One of the things that makes pet care services interesting is that the practical need is usually easy to understand, but the decision to use the service is much more emotional. A dog parent might need someone to walk their dog every day because they are at work. They might want a groomer to come home once a month. They might need somewhere for their dog to stay while they travel. In each case, paying someone to do the task is the easy part. Trusting them with your dog is much harder. I see this most clearly with first-time customers. They want to know who is coming, how they have been trained, whether they have handled dogs like theirs before and what happens if something goes wrong. When it comes to boarding, the questions become even more detailed because the pet parent might be leaving their dog with someone for several days. None of this feels excessive when you think about what the customer is actually doing. They are handing responsibility for someone they love to a person they may have never met before. This also means that trust in pet care cannot be built entirely through branding or marketing. Those things can help someone make the first booking, but the service itself has to do most of the work after that. The walker has to show up consistently. The groomer has to handle the dog well. The boarding experience has to make the parent comfortable enough to leave town without worrying constantly. Each good experience makes the next booking a little easier. Eventually, the customer stops wondering whether everything will go well. I think that is when a pet care service has really earned its place in someone’s life.

One thing I have learned over the years is that a customer complaint is rarely just about the complaint itself. Someone writes in because their experience went wrong, but understanding why it went wrong can take you surprisingly deep into the business. You might start with a customer whose service did not happen as expected and discover that the issue came from an operational process. When you look at the process, you realise it exists because the product does not handle a particular scenario. You then discover that the support team has been manually solving variations of the same problem for months. This is why I have become much more interested in complaints that initially look like isolated incidents. Resolving the immediate problem is important, but I also want to understand whether the same thing could happen to another customer tomorrow. Sometimes it really is a one-off problem. People make mistakes and unusual edge cases happen. At other times, one complaint reveals a pattern that has been sitting quietly underneath the surface. Those are the complaints I find particularly useful. Following the thread can lead to changing a process, fixing a product flow, improving communication or removing manual work that nobody had thought to question. Dashboards are useful because they tell you what is happening across thousands of customers. Individual customer experiences give you a different kind of information because they show you what those numbers actually feel like for one person. A metric might tell you that 98% of something is working perfectly. I have learned that the person sitting inside the other 2% can sometimes tell you much more about what needs to get better.

I am convinced that every family with a dog eventually develops a language that would make absolutely no sense to anyone else. The dog starts with a perfectly normal name. Within a few months, that name has somehow produced six nicknames, three of which bear no resemblance to the original. Normal words also acquire very specific meanings. “Walk” cannot be said casually anymore, so you start spelling it out. Eventually the dog learns what W-A-L-K means, and you are forced to find a new code word. Certain sentences become part of the household vocabulary. “Did you feed him?” becomes an important handover question. “What is in your mouth?” is asked with surprising frequency. “Why are you wet?” is rarely answered satisfactorily. Then there are entire conversations where everyone talks on behalf of the dog. Someone says, “He is upset with you.” Another person responds, “No, he understands why I had to leave.” The dog, meanwhile, is asleep. Somewhere along the way, they stop feeling like an animal who lives in your house and become a character in the family. They have preferences everyone knows, relationships with different people, established routines and a personality that gets discussed even when they are not in the room. I think this is one of the funniest parts of the human-dog relationship. You bring home a dog. A few years later, four adults are spelling common English words around them and having serious debates about what they are thinking. This seems completely normal until someone without a dog comes over.

Nothing like a coffee shop think sesh with your cofounder / best friend

I used to think about growth as finding the thing that works. The right channel, campaign, product feature or message would click, and you would suddenly have a much clearer path to scale. I spend much less time looking for that one thing now. Most of the growth I have seen up close has been much more incremental. You improve conversion on one page. You find a creative format that performs slightly better. You reduce cancellations. You get more customers to come back. You improve the experience enough that referrals increase. You fix a part of the funnel where people were quietly dropping off. None of these changes look particularly impressive on their own. Together, they can materially change a business. This has also changed the way I think about growth problems. When growth slows down, my instinct used to be to ask what new thing we should try. Now I am equally interested in where the existing system is leaking. Sometimes the answer is a new channel or a big new idea. Often, there are five fairly ordinary problems sitting inside the existing business that each make things slightly harder than they need to be. Fixing them is less exciting than discovering a magical new acquisition channel. It is also usually more within your control. I still love the idea of finding something that suddenly changes the trajectory of a business. I have just become much more appreciative of the boring work that compounds while you are waiting for it.

One of the things I find interesting about pet care is how much infrastructure sits behind the simple decision to get a dog. There is the everyday care. Who walks the dog when you have a long day at work or cannot make it home on time? There is the regular care. Who grooms them every month and knows how to handle them comfortably? Then there are the moments when your routine changes completely. Who looks after them when you travel for a week? Walking, grooming and boarding solve very different problems, but they have something important in common. They all require a pet parent to trust another person with their dog. For a long time, a lot of this care in India has been managed informally. A domestic worker walks the dog. A local groomer comes home. A friend, family member or neighbourhood boarder takes care of them during a holiday. These systems often work well, but they can also be fragile. As our lives get busier, pet care needs to become more dependable. A walker needs to show up every day, with a backup available when they cannot. A groomer needs to deliver a consistent experience every month. A boarding service needs to make someone comfortable enough to leave their dog behind and actually enjoy their holiday. None of these are particularly complicated needs. Delivering them reliably is complicated. I think a large part of the next phase of pet care in India will be about building this infrastructure. The goal is quite simple. Pet parents should be able to live full lives while knowing that their dogs are being cared for properly. Making that feel simple requires a lot of complexity behind the scenes.

I used to think that with enough experience, making difficult decisions would become easier. I am not sure that has happened. What has changed is that I am quicker at figuring out what the actual decision is. A lot of difficult decisions arrive disguised as requests for more information. We need another analysis. We should have one more conversation. Maybe we should wait another week and see what happens. Sometimes that is genuinely useful. Sometimes you already have most of the information you are going to get, and the uncomfortable part is accepting that there is no version of the decision where you get certainty first. I have become more comfortable with that over time. I also spend more time asking myself what would need to be true for a decision to be obviously right or wrong. Usually that makes the unknowns much clearer. The decisions themselves have not become smaller. If anything, the consequences get larger as the business grows and more people are affected by them. I still overthink some of them. I still occasionally wait for a piece of information that changes absolutely nothing. I still get things wrong. Experience has mostly helped me separate uncertainty that can actually be resolved from uncertainty that is simply part of making the call. That distinction has become increasingly useful. I am still waiting for the stage where difficult decisions start feeling easy. I am beginning to suspect that stage does not exist.

One of my favourite things about dogs is how little respect they have for the importance we assign to our own lives. You can spend the day dealing with a difficult problem, sitting through serious meetings or making a decision you have been thinking about for weeks. Then you come home and your dog has one question. Are we going for a walk? They do not care that the meeting went well. They have no interest in your quarterly targets. They are unmoved by the email that ruined your afternoon. They care that you are home. There is something wonderfully grounding about living with an animal whose priorities are so uncomplicated. Food should arrive roughly on time. Walks should happen frequently. Interesting smells should be investigated thoroughly. People you love should be greeted as though they have returned from war, even if they only went downstairs for ten minutes. I think this is part of why dogs become such an important presence in our lives. Our days can become very good at convincing us that everything is urgent and consequential. Dogs remain completely unconvinced. Whatever happened today, there is still dinner to eat, a walk to take and a spot on the sofa that needs occupying. Sometimes that is a useful perspective to come home to.

Working in pet care has made me think differently about how people make purchasing decisions. Most of us like to believe we are fairly rational consumers. Then we get a dog. Suddenly, a purchase is rarely just about the product. A dog parent buying food is thinking about health, taste and whether their dog will actually eat it. Someone choosing a groomer is thinking about whether their dog will be comfortable with a stranger. Someone finding a walker is deciding who they are comfortable trusting with their dog when they are not around. There is a lot of emotion sitting underneath seemingly functional decisions. I see this constantly in conversations with dog parents. People will spend hours researching something for their dog that they would buy for themselves in five minutes. They notice tiny changes in behaviour. They remember bad experiences for a long time. They also feel guilty surprisingly often. They worry that they are not walking their dog enough, spending enough time with them or feeding them the right thing. It makes pet care an interesting consumer category because the person paying for the product is not the person using it. The customer has to interpret whether someone else, who cannot give them a review, is happy with the decision. So they look for other signals. Did my dog finish the bowl? Did they seem happy after the groom? Do they get excited when the walker arrives? After spending years around dog parents, I have realised that a surprising amount of pet care comes down to one question: “Does my dog seem happy with this?” It is an extremely unscientific metric. It is also probably the one that matters most.