Vendor management strategy planning

As a platform connecting pet parents with trusted pet sitters, pet sitters played an indispensable role at FurrySitter. With their quality and trustworthy service, FurrySitter will be able to attract new and returning customers. Therefore, we need to keep the pet sitters warm and engaged so that they will stay with doing business on FurrySitter instead of on other platform. We would like students to help us with our email marketing plan by preparing communication materials to pet sitters (our major vendor) at different stages from pre-enrolling for FurrySitter, on-boarding to post-sales follow up. Deliverables To achieve the plan, students are expected to: Draft and send out invitations to pet sitters to join FurrySitter. Hoping to recruit 30 pet sitters to join FurrySitter. Prepare email communications at different points of communications throughout pet sitters’ on-boarding journey to build bonds with our brand. Prepare post-sales follow up communications with survey to improve FurrySitter’s service and keep pet sitters engaged with the brand Business students looking for B2B (busines-to-business) experience with good communication skills would be ideal for this project.

Product launch strategic planning

FurrySitter is getting ready to launch by Q1 2022. Hence, we would like to have student internships helping in our Go-to-market plan. Students who are looking for practical experience in Digital marketing and/ or Social media will be benefited from taking part in this project. Objectives We hope to achieve the following targets through our “Go-to-market” plan: Drive 100 pet parent leads through social media promotion Obtain 5 early adaptors Deliverables Students will have chances to work on: Email marketing Develop social media strategy (for Facebook, Instagram and Twitter) based on company visual, value and mission Content planning/ Prepare content calendar for pre-launch stage and early launch (3-month duration) Prepare social contents (text, visual, hashtag) that drive brand awareness and leads Business or Marketing students with excellent writing and social media visual creation skills would be ideal for this project.

Web development: Pet sitter searching and booking

The project background With lots of researches and validation, core features and attributes of the platform are identified. We are now looking into launching to the market by Q1 2022. Hence, we are looking into building our first minimum viable product (MVP) to acquire our first group of customers. Without a partner with IT and technical knowledge, building a MVP is not an easy task. The project details This project is not only about coding and web pages development. Participants of the project are expected to gain hands-on experience not only on website development, but also user journey design, user experience, web design, web analytics and digital marketing. The core items to be delivered in this project included: Pet sitter search function Pet sitter profile template Booking forms for new and returning customers Pet sitter registration forms As the website of FurrySitter is already in place on WordPress , these new functions and pages will be “add-on” to the existing website. These newly set up pages are also expected to follow best website practices by having web analytic coding ready, responsive to the mobile screen and search engine friendly . Project expectation The website is expected to be ready for launch by Mar 2022 at the latest. For students who are not familiar with website design, you can team up with your friends and schoolmates to cover up each other.

Market acceptance of new pet-care service experience

About us In today’s world, it is nearly impossible to assess the quality of current pet sitting services. There have been cases of pet abuse or even missing pets. Evaluating the credibility and quality of pet sitters is, therefore, a major challenge for pet owners. The missing trust leaves owners with uncertainty and sometimes even guilt when hiring people to take care of their pets. Therefore, most pet owners are heavily reliant on peers' recommendations when choosing pet sitters, pet hotels, or daycare. FurrySitter aims to close this gap with a safe, reliable and trustworthy marketplace. The Airbnb of pet sitting. FurrySitter combines traditional pet care business (professional trainers) and technology (online personalized services) to bring pet parents a new pet care experience. We have the vision to bring happiness to the life of pets even though their parents might not be with them always. Our challenges Pet care marketplace is not a brand new idea with several market players in Canada already. With a high market potential, and without a dominating market leaders, we decided to go into the market, by placing ourselves in a different position in the market. A customer discovery research was conducted for an initial understanding of customer key concerns about pet caring. However, uncertainties like contradicting customer feedbacks or customers unable to visualize the business value, hold the startup back from proceeding with MVP development. The project, therefore, focuses on market research to achieve product-market fit for the business. Our objectives We would like to use a design thinking approach will be used to step by step develop a product that resonates with customers.Through one-on-one interviews, surveys, competitor analysis, identifying customer segments and archetypes, we hope to learn, clarify, and validate the following: Validate market acceptance of the proposed product features of FurrySitter with customers and sellers (i.e. solution fit) Understand the priority of product features from the view of customers and sellers Analyze and measure the attractiveness of the points of differentiation compared to the competitors Define customers’ and sellers’ market segments and chalk out their respective archetypes Validate market acceptance of value proposition and messaging for each defined segment/ persona In this way, FurrySitter has sufficient information for the building of MVP, defining a clear messaging strategy and value proposition with the ultimate goal to develop the “Go-to-market” strategy with the least amount of friction based on the analysis above. Our approach and expectation We hope to adopt a mixed method approach for market acceptance and product feature deep-dive, with the combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis to come up with the deliverables below: Quantitative survey SWOT analysis Perceptual mapping Market sizing Analyze of competitors’ online activities Customer archetypes and unique value proposition development A/B testing on messaging strategy