Much of my career has been spent in financial services, specifically insurtech, though more recently in the pet health space where I met Biscuit’s co-founder Justin Dexter.

As a pet parent to two dogs and a cat I have a genuine determination to deliver positive outcomes (both business and social) for the good of our pets and their parents.

The wellbeing issues affecting our nation’s pets (obesity, anxiety, unwanted behaviours, preventable conditions, etc) are very evident. They have a devastating impact on not only our pets but also on us, the pet parent.

Justin and I saw an opportunity to address these issues and help pet owners become better pet parents whilst also reducing the cost and uncertainty of pet ownership.

We set out developing our proposition during the second Covid lockdown and identified that we would be in a unique position to build a composite pet wellbeing and behavioural data asset. Consequently, the data strategy was forefront to our programme design and technology architecture. It will be through the collection, analysis, and application of this data that we will be able to enhance our pet wellbeing programme and continue to work towards improving the health and happiness of our pets.

We started our journey by undertaking a large research study with an innovation consultancy to identify the unmet needs of pet owners. We didn’t want to assume that we knew what they were even though we were working in the pet space. Lasting several months, the study comprised       qualitative and quantitative research methodologies and required rigorous statistical analysis. Using the findings from the research we identified a number of potential value propositions that we could have taken forward for development, however, there was one that stood out as the clear winner – a pet wellbeing programme, delivered through an app, that incentivises and rewards pet owners for making the right choices and acting in the best interest of their pets’ individual needs.

Having landed on our proposition and a workable business model, we spent the following weeks and months working with a number of external partners (behavioural economics consultants, a brand design consultancy and software development agencies) to help us bring our concept to life. This was a very exciting time in the development and formation of what we now know as Biscuit.

We knew we’d need some impressive tech behind us and the funding to gather this so we set out to seek investment and, using our contacts, we were successful in achieving £3 million seed funding from Correlation One Holdings, welcoming Biscuit to the group’s portfolio of pet businesses.

We knew that the largest financial outlay for us was going to be actually building the Biscuit app as we needed to partner with software developers, not having this capability in-house. The process of finding a software development agency that we were confident understood our business requirements and would deliver a quality product, on time and within budget was one of the biggest challenges we faced.

Having gone through our third ‘discovery process’, Rocketmakers, based in Bath, got the thumbs up. Development work started in October 2021 and we launched our MVP in March 2022. Now came the real test – had we made something that people wanted? We felt an element of safety, squirrelled away for months under the radar. Now we’d raised our heads above the parapet not sure what reception we’d get.

Judging by our achievements in the 11 months since we launched, I can confidently say that people want what we’ve made; we have almost 100,000 users already, 8 employees and plan to double our growth this year.

The scary thing is that this is only the beginning. Justin and I have been on a rollercoaster of a ride just getting to this point. Our heads are spinning but we know we can’t get off. I guess that’s what you sign up for when you venture out as an entrepreneur.