Jason Meltzer, the Valley-based co-founder of the dog-walking marketplace Wag!, has created a new app for dog owners called Paway, amassing more than 15,000 users since its launch last fall.“Millions of dogs were adopted during COVID 2020, and it seemed like the existing service providers on the market weren’t focusing on building community and building safety features, or on letting the service providers grow their own businesses,” Meltzer said about the timing of the launch.
The Paway app combines features of a route mapping application like Waze with a neighborhood community-building social apps like NextDoor. Users create a profile for their dogs and can map and monitor hazards on their walks, share information about their pets with friends and eventually hire professional pet services and schedule in-person playdates with other dogs. Meltzer, who worked as a professional dog walker before pivoting to co-create the Wag! marketplace for dog walkers and sitters to advertise their services, aims to market the app as a digital gathering place for dog lovers.“Lately, we’re really trying to focus in our backyard – Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley – to go into dog parks and create that sort of virtual dog park experience,” Meltzer said. “But we’re starting to see we’ve got people using the app, all the way from in Australia, in Asia, like parts of Singapore, the U.K., Europe. There are small little clusters forming there.”Density of users remains the app’s biggest challenge thus far, with clusters of activity beginning to crop up around the Valley, though not yet widespread. But, as additional features continue to roll out, such as alerts for lost dogs, more and younger users have started using Paway.“We thought that millennial pet parents and dog walkers, obviously, would be attracted to the application, and they certainly are — we have close to 2,000 service providers on the network,” Meltzer said. “But when we started looking at the stats and seeing how this Gen Z audience was being attracted to the product, that was exciting to see, because those are the future pet parents of the world.”By the end of the year, Paway’s five-person team plans to extend the app’s offerings to include more social features and an in-app marketplace, similar to the one offered on the Wag! platform.
Dog-Walking App For Stay at Homers
