The Story of MoeGo

Hi, this is Ethan, I’m the founder and CEO of MoeGo. It’s been an incredible journey since we launched MoeGo. As of 04/28/2020, We’ve had thousands of pet groomers, created millions of appointments, and served millions of pet owners. Today, I’d like to share more stories about MoeGo: to share why we started MoeGo, what value proposition we stand for, and how we execute on it.

1. Beginning of MoeGo

As a dog dad with a busy schedule, I found it super painful to schedule appointments with my dog groomers, not alone to make time changes. I wondered why there weren’t any apps like “OpenTable for Pet Business” existed. Not taking too long, I realized that the pet business owners were probably lacking good digital apps, as they weren’t intended to make customers struggle. With this assumption, I had my partner sketched software mockups, and spent the following a few days visiting 50+ local pet grooming shops. After hour-long interviews with these groomers, I caught some insights:

• Pet grooming business owners are oftentimes multitaskers. Daily operations as a grooming business owner are often very overwhelming and exhausting.
• Bad management often leads to low customer satisfaction, which often ends up with poor business results.
• Groomers are experienced experts on software they use but oftentimes their requests are ignored. (Existing vendors pay more attention to sales numbers than product and experience.)
• It was obvious that mainstream software that groomers use were outdated and not user friendly, at all.
• More often than not, the existing options were counter-productive, this would become a headache specially for the fast-growing business.

These insights gave me a strong motivation to devote my time and my energy to re-shape this industry. Pet groomers deserve much better than this.

2. Let's Call it - MoeGo!

We didn’t like how people name software in our industry. Pets are cute and lovely, and we need a name echoing this feeling. At first, we came up with a name “MoementGo”, I know it sounds lousy. But let me explain this to you: “Moe” is a Japanese slang to describe something cute and lovely. “Moement” sounds like “moment”. By combining these together, it would bring about the lovely and enjoyable moment you share with your pets. MoementGo sounds like AmazonGo, which delivers a sense of productivity. Soon we discovered that “MoementGo” was too long. Then Lily came up with the idea — let’s just call it MoeGo! Simple, clean, and catchy.

We hired the best Logo designer we could find. After weeks of the back-and-force discussions, we landed on the current logos (see below) as our business logo and consumer app logo. We really liked the idea of the orange check mark in the dog face, creating a sense of productivity. While for the MoeGo pet owner app, the check mark changed to a mild curve line mimicking smiling. We hope that your clients would be even happier when you use MoeGo since you would become more productive, haha!

3. Build MoeGo

Our goals are simple:

1. Build the best software;
2. Offer the best customer service;

To better understand our customers, we spent days working at grooming shops and mobile grooming vans in the early startup days. I was shocked by the fact that this was such a non-stop working experience. Lunch time, or even“pee” time, has become a luxury to have. After experiencing all these in the front line, I have gained more respect for groomers. And I was so determined to make MoeGo work for them.

To ensure the software quality is on par with the highest standard, we invested to hire the best software engineers and designers from the top tech companies. We were one of the few (if not the only player) who offered native apps across three platforms (Web, IOS and Android).

The majority of MoeGo team are pet owners, they empathized with our customers a lot. They are super driven and work extremely hard every day. They read customer comments to understand our customers better, and they always strive for a better solution even if it may take them a longer time to implement.

We can’t emphasize enough about the importance of customer service. We want to deliver a service that makes groomers feel that we are like part of their team. Groomers are smart enough to know what software would work best for them because they are the ones doing the business, so we listen, and respond with actions and results.

We built a social community on Facebook as a channel to connect with our customers and collect feedback. MoeGo Lily, our chief customer success officer, has become a bridge between the MoeGo team and groomers. In product discussion meetings, Lily always brings a lot on the table with customer insights. She loves our customers so much that we even feel she’s a groomer representative sitting in our meeting room. We love that because this makes us feel close to our customers!

4. We Grow with You

Honestly, it hurts badly every time customers cancel our service. We make mistakes, but we iterate, and we improve fast. We were happy to see some customers who had left us earlier returned back after trying other alternatives. When they left us, we felt sad but motivated to strive to be better, and their returns strengthened our belief to work even harder for anything good.

5. We Keep Innovating

As a value-driven tech entrepreneur, innovation sits deep in my DNA. We will not hesitate to invest on new ideas bringing value to customers. For instance, we are the first software company to build the smart-routing feature for mobile groomers. It doesn’t make very much economic sense at first place as it adds extra cost using Google Map service in our smart-scheduling system. However, we know how little cognitive resource a mobile groomer could have while arranging schedules and holding the incoming client call at the same time. We know this feature could relieve their tensions and make things easier for them in the workflow. And it definitely feels super rewarding when we receive feedback that mobile groomers love this feature. It means a lot to us!

Another under-rated feature is Review Booster. It’s funny every time we introduce this feature to customers, groomers often have negative perceptions about this feature because many of them have had very negative experiences with yelp. However, this feature is quite well-thought-out designed to boost more five star reviews on review sites. We understand that only people who are furious about your service would be so driven to release their anger towards your online review pages. On the other hand, the majority of customers who are happy about your service, always forget to write reviews because they have expressed their delights through tips and recurring service requests. Ironically, the review sites become a place for the haters, leaving unfair reputation damages to small business owners. Some companies even charge $50/month+ for Review Booster feature alone, however, this feature is included in our service package with no additional cost.

6. Worth it?

We are confident about our service, and therefore, we believe as long as we consistently deliver values, customers will stay. Even if we have some cancellations, we would consider this as an opportunity to improve ourselves. Fortunately, we keep seeing customers returning back to us as they would eventually realize that we are much better than alternatives in the market.

In fact, as long as MoeGo could save your time and allow you to take one extra appointment, your software expense with MoeGo could be justified. Not alone to say the improved user experience will boost word-of-mouth referrals, which is a key success factor for service based merchandise.

When you are picking software vendors, I would highly suggest not evaluating with a cost-driven mindset but with a value-driven mentality. Software service can help you save your precious cognitive resources from worrying about every detail in the work flow rather than focusing on the most important things: your service and your customers. The software can also help increase your customer satisfaction, and eventually, improve your business results in the long run. Having worked with thousands of groomers, we learnt that groomers with better business performance commonly consider software as an investment rather than an expense.

7. Your Business Companion

The purpose of this blog is to present other aspects of MoeGo to our current and future clients. Building a business is tough, but building businesses together feels much better. MoeGo will always be there, be your business companion.

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