Find Local Pet-Friendly Businesses and Activities With Yapsie

Frank Gruber November 28, 2010 Tweet

According to a recent survey, 62% of U.S. households own a pet, which equates to 71.4 millions homes. That’s a lot of pet owners looking for places and events to bring their pets. Yapsie, a San Diego based startup, just launched a site for pet lovers to share opinions about local pet-friendly people, places and things.  Yapsie looks to keep you informed about that upcoming Holiday Pet Parade or where there is a beach to take a walk with Fido. It also offers a place to connect with other pet lovers, including photo sharing of your favorite pet photos with the rest of the community.

Yapsie appears to be positioning itself as a more broad version of the popular Dogster and Catster sites that launched in 2004. These two sites were both profitable after a very short period of time while also being early in the social networking game, as this was before Facebook and Twitter even existed. So while they may be later to market, existing social networks could play to Yapsie’s advantage as the site can leverage Facebook and Twitter to build critical mass.

This San Diego based, bootstrapped startup founded by Joe Mahavuthivanij, Tim Foss and Debra Lin, aims to offer a place for people to easily discover pet-friendly restaurants, hotels, events, services and more. Joe was formerly at Goowy Media, which sold to AOL, in a marketing and biz dev capacity and is a lifelong dog owner and whisperer who wants to improve the lifestyles of pets and people. You can come and meet the team at the upcoming Tech Cocktail San Diego event on December 2nd at Analog Bar (sorry, I don’t think this is a pet friendly venue!).