114: Pawsitive Reinforcement: Petcademy's Impact on Pet Parents with Co-Founder & CEO, Bailey Schroeder

Holly Owens (00:03):

Hello everyone, and welcome to another amazing episode of Edup Ed Tech. My name is Holly Owens

DaNadia Johnson (00:10):

And my name is Nadia Johnson. And we're your hosts

Holly Owens (00:14):

And we're super stoked today because we have a very special guest with us. And for the pet lovers out there, you're going to love this episode. We have Bailey Schroeder, who is the CEO and Co-founder of Petcademy. Bailey, welcome to the show.

Bailey Schroeder (00:31):

Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited.

Holly Owens (00:34):

We're excited to chat with you. And this is definitely something that's kind of in our realm, but not in our talking about this sort of community. So we want to know all about you. So how did you become this entrepreneur? How did you learn about pets or I know you're a pet parent from when we talked, so tell us about your journey. How did you get here?

Bailey Schroeder (00:54):

Yeah, so about 10 years ago, I actually founded another company in the pet space called Rescue Walk. And what we did was we enabled pet parents to go on a walk and earn money for their favorite rescue or shelter. From there, I moved a bit more into the startup technology scene, living in New York, living in San Francisco, really wanting to build up, I'll say my skills as a product manager and as someone who understands how you can use tech to just build amazing things. So from there, I actually adopted a dog named Harry. And Harry is this very beautiful, fluffy chow, adopted him in New York. And when I brought him home, I knew that he had a little bit of fear, a little bit of anxiety as we got to know each other more, learned that these fears, these anxieties were pretty big and we wanted to really bring in an expert to help us.

(01:51):

And so started looking in New York, what trainers should I work with? Should we get a veterinary behaviorist and actually move to this place where we got both? So got him a trainer, got a veterinary behaviorist to really help us figure out what can we do to make this dog happy, to live this great life together, what needs to happen? And so through the support that we found in New York, through the trainer, through the behavioral, the veterinary behaviorists, we got to a great place. And at the end of that, I was so much of this information, as valuable as it is, I can't find it anywhere. I don't know where to look, where I Look,

Holly Owens (02:29):

It's so scattered. It's scattered about, and this could be for anything if you're pet trainers near me or people to help near me, it's just so scattered.

Bailey Schroeder (02:41):

Totally. It's so scattered. And again, just as a person who had just adopted a dog, I would've no idea where to look. And so thought, hey, can we build a tool that makes it easy for people to get high quality training, behavioral support for these adopted animals, these potentially fostered animals that they're bringing into their home? And so through that journey, we'll say starting a company, working in tech, adopting a dog with lots of behavioral issues that led me to found Peck Academy.

Holly Owens (03:13):

Great, that's wonderful. And I'm so glad you were able to find that support, but then also think, how can I in turn help people who are having this similar issues and going to technology for that and using all your skills and your experiences to start Petcademy.

DaNadia Johnson (03:29):

Yeah, that's awesome. I don't have a pet, but I'm thinking I want one, but when I get one, I'm like, where would I go? I would be clueless as to how to take care of a pet. So that's awesome. So going into a building Petcademy, who inspired you along the way as you moved into helping others with their pets?

Bailey Schroeder (03:59):

Yeah, it's a good question. So I would say the first obviously is Harry, who I mentioned is kind of the animal that got all of this started that. And it's funny because we've built all these online courses, all these course materials, educational materials, and almost all of them have an animated version of Harry in them. So his inspiration and impact, it continues through even though

DaNadia Johnson (04:20):

That's so cute.

Bailey Schroeder (04:23):

Yeah, I'll send you guys a link so you can check out the

DaNadia Johnson (04:26):

Courses.

Bailey Schroeder (04:27):

Yeah, he's a very cute dog. Even when he's animated or especially when he's animated perhaps. But say your question one more time. I've now lost it going on a tangent. Who

DaNadia Johnson (04:40):

Inspired you along your journey? So you said Terry was the first one that kind of inspired you along, or was the pet that inspired you along your journey? Is there anyone else that kind of inspired you along your journey to Petcademy? Yeah,

Bailey Schroeder (04:53):

So I think one of the big ones is really the rescues and shelters that we work with. And again, coming into Petcademy, I had worked with shelters and rescues for many, many years. And I think one of the big things is really that I find inspiring at least is we'll say the resilience that they have. They have a hard job. There's a lot of animals coming in. They're trying to place 'em in the best homes. They're trying to do what's best for the animals. It's pretty amazing. So I would say they are a big inspiration as to why we do what we do and to try to make their lives easier. I'll say, just to put it bluntly, and then the last piece, which is more I guess today as the company is in progress, so we're getting, right now, we service tens of thousands or provide support to tens of thousands of pet parents a month.

(05:39):

And we have a very small team. So we have four trainers slash behavioral consultants on our team, on staff to really provide some one-on-one support to some of these pet parents. And I'll say that the breadth of questions, the breadth of concerns that people have are very, very vast. And I would say that they inspire me, number one, in that they just retain all of this knowledge, which is pretty mind blowing to begin with. But I would say that they deliver the recommendations with so much empathy, which I think we can get caught up in tech sometimes on like, oh, everything needs to be so operationally perfect, it needs to be bug free. But really a lot of times you're delivering people information through tech, but that piece, that component of empathy can really make or break how they experience, how they learn, and when it comes to the pets, the value, the takeaways that these pets are able to get based on what is being retained, absorbed by that pet parent.

DaNadia Johnson (06:38):

That's awesome. Yeah, I always say empathy would make our world, if everybody just had empathy, it would make our world such Sid a better place. Just a smidge,

Holly Owens (06:46):

Just

Bailey Schroeder (06:47):

A smidge, just everybody.

Holly Owens (06:49):

So as you're talking and I'm thinking about all the different questions that you have to filter through and all the different trainings that you develop, my ID brain is just going towards training and I want to know a little bit about how, and I'm going to go a little bit off the questions. This is a little bit different. How does your process work for developing training, going directly to the end user, directly to the pet parents, directly to, and this could be in any situation, how are you developing that? What is your process like? Because I know from experience it's really difficult to meet the level of needs of all different types of learners and what they want and get them to what they need and what they want to learn quickly, but also knowing too that they're retaining the information like assessments, and so my brain's going there. So tell us a little bit about your training process or how you build things and then how you put it out for the world.

Bailey Schroeder (07:44):

So in terms of the building of the courses, so we practice positive reinforcement based training, kind of full stop. There's many different training methodologies, but for us, that's the only one that we focus on, which makes it easier out of the gate in terms of what's the spectrum of training we would create. It's very limited to that subsection. And then from there, we essentially have developed a series of core behaviors that we believe every parent, every dog parent, every pet parent should know in order to set their pet up for success. From there, we built out behavioral issues. So there's a very common set depending on the species of animal, of behavioral issues that these pet parents and these pets experience. So for us, it was really around creating a very solid base of, let's say information education courses and lessons that based on the pet parents' needs, we kind of package up together and deliver to them.

(08:45):

So an example of that would be, so again, think in your head, we have this big mound of courses and lessons on the right, and then on the left, a pet parent comes in and they're like, Hey, I just adopted a puppy. The puppy isn't house trained. I have a cat in the house, I also have a dog in the house, and I really wanted to set my dog up to learn a bunch of tricks. It's like with that information, we can literally go and pluck from our course materials, this series of courses that pet parent should learn in order to achieve their goals, which are by association the goals of the pet as well,

Holly Owens (09:23):

And

Bailey Schroeder (09:23):

Give that to them. From there, again, they have this training plan. We do prompt them to submit some of their progress to do quizzes, and then if they have questions, which many of them do or they need support, like, Hey, you told me to install a cat hammock, but my cat's still jumping on the counter. This isn't working. What do I do? That's when our team steps in and it's like, oh, okay, well tell me more of what's going on. And so they'll tell us the nuances of their situation, and then while the materials that we provided to them are still relevant, there might be a little bit of tweaking that we need to do in order to make it completely fit with the situation that that pet parent is experiencing and that their cat in that case is experiencing.

Holly Owens (10:10):

So you're personalizing the learning experience, just like we try to do in e-learning world and instructional design world is like, this is what I need and you're giving me what I need without giving me all the extra sifting through the clutter of, I mean, just typing in pet support on Google, it's

Bailey Schroeder (10:30):

Millions And

Holly Owens (10:30):

Millions of things to evaluate and sift through, and you can really pick any topic. But pets therapy, I mean anything pop culture, it is just so difficult. But it sounds like you've taken this and you've really personalized and customize the experience for pet owners, because I know one thing as a pet owner, you're just worried about the quality of life and what's going to happen to your quality of life, your pet's quality of life, making sure everybody has a nice balance there and everybody feels comfortable and safe in their environment.

Bailey Schroeder (11:04):

Totally. Yeah. I think that is when a pet parent reaches out to us a lot of the time, it isn't like, oh, I'm angry. My dog is barking at another dog growing by. It's like, Hey, my dog's barking. They're obviously feeling stress. How can I help them feel less stress? So it's coming from this place of wanting the best for their animals, which I think is awesome.

Holly Owens (11:27):

Yeah, absolutely.

Bailey Schroeder (11:30):

One other thing I was going to say, just in terms of how the information is delivered. So we have a program that we run with shelters and rescues across US, Canada and Australia, where they work with us to offer behavioral support to every new adopter and every new foster. And so when a person adopts that pet parent automatically receives 30 days of support from our team, that support also includes access to the specific course that's relevant to their animal and all the lessons and whatnot. But one of the big learnings that we had was when we started, everything we did was through email and also through this online, we'll say community platform that pet parents could access. Our engagement level was pretty good, but we thought, you know what? People, they live on their phones. And I fundamentally am very, very nervous about creating a mobile app because I feel like it's very expensive and people don't want all this clutter on their phone.

(12:31):

So it's like, what can we do to use their phone, but in a way that feels natural? Can we use text message? So we moved a ton of what we do to text message, and now I would say we're text message first. So when a person adopts, they receive a text from us saying, Hey, congratulations on adopting your new dog, Harry, if you have any questions or need anything over the next 30 days, we're here to support you. And again, that's in conjunction with the courses that we give them access to, but we check in with them once a week just saying, Hey, how are things going? Do you need any support? And based on what they tell us that's going on, we can direct them to the lesson or the course materials that would help them in that moment. But moving to text message and kind of meeting people will say where they're at on their phone made a huge difference in terms of engagement and how pet parents work with us once they bring those animals home. Awesome.

DaNadia Johnson (13:26):

And that's what I was wondering. So is that when you're doing the messaging system, is that where they have the access to the trainer that they're able to ask those questions to?

Bailey Schroeder (13:38):

And when I first started, when I first started Petcademy, which is a bit more than four years ago, I had this thought, oh, pet parents will just reach out to us. I'll make this form where people can submit any questions they have when they have them. And basically nobody asked the question and I was like, oh, this sucks. I have all this information, but that I want to give to people. But realize, but if you reach out to someone just like, Hey, I'm here for you, and kind of nudge them to tell you what's going on, now we are getting multiples and multiples more questions just by nudging that person. So yes, it's predominantly email that we ask the pet parents what's going on. They can ask the questions to us. Every shelter has a unique phone number that their pet parents can text with questions that all come into our team. We show all those conversations back to their rescues and shelters so that they don't have to feel like they're in the dark after we take over part of that behavioral and training component. So we try to make it really, really easy for everyone.

DaNadia Johnson (14:45):

So I'm interested to know a little bit more about the customer experience. So can you kind of Walk us through or describe the customer experience? What happens once someone signs up and wants to get started with supporting their pet?

Bailey Schroeder (15:01):

Sure. So I'll give you the example with the shelters and rescues first, because a huge portion of our population or community comes from those relationships and partnerships. So for an adopter, a person that adopts a dog, let's say their dog is named Bruce, they would receive a text message a day after they adopted that, said, Hey, congratulations on adopting your new dog, Bruce. You have any questions? Text this number. We're here for you. Three days later, we text them again. You're like, Hey, how are the first 72 hours with your pet? Then at the 10 day mark, we're like, Hey, we ask a variety of questions of how's your pet meeting people? How is your pet when someone comes to the door with the goal of not asking them is there any problems with your pet, but getting a sense of what's actually going on?

(15:47):

Because again, we can use that information, those signals to automatically provide them with resources. So the big piece again for a pet parent is that 30 day cycle of messages that they'll receive over text message and they can respond to or ask us questions at any time. In addition to that, via email, we send them the information to enroll in the course that we think would be best for them. So for example, a person that's adopted a dog would be prompted to enroll in adoption fundamentals for dogs, which will give them really, we'll say high quality, but bite-sized information with the goal of not having them retain hours, of course materials, but little snippets of information of what to do, what not to do, to really, again, try to maximize retention and set them and set them up for success with their pet. And lastly, as part of this program, they also have access to our communities where they can connect in a more of a forum style and see other pet parents' questions, what they're asking issues they're facing. Our team chimes in there as well, but it's meant to be a space where pet parents can kind of learn from one another, talk to one another, and make progress together.

DaNadia Johnson (17:05):

Yeah, I like that. That's awesome.

Holly Owens (17:07):

I like that too. And I feel like the education space could take a lot of snippets from just what you're saying. You're offering a personalized learning experience, but you're also offering great customer service and support when things are confusing or you don't have the answers or you encounter a barrier. And then on top of that, you're opening up a community, so you're having the learners support each other. So it's really the space where everybody, you have these fail safes put into place so if something happens, they can reach out. They just don't feel alone. And I feel like when it comes to training and learning and development, sometimes those opportunities aren't there. You get one shot to take this test, and if you fail, you fail. So I really feel like that's important to point out, especially to our audience, that building in types of these checkpoints. But also, like I said, fail safes can help the end user become more successful and then everybody wins.

DaNadia Johnson (18:03):

And I like that it's kind of not too overwhelming when the customer first comes onto Petcademy and is you're kind of collecting that information in a nice subtle way through messages and then building out their plan and personalizing their learning, and then it's not too overwhelming for the pet owner. So I like that that kind of gradual customer experience process that eases them into the learning.

Holly Owens (18:34):

You're already overwhelmed by adopting the pet.

DaNadia Johnson (18:36):

Yeah,

Bailey Schroeder (18:37):

Totally. I'm sure. I'm sure. I can

Holly Owens (18:40):

Imagine it's having a baby. I

DaNadia Johnson (18:43):

Can imagine I having a baby's like, but I kind of get an idea from adopting

Bailey Schroeder (18:47):

A pet.

Holly Owens (18:48):

That's what it's like bringing somebody a new home. So Bailey, you're a very successful entrepreneur, a couple startups, a lot of our audience, they have dreams, they want to do their own startup, they want to be their own boss, they want to do something they're passionate about. Obviously pets is something you're passionate about. So is there any sort of pieces of advice, maybe two or three that you can give people who are thinking about starting to start maybe things to do or maybe things that challenges you might encounter and how you overcome those? I'd love to hear

Bailey Schroeder (19:22):

This. So a few things come to mind. The first one that comes to let's say running a startup and maybe even starting one is experimentation. So I talk about this a lot in terms of just be ready, be willing, be excited to experiment and do so in a way that doesn't require you to kind of sit down for months and months and months in order to ship something, put something into the world to get feedback. The goal of experimentation, I think is to lose and win early. So kind of looking for signals and experimentation is what drives that. The next piece I would say is really just keeping things simple and looking for signals. So when I started Petcademy, it was a blog and it was a blog and an email drip campaign, which was super simple. I'm not an engineer, my background is in product, but I am not technical at all, but I could use no code products to kind of mesh something together in order to get a signal. Built this blog and ended up being, we'll say, contacted by this partner company called 24 pet, which we work with have worked with for four years now, but they were like, Hey, what you're doing is really interesting. Would you be interested in building it out more to potentially support the pet parents within our community? I was like, that a great idea, but it really was, how can I get my idea out into the wilderness or into the world to get feedback, look for signals, and then build based on those signals?

(20:58):

Yeah,

Holly Owens (20:58):

That's great. People spend so much time, I feel like trying to perfect something and you really become so lost. And Nadia, I don't know if this happens to, you become so lost in what you think should happen and you believe in all your biases that you forget this is going out to other people and you need that feedback in order to make it better. The process is very iterative.

Bailey Schroeder (21:21):

Totally. And I would say what I see relatively often and had a conversation about this yesterday is there is this inclination to build something so it's perfect. So for example, if you want to run a test to see if people are going to engage with a piece of content, you probably don't need to focus on building a pipeline that delivers the content every day for the course of a year if nobody caress about the content. So it's like being clear in your mind of what do you actually need to understand in order to keep this moving forward and not get bogged down with like, Oh, When a million people want this, this is what the operational processes need to be. So yeah,

Holly Owens (22:06):

That's great advice.

DaNadia Johnson (22:08):

Great Advice. So without giving away too much, is there any new exciting things on the roadmap for Petcademy in the upcoming year? Don't want to give away all of your secrets for what you have in the pipeline, but

Bailey Schroeder (22:25):

Anything new

DaNadia Johnson (22:26):

And exciting coming our way? Yeah,

Bailey Schroeder (22:29):

So as I mentioned, and we talked about a few minutes ago, community learning I think is really, really important to us. And I think as we scale, it is a necessity in order to keep up with pet parents and continue to give them support quickly. And so what we're looking at doing is thinking about how can we potentially build group support, group style forums. So for example, if you had a variety of people, a group of people whose dogs were all experiencing separation anxiety, could we bring all of those people together and even have a live conversation with a trainer with a variety of people to talk through things together? And so we're looking at different ways that we can use our community use shared experience to again, grow together, learn together, and then improve ultimately the lives of the pet parents and the pets as a function of that group learning.

DaNadia Johnson (23:29):

Awesome. So more, I like That Collaborative learning going on.

Bailey Schroeder (23:32):

Yeah,

Holly Owens (23:33):

You're adding that into it. So I envision a zip code and putting in a zip code, and these are the pet parents in your area that may have this issue, or

DaNadia Johnson (23:42):

Something

Holly Owens (23:44):

Along those lines. Because I know when I go for online resources,

Bailey Schroeder (23:48):

Sometimes

Holly Owens (23:49):

I do want to know if there's, I don't know any the other instructional designers in my area. It's really sad.

Bailey Schroeder (23:55):

It's really sad,

Holly Owens (23:57):

But having pet parents, they're everywhere,

Bailey Schroeder (24:00):

Literally everywhere. The other interest, just building on that in terms of zip codes, I hadn't really thought about behavioral challenges being location. I kind of think of them being location agnostic. It doesn't really matter where you're from, you're going to be experiencing the same thing. We bring it together. But there are things that do or are situations where location could matter. So for example, when a person brings home a puppy, the number one piece of advice I would give to any puppy parent is to socialize that puppy with other puppies.

DaNadia Johnson (24:31):

It's

Bailey Schroeder (24:31):

Going to tire them out. They're going to learn how to use their mouth. You can avoid so many problems down the road by taking that step, but one of the challenges in some cases is like, well, I don't have any friends with puppies.

DaNadia Johnson (24:43):

Where

Bailey Schroeder (24:44):

Do I find a puppy? And so if you can think, okay, here's my zip code, here's other people that have brought home puppies that are within X number of days or within X age and size, can we connect those people? And so that's one of the things we're thinking about in terms of those group connections. And we're getting close. Maybe by the end of next year we'll be at a scale where that might actually work because you need a lot of dogs probably, and you need a lot of adoptions to facilitate it, at least within the community we've built, but that's something that we're looking at as well. Yeah,

DaNadia Johnson (25:20):

That's awesome. They can connect and go on a walk Together or something.

Bailey Schroeder (25:24):

Exactly.

Holly Owens (25:27):

I mean, because whatever this app is, what is it called? Neighborhood or next door? It used to be called Next Door, now it's

Bailey Schroeder (25:33):

Called Neighborhood

Holly Owens (25:34):

Man. People are just not utilizing that app for what it's meant to do. So finding people and connecting and they're just using it to complain and stuff like that. Anyways, either

(25:46):

So I could talk about pet stuff all day. We're coming up on the end of the episode here, and I really see a lot of the relationship between what you're doing and what we do as instructional designers or in the ed tech space. That's why I wanted to have you on to make that connection. Is there anything that we missed, anything else you want to share about Petcademy? And I also want to know from you in this space, like the startup space, the pet space, whatever space you want to talk about, what does the future look like here? What are we talking about with AI coming down the line and those different things? Anything else you want to share with the audience? And of course we'll have everything in the show notes and then what does the future look like?

Bailey Schroeder (26:28):

Yeah, I think the future is just continually getting deeper into personalization and personalization quickly, and I guess not needing to go to 10 different places to get information about a pet. This is kind of a digression maybe, but we receive information about pets from a shelter. We theoretically could have all the information from a pet that could be passed to a vet and our behavioral information could be passed to a vet as well. And having this kind of holistic view of the animal of the home, being able to get that without having to hodgepodge data from 10 different sources to again, enable people to make fast decisions around the health of the pet, all the different kind of components just around wellbeing, I would say not even health, but the wellbeing of the animal, but using technology to make all those connections and make it easy for people to take actions that quickly.

Holly Owens (27:31):

Yeah, I feel like not even our human healthcare industry does this. It's hodgepodge putting things

Bailey Schroeder (27:36):

Together. Yeah,

(27:37):

Totally. And thankfully though, with pets, well, I'm just going to say it's not as regulated as human health. It's still pretty regulated, so you have to be careful with all the things, but I feel as though, I don't know, we're on the cusp of, there's been a lot of consolidation in the industry as well with pets. And so you're kind of, I guess, on the forefront, on the cusp of this time where all information is easily available in one place for an animal, for everyone to make the best decisions for that animal and for the pet parent that's kind of taking care of that animal.

Holly Owens (28:09):

Yeah, absolutely. Oh my goodness, this is a great episode. I just dropped my AirPod. I love going outside of the space a little bit and seeing what can get into about pet stuff. And of course I'm passionate about that. Nadia knows. Well, Nadia, I adopted a puppy. I haven't showed you yet, but

DaNadia Johnson (28:31):

Oh, really?

Holly Owens (28:34):

So very timely episode for me. I just lost one. And then they're like, don't do it too soon. And then I went four

DaNadia Johnson (28:42):

Years later. Immediately I was like, Nope, some other baby needs a home. So here we are, but

Bailey Schroeder (28:49):

Definitely

Holly Owens (28:50):

Everything in the show notes about Pit Academy so that everybody can go there, check out what Bailey and her team are doing. It's wonderful, and I'm so glad that we got connected. So thanks for coming on.

Bailey Schroeder (29:02):

Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

Holly Owens (29:04):

Of course.