Please share your thoughts on pet communities, hoping to discuss with everyone.

Could a pet community be established?

This question has always accompanied entrepreneurship.

From a horizontal market perspective, pet, anime, cosmetics, fitness, comedy entertainment, and automobiles belong to natural interest categories. The proportion of pet content in interest-based platforms is relatively high, while other interest categories have formed relatively mature communities. The pet industry has not yet appeared a prominent community, which may be a question many people are wondering about.

Currently, I have several ideas:

(1) The number of pet owners is large, but the user scenarios are unique compared to other interest categories, making it difficult to form a mature independent app within a short time in the context of broad interest platforms like Weibo.

It’s comparable to the maternal category; recording has no immediate need, and re-operation is difficult to support a high-day active independent app.

(2) The pet market in China is developing rapidly and started late. From a pet industry chain perspective, most startups are concentrated in the mid-to-upper range of the market. Pet food, supplies, medical care, and services all have demand, and China is still urgently needing maturity compared to foreign markets. The emotional consumption sector is almost nonexistent.

Under the backdrop of the booming pet population, the mid-to-upper stream ecosystem will further mature, and the downstream market will also spawn more opportunities.

(3) The consumption upgrade awareness of pet owners in China is gradually increasing. User awareness is often later than market development. When the market is not yet fully mature, users’ pet awareness is also gradually upgrading, from how to raise pets to the concept of scientific raising pets, which will further stimulate the emergence of pet communities.

Cloud Snuggling: The Paradox of Pet Content and Pet Communities

‘Cloud Snuggling’ has attracted a batch of pet entrepreneurs, but I understand that most of them have fallen into pits...

Cute pet pictures and UGC are an important starting point for ‘Cloud Snuggling’. This type of picture story is widely present in Weibo and short video platforms and has a large production and audience, but it may not be a good starting point for a pet community. I think there are several reasons:

(1) From a market perspective

Because this type of content has strong eye-catching ability, most interest-based platforms will focus on supporting this type of content and creators, such as Weibo, B, and Douyin. The latter two dominate most head pet UGC, while Weibo gathers a large number of waist pet creators.

A single cute pet content product lacks network effects and cannot gather top and waist-level quality cute pet creators. It’s natural to lose the advantages of interest-based platforms. If you just transfer, it’s even more hopeless. Instead, you should rely on large platforms for transfer media.

(2) From a user scenario perspective

Cute pet pictures have a natural ‘un-pet’ audience, which means users who don’t own pets. For pet owners, the attractiveness of beautiful cute pet pictures will be greatly reduced. For a pet community, if it is positioned as a pet community, it will be difficult to grow a stable daily active user base.

This can also explain why most apps or mini-programs around cute pet shows and showing cute pets have low retention rates: cute pet pictures do not have much value for pet owners, and it is a dead end to do long-term retention by providing high-quality cute pet content. It's like doing a dead end.

(3) Different platform scenarios affect pet owners’ behavior.

Why do users still want to go to a cute pet community to show cute pets when WeChat, Weibo, and Douyin are so convenient?

Recently, I heard a term that can answer this question: ‘Social Environment’. Different products have different social environments, and WeChat is used to build intimate relationships, while Weibo is used for public expression. Therefore, there will still be a large number of users who want to go to a group of cute pets to show cute pets.

So there will still be a large number of users who would rather go to a group of cute pets to show cute pets, rather than displaying it in a group setting on WeChat or Weibo.

Pet communities can be understood into two categories: ‘two-stage’ and ‘gradual’.

‘Two-stage’ refers to using content/tools as a starting point, reaching a stable daily active user base, and then transitioning to a community form to eventually form a healthy social network – community users can socialise through certain scenes and find a sense of belonging; each community user has a clear self-growth path, such as building their profile.

‘Gradual’ refers to starting with an MVP community and then copying or expanding it – this is typical of the BBS category.

Pet communities are no exception. Pet owners are more prone to forming emotional relationships, such as loving pets. This relationship makes it easier for pet owners to have topics in the community. Pet owners can use recording, forums or science popularization.

Recording and showing cute pets have value for the community.

After I adopted a pet, I added many WeChat groups and cat groups and forums. I found that these groups actually had a natural topic soil. Showing cute pets, group buying, carpooling, adoption, matching, disease.

If you don’t own a pet, I’m afraid it’s hard to understand. The natural UGC topic is the soil of the community. If combined with certain operation and management, it may become a core growth point for a pet community.

This is a typical case: the Douban Love Cat Group.

(3) Pet consumption and science popularization are needs, and this is also the two mountains faced by the community.

The most fundamental problem is how to let pets eat well and let pets live well.

The first is the pet consumption problem. Most Chinese pet owners don’t buy domestic pet food. I understand that most middle-level pet owners don’t buy domestic food. Pet supplies and snacks have many startups in China.

The second problem is the pet service problem. Medical care, life science popularization services, there are many startups in China, there is no very good online and authoritative pet science popularization media and medical media, most of them are pet KOL, and offline medical is full of black.

Therefore, for a pet community that serves pet users, these two problems are unavoidable mountains. How to handle pet consumption, science popularization and the relationship between the community is a key question when building the community.

This article was originally published by @Bula’s Cat on Everyone is a Product Manager without authorization to reproduce.

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