Startup Showcase: Tailster

Where is the company based and why?

Tailster is headquartered in Central London and we are a small team of 10.

More than 11,000 carers across the UK use the Tailster platform, with over 120,000 users on our platform, we do have a presence across the whole country. We chose London because that’s where the talent is, and being purely selfish, I live in London, so that’s why we are here!

How big is your company and what are your technology demands?

We have 120,000 signed up users, 11,000+ carers and hundreds of new carer applications daily – we’ve helped over 65,000 pet owners with requests to look after their dogs, cats, guinea pigs and small animals. Personalised quotes of over £15 million have flowed through our platform since we launched in 2015.

We’re able to help customers with urgent requests, in tears outside hotel lobbies with their dogs who are being turned away by the hotel in less than 20 minutes, right through to people booking in their pet care for Christmas 2017.

Through our site, and multiple web apps, and largely data driven workflows and processes in the backend – we’ve built this for scale, collecting millions of data points and events per month. All built in the cloud, we’re able to handle the traffic that comes to us, in particular the GPS points collected on our dog walks. We’ve tried to build something elegant and simple for the pet owners and carers, whilst the magic happens in the background.

Where do you see your company in the next five years?

The goal is to make Tailster THE trusted brand for pet care across the UK and Europe. This money is being spent already, we would like to help owners spend it easily with all the added benefits we offer. We’ve got some interesting surprises up our sleeves too.

We will be launching in Europe in early 2017 in new territories, and we just launched our Pet Grooming service in London this month – so we will be kept super busy!

How can the UK government help startups in the UK and will Brexit have any impact?

The UK government has been helpful in providing various tax breaks such as SEIS/ EIS to encourage investment into young businesses. We’ve been able to make use of that but I find that there are still many young startups out there that are unaware of such schemes existing.

In terms of Brexit, I’m not entirely sure about the short term – we’ve not seen any impact to our business – pet owners spend money on their pets regardless so we’re almost recession proof. Brexit may impact us going forwards with our plans to launch in Europe but it’s still a small unknown. In terms of attracting great talent, this might become difficult – two thirds of our development team are from outside the UK – that great talent might decide that Berlin or other tech hubs are a better place to move to. We’ll make sure that we do the utmost to keep that talent here at Tailster though.

Which tech company do you personally admire and why?

Amazon is everywhere – some may say their approach is ruthless but what they do is simple and easy, and it’s become a massive part of our lives. I go home to probably a new amazon box every other day. The whole process and service is frictionless, and I admire that – even though they’ve made it super easy for my wife to buy stuff we probably don’t need!

Quiz: What do you know about mobile apps?