SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
His chip is Inside 176,000 Dogs, $1m in Revenue, Big Help for Vets
27 Nov 2022
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. And there you have it.
Piva.co launched to help you not only keep track of your dog or your animals in general in case they're lost or stolen, but also to make sure all your medical records from the vet perspective all stay in one place. You can have that history. They've shipped 300,000 of these chips.
They believe about 176,000 have actually been installed and did over a million bucks in revenue last year with a team of 14 bootstrapped, which we love. Hey, folks. My guest today is Michael Hamilton.
Chapter 2: How does Piva.co help pet owners and veterinarians?
He's the founder and CEO of PEVA. That's P-E-E-V-A. Before tuning into entrepreneurship, he developed more than a decade of experience in New York managing litigation support and e-discovery projects for some of the nation's largest law firms and corporations. All right, Michael, you ready to take us to the top?
Sure. Yeah, absolutely.
What's an e-discovery project?
Electronic data discovery. It's just glorified photocopying electronic formats.
There you go.
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Chapter 3: What challenges does the veterinary industry face with data?
Okay, so loop this now into what Piva is working on and how this has to do with pets and microchips.
It really has absolutely nothing to do with it other than ultimately dealing with large data sets. The pet problem is ultimately a data problem. The field of veterinary care in general is extremely fragmented. It lags behind other industries technologically. And to resolve the problem over missing pets, you have to resolve the data problem.
That's what we're essentially doing with a critical mass of data. PIVA is a universal pet tracking system. So we can read any brand of microchip or microchips can be read by any brand of scanner. We're the first to read, record, analyze, catalog any brand of microchip, regardless of the manufacturer.
Chapter 4: How does Piva ensure a universal pet tracking system?
And we pair literally millions of pet microchip IDs with pet medical records in one centralized location. So that streamlines a veterinarian shelter worker workflow to ensure that microchips are scanned and pet owners are instantly notified the exact second that their pets microchips are scanned. So we're essentially two, you know, B2C and we're B2B, right? Yeah.
That might get a little confusing when you want to start talking about percentages, you know, ARR and MRR and all that fun stuff.
I would say you're B2B, but really then it's C to D, consumer to dog, right? Flushing that out. Help me understand. People are going to hear microchip. They're going to go, wait a second, wait a second.
Chapter 5: What incentives does Piva offer to veterinarians?
So let me just sort of break this down and try and dumb it down for me. If I have a great golden retriever, he sees the vet once every two months. Sometimes it's a different vet, though, because I'm on vacation or I'm moving around. How do you incentivize vets to submit the data? It could be different vets to your central database that then shows on the microchip.
Yeah, that's an excellent question. With every hospital that we onboard, we take a hard look at the data. So we have a breakdown of every pet that has a microchip, the brand of microchip, every pet that does not have a microchip, the breakdown of how many pets, how often they're seen that year. So we know exactly what we're getting.
So we're essentially providing a service for them by pulling all this data together.
Chapter 6: How does Piva make money through its microchip system?
And then we're able to garner a critical mass because every pet that is already chipped with another brand is auto-enrolled into PIVA at no cost to the hospital or the pet owner. They just have to kind of confirm their accounts. But that's really, really important.
Michael, wait, do you also make your own chips or are you just aggregating other people's chip data?
We distribute our own chips. We do not manufacture our own chips. We distribute them.
I see.
We will register any brand of microchip. And to offset that upfront cost, right?
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Chapter 7: What has been Piva's revenue growth and success so far?
Vets are required to scan every pet or vet techs, every pet that comes into their office. And then vet techs add a line list of six or seven bullet points, the benefits of microchipping, specifically microchipping with PIVA. They then register the pet on site and then we bill the vet.
Got it. So what... What brand? I'm looking at your website right now. This is very interesting. It almost looks like a turkey syringe, ISO compliant transponder that holds like, it looks like a pill almost. Who's manufacturing these for you?
Chapter 8: What advice does the guest have for aspiring tech entrepreneurs?
A company called Wuxi in Shanghai.
Okay. How'd you, I'm less interested in who they are. I'm more interested in why you pick them.
Our electrical engineers just vetted everybody out. It was very important that they have what is called an ISO certification. See, in the States, part of the problem is not all microchips can be read by all microchip scanners because there's multiple distributors, multiple frequencies. So in Canada and the UK and everywhere else, they have a specific frequency.
So we chose that brand over the others to truly be a universal microchip. But we can also lead any other brand of microchip as well.
Yeah. So what does one of these things cost you?
Me?
Well, not you, but the company, the company, Piva. What do you pay?
It's a volume game. I mean, if you got them individually, they'd be really expensive, but literally less than... with hundreds of thousands of these things there, they can come down and cost considerably.
Okay. Interesting. So when you first launched, I'm going to get your origin story here in a second, but when you first launched, what was the order size you got as your sort of first, you know, slot of inventory? Are we talking like, like a thousand or 10,000 or a million or what?
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