, will lead to a win-win situation for dogs and dog owners as well.
In addition to the free app for everyone to download, we will also have a paid members’ section in the app: the Dog Lover’s (DL) section. The DL section will be accessible for a $20/month (or $210.00/year) subscription and include:
DL members will receive more than $20 per month of coupon savings and freebies. This is more than what they pay for the DL membership.
By paying to become a DL member, you’ll be able to stay updated with new products and services on the market. While DL members will get all the products for free, the non-paying members will also benefit by getting the information about the latest dog products and the discounts available. It must be noted that the discount on the products for them will be less than that of the paying members.
Barkily is designed by the dog people for the dog people. It’s not backed by a firm, which has profit as its sole objective. Our motivation is and always will be – to help all dogs live a healthy and happy life. This can only be done by making it easy for vendors and owners to come together and interact on a common platform.
We also don’t want to tackle just one specific area of dog ownership. There are a lot of dog apps on the market that address just a single aspect of owning a dog. Barkily begs to differ by being an all-rounder app that can be used as on a daily basis. It can be used as a day planner, a calendar, a Yellow Pages and a notebook that is exclusively meant for dogs.
This makes Barkily a lot more than just an app or even just a firm. It is more like a community of “dog people”. Therefore, when you download Barkily, you aren’t just downloading an app, but joining a community of dog loving people. It is this community of people, who recognize the integral role that dogs play in our lives and understand why we should treat them with the utmost care and respect.
In addition to the app, Barkily also has a number of products that will keep your dog healthy and happy.
Barkily Health Check Test
This simple-to-use test will give you an overall picture of your dog’s health. All you have to do is gather a small sample of your dog’s urine and perform the test easily at home.
Barkily DNA Genetic Disease Test
This test informs you about the various diseases that your dog may be susceptible to. All you have to do is take a sample of your dog’s saliva and mail it — using the pre-addressed, pre-stamped envelope — to Barkily’s certified laboratory.
You will receive the result of the test within a few days. The result will tell you about the diseases that you need to watch out for. For example, the test will be able to tell you whether or not your dog comes from a lineage that is susceptible to certain forms of cancer.
Knowing about the diseases that your dog is more likely to develop will allow you to pass that information along to your veterinarian and therefore, you can give your dog a better quality of life.
As you may or may not know, developing an app is expensive. But it is even more expensive to develop the relationships and build data and connections needed for making the app successful. We can make the best app in the world, but if we don’t have a good user base to begin with, we can’t label our app successful.
Using Kickstarter and getting support from real people will give our concept/app a boost and help us procure better deals from pet product and service companies. We want to convince these product and service providers to use Barkily and help them sell their products and services. And there is nothing like a successful Kickstarter campaign, which can convince businesses to join us in our endeavor.
We also want Barkily to be less revenue-oriented. Obviously, we need to cover our costs of developing the app and other expenses, but we don’t want Barkily to be all about maximizing profits to cover those costs. That’s where Kickstarter comes in. If we get enough revenue on Kickstarter, we can concentrate on Barkily’s main goal of making the world a better place for our furry buddies.
By gaining support via Kickstarter and having a paid membership section, we can avoid having any kind of sponsorship deals or advertising from pet product and service providers. This is important to us because we want to be a 100% objective review center for all dog-related service providers and vendors. So, if we keep our independence, we can keep that true objectivity.
About 45 days after we’ve reached our funding goal, we plan to release the app to download for free. We intend to release an update later, which will include the Premium Dog Lover section. After that, we will roll out city-specific features one by one till we achieve comprehensive coverage in the United States (or, in the major cities in the USA, at least).
We want to build a comprehensive community of dog product and service providers for Barkily App users. The more business partners we have, the more dogs we can serve and the more dogs we can serve, the more attractive our community will be to potential business partners.
The usefulness of the app for the dog owners will depend partially on how many vendors we manage to get on board. So, the main risk we will face with Barkily is not signing up enough dog business vendors and/or not getting enough people interested in the app. If we don’t get enough vendors, the app’s functionality will remain largely unaffected, but some of the app’s additional benefits will not be as impactful as originally intended.
On the other hand, if we cannot attract enough interest from dog owners for the app, it will be more difficult to attract vendors to sign up because a large pool of potential customers (app users) would entice the vendors to sign up. We cannot have one without the other.
We are qualified to overcome these risks because we have a team that has been working in sales and marketing for decades. The combined marketing experience of our team will allow us to promote Barkily in the best way possible to our target audience (dog owners and dog vendors).
With our collective effort, we want both dog owners and vendors to see and understand the benefit of downloading and using the app or registering as product or service providers. We are confident that once a large number of dog owners and businesses are on board, the positive reviews posted by them will prompt more people to start using it.
Apart from the experience of our team, our app fills a niche that has yet to be addressed by any other app, which makes Barkily truly unique in the space we are operating in. This is what we will be promoting majorly in various media, including dog magazines, social media pages and throughout the dog loving community in the United States.
Our app is in its development phase right now and we’re raising additional funds for marketing and outreach to dog product vendors and canine service providers. We are waiting for them to join the Barkily community.