SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 90: Quitting Corporate and Going all In With Her Own $50k with Sonya
22 Oct 2015
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per talk. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark.
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Okay, guys, don't forget to tune in tomorrow morning where you're going to hear from Brian Brushwood, where I finally asked him, do you make a lot of money producing reality shows? All right, Top Tribe, good morning. You can feel it in the air. October and Halloween is coming amongst us, and you're going to love our guest today.
Take your mind off costumes for a second and focus in. Her name is Sonia Petkovic, and she is the founder and CEO of Meowtel.com, the internet's only cat-sitting platform that shares profits with local shelters. She's an alumna of UC Berkeley and went on to have a successful career in big tobacco, where she then left the industry to pursue business. her startup.
Sonia, are you ready to take us to the top?
So ready.
Yes, I love it. First off, is hometown for you Richmond, Virginia?
No, hometown is San Diego, California.
Ah, very good. Okay, I thought you were really close for some reason. Well, let me back up a second. Anything about your bio that I missed that you think the top tribe really needs to know? I don't think so. Okay.
Go ahead.
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Chapter 2: What motivated Sonya to leave her corporate job at Big Tobacco?
So from there, I got a full-time offer to come on board after graduation, and the rest is kind of history from there.
Okay, and so tell me what year you left the tobacco company.
Yeah, I left in July 2015, so a few months ago.
Okay, got it. And then tell me, is that when you started the cat company? Yes. Okay, so walk us through that. Why did you start it and what's it do?
So I've been a cat owner all my life. And in January of this year, my cat of 17 years, Miss Lily, she passed away.
Oh, wow.
And while I was working for Altria, I traveled quite frequently. Um, I was probably gone for up to two to three weeks every month. So she was at home alone all the time. Cause it was just a hassle to find a cat sitter for her that I could trust. So that coupled with the fact that once she passed, I knew I would be moving around the country and then going to grad school overseas.
So I couldn't commit to a new forever cat. So I just wanted a way to be able to help cats, whether that was through cat sitting or fostering kittens or shelter cats. And that's kind of how Meowtel came about. I wanted to be able to create a service where it's easy for cat owners to be paired up with cat sitters and then be able to help shelters at the same time.
Okay, so how does it work? I have a cat. I come to you. What do I pay you and what do I get?
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Chapter 3: How did Sonya come up with the idea for Meowtel?
Yeah. Can you hear me? Sorry. Yeah. So give me a range. If you're not comfortable with an exact number, like again, just speak to the listeners that are wondering how much should I have to set aside to jump in and do my own thing?
Sure. So it really depends on what kind of site you want, since the website is the main product that we offer to generate our revenue. I wanted to make sure it was a top notch. So if you want a site, that's kind of the caliber of me, I'll tell that's completely designed. It's not like a WordPress template. you're gonna be looking at least probably 50K to put into your startup.
If you wanna take the easy route out, you can probably get away with only investing five to 10K.
And did you go the easy route or the quality route?
I went the quality route.
There you go. So it's fair to say, we won't say specific number, but we can say more than 50 grand. Correct. Okay, got it. That's fair enough and that's valuable. So, yeah, and you spent a lot of that money. Do you have a team? Have you hired a team or is it still you and just the website costs?
Team as in internal employees?
Yeah. Have you hired anybody?
Nope. Cause we don't have formal funding for that yet.
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Chapter 4: What is the business model of Meowtel and how does it work?
Okay. So some people have young cats that need a lot of attention and they travel frequently. So they just need a sitter to stop by maybe once or twice a week. Um, other people, they go on extended vacations and want someone to come in on a daily basis and feed their cats for a week at a time.
So what is your hypothesis of, of like how, what are you doing on a daily basis to hustle and get more owners, you know, using Meowtel?
That's a great question. It's a lot of manual work. So perusing existing websites, that are out there that have sitter listings such as Yelp, Craigslist. But the tough thing there is that we want quality sitters. So I'm looking into a way to get background checks conducted that won't break the bank and kind of set up a verification process.
And we have one in place, but I would like to make it a little more stringent.
Well, it's like you've got a marketplace, right? I mean, that's the tricky thing about this business. You have to not only get sitters to list, but then you have to get owners to use the thing to find sitters.
Right. And you have to make sure that they all stay in equilibrium for all the cities that you're in or else, you know, the sitters will be like, oh, I don't believe in this service because there's no one booking my sitting services and vice versa if you're a cat owner. Yeah. And there's no sitters available. So it is pretty tricky.
And it's kind of balancing out our spend on online advertising via Facebook and Twitter and then actually doing the hustling and emailing leads directly to to let them know about their service that could potentially build a sitter's clientele.
I see. I see. And so what are you, again, I'm really trying to put my mindset in, in terms of, let's say there's a listener right now who's in corporate, they're going out, they're thinking I need to save 20, 30, 40,000 bucks to really start the thing. How do you know if like, do you, have you set a deadline for yourself and said, I'm going to be consistent and hustle until this date.
And if I don't have X happening, I'm going to go back to tobacco or have you set any milestones like that for yourself?
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