The founders of PlayDate express their excitement after finding out they received $100,000 in flash funding from Arrow for PlayDate, a smart, interactive toy that lets you play with your pet from anywhere in the world. Discussing the advantages of Arrow Certification, the entrepreneurs explain how working with engineers and connecting to interested buyers helped them create a stronger, more desirable end product.
I'm Kevin Li and I'm CEO and Co-Founder of PlayDate. I'm Anthony Chien, Co-Founder and CTO of PlayDate. All in all we are just really, really excited to bring this product to life and to bring it to our backers. It is really cool to be able to conceptualize it, talk to our potential customers or customers seeing what they actually want, and then bring that to life and delivering on it. Obviously, the flash funding is going to help that.
He was working on his laptop as usual, head down, working really hard and then he pauses. He said, we just won a hundred thousand dollars and then immediately I get up on my chair, do a little dance and scream. He continues to just stare blankly at his computer screen in disbelief. Kevin had to re-read the email a few times.
We started working together around two years ago on a completely different startup idea, actually. It was working through that and then failing that we discovered this new exciting market of pet tech. So the idea behind PlayDate started about two years ago, I'd started fostering a dog because one of Anthony's friends had actually recommended that fostering would be a great way to try out having a pet. I prototyped an activity tracker for him, slapped it on him for the walks around the city and it was just a hobby project. But we revived it last year, and as we talked to more and more pet owners, they kept coming back saying that the bigger problem they had is that the feel guilty leaving their dog home alone all day. That is how PlayDate was born.
We chose Indiegogo as a crowdfunding platform because it has really great plugs for analytics. We're both quantitative guys and we both love data and one of the great things about Indiegogo is they have good plugs for all the typical analytics platforms that you would expect. One of the great things about crowdfunding that people often don't think about or talk about is that you gain a lot of insight into customer behavior and their needs. Through them, we've been able to get a lot of feedback both in terms of what features they like, what features they don't like; really identify who the key customers are for what we are working on.
One of the great parts of the Arrow Certification Program is, it puts us in touch with engineers who are really familiar with the supply chain management as well as manufacturing. So we have a few open problems that keep us up at night and being able to talk to some experts who do this day in and day out has been incredibly valuable. I would absolutely recommend other entrepreneurs to apply for the certification program. I think there's just a tremendous amount to gain through the process.