Paul and I founded MyPet as we both had dreadful experiences with microchip databases.
When I first registered my dogs I was charged £40. The website crashed when I was paying and the money came out of my account. You’d have thought my pups (Picture below because they’re awesome) would have been registered, but I couldn’t get logged into the account I set up. Pretty rubbish.
I called and held for around 20 minutes, once answered it turns out they hadn’t been registered, and they would resolve.
I never heard back from them.
I had a conversation with a Veterinary friend who told me about a huge number of issues they had and deal with on a weekly basis.
I registered microchips on a few of the other databases and found the technology and service nearly as poor. To this day I’ve never so much as received an email reminding me to check my details are up to date. This turned out to be my first investment in MyPet. (Cost me quite a few pounds to register on 5 databases. £125.00 to be exact.)
Paul and I got to talking one day about his pup Saoirse who came all the way from Ethiopia with his Sister in law. Paul experienced the same pain registering the microchip. Although it complied with all ISO Standards several databases wouldn’t recognise it as a microchip as it didn’t start with a 9.
He ended up calling a database to get the microchip registered. He paid £30.00.
Time to research
Paul and I set out to conduct research on the world of microchips and microchip databases and it was confusing. Very confusing.
We had dozens of conversations, a few surveys we hassled Pet owners to complete, many phone calls to animal rescues and Veterinary Clinics and it became clear it wasn’t working very well. Here was a few of key themes we discovered
- Poor Technology
- Poor customer service
- Terrible user experience
- High cost, low value
Time for action
We knew we could do it much better, so we set out and built the MyPet microchip database. It’s turned out awesome in our opinion.
Initially we didn’t charge, this helped us check our customers were happy, that everything was working as expected and we learnt a whole lot about how pet owners interact with microchip database. We also got a much more in depth look at the problems.
I still remember the names of the first 3 people (that I didn’t know) that registered their pet’s on the platform.
We introduced a small charge of £1.99 that covers our costs in the summer of 2021. A pet owner will never have to pay again to update their details, nor will any person the pet is transferred to.
We learnt over the course of this year about the issues animal rescues face and heard from campaign groups such like Tuks Law. We built our Animal Rescue platform to help. You can see more about it HERE.
Did I mention we also let animal rescues register microchips completely free of charge.
Over the next 6 months, we built out our microchip business and built the technology to manage it. We started selling microchips to Veterinary Clinics and other implanters in June 2021.
We’ve now got a lot of Veterinary and implanter customers who are super happy with our product and the service we deliver to them and their customers.
We actually did a survey recently. we asked:
Since moving to MyPet microchips, Have we made microchipping easier for you and the team?
Check out the chart below straight from the survey results:
The proof is in the pudding
We’re super excited for what the next year will bring, we’ve got lots of exciting plans coupled with the current legislation review which we hope will improve microchip databases for everyone involved from Vets to Pet owners.
We set out to build a better, fairer and easier to use platform for all users of microchip databases. We’ve done that now. It doesn’t stop there though. We will keep delivering amazing customer service. We will keep releasing updates to the platform monthly, we will keep adding features that make the product better for everyone involved from Dog Wardens to Pet owners.
We love hearing from anyone about what we could do better and problems you’ve encountered with databases no matter if your a pet owner, dog warden, Police Officer, Vet or Animal Rescue. Please pop me an email at conor@mypethq.io if you’d like to chat.
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