Speaker 1: This is Pet Life Radio. Let's Talk Pets.
Speaker 2: Hello, pet levers, Welcome to Best Spets from Pets. I'm
your show host Michelle Byrne. Today we have an app
to talk about, not just any app, but an app
that is really created to really really help pet parents.
We're going to talk with the creator and ceo in
just a minute. We'll be right back.
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Speaker 4: Let's talk pets on Petlife Radio dot com.
Speaker 2: Welcome back everyone. I'd like to welcome Ayas. I'm Adolf.
He is the CEO of Dosti and also the creator.
Welcome Ayas, Am I pronouncing it right?
Speaker 5: Yes? Yes, thank the Michelle an.
Speaker 2: Okay, well, welcome. Welcome to Best Bets for Pets.
Speaker 5: Yeah, thank you very much.
Speaker 2: Glad to be here, glad to have you. So before
we get into talking about Dosti and it's an all
in one app that helps provide pet parents the ability
to navigate ongoing care and emergency care, can you share
your background with our listeners.
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 6: Sure, Okay. The first thing I really want to agree
on with is that I'm here not as a founder
or CEO. I'm here as a pet parent myself. I
have three Labradors and I had those dogs for six
years now. I always have dogs in my household. These
are my recent ones, and I also have three kids,
so I'm both pet parent and a parent.
Speaker 2: Three cares and three dogs and three big dogs.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I know the hustle. So I know the hustle
from the side. And my background is in marketing. I've
been in marketing for eighteen years. Did my marketing degree
in the Union years in the United Kingdom, and then
work in telecoms. Was a founder of a big sport
marketing agency, the IT Agency, and that's my recent venture, Dosity,
the pet care ab. Basically, I was trying to create
a product I couldn't find myself.
Speaker 2: That's right. I was just going to ask you the
next question, why did you create DOSTI? So you said
you couldn't find the program yourself like it. What were
you looking for that you could not find? What were
the other programs lacking?
Speaker 6: We all as people in pet space, we all understand
the size of the market and the significance of the market,
but when it comes down to solution, it seems that
understanding is gone. There are a lot of great apps
in the world, a lot of great solutions, but those
solutions are here to help us with some minor issues
like here and now, let's say I have a problem
with my dog, like I need to train it. I
download the app, I train my dog, and that's it.
I don't need the app anymore. And then that was
the minor fix I had to have. And then throughout
the years I need some kind of different support. It's
not about training or just not just about vets, not
just about grooming. This is a complex We're talking about
the life of a pet inside the family with a.
Speaker 5: Human being together.
Speaker 6: So there's a lot of things we need to understand.
There's a lot of things we need to know, especially
during the early days of pet being in your house.
That's what our statistics as is our app is perfect
fit for the new pet parrots, for the young dogs
like six months up to six months. The fifty five
percent of our user base, which is twenty three thousand
at the moment, we've been around forty year now, and
by the way, forty one percent of that base comes
from us. So yeah, the fifty five percent of our
bases and new pet parrots, and they require not the
minor fixes here and now, but like a lifestyle support.
Speaker 5: So that's what we do.
Speaker 2: Okay. In my research with apps, and there's a lot
of them out there, and they are very specific. There's
either apps that deal with training, there's apps that deal
with pet records, there's apps that deal with there are
some that are live chat but more emergency focused, where
your apps actually talking to about what makes Dusty different
than these pet care apps.
Speaker 5: Okay, so everything starts with the registration.
Speaker 6: So once we download the app, you register you you
asked to answer about like eighteen questions about your dogs
specific or your cat. So once you answer those questions,
we start comparing data you gave us with the breed
standards that we have from my US kennel clubs and
European kennel club so once we start that comparison, we
see the small deviations. They may come with weight, they
may come with walking, with activity level you have with
your dog, or with the food you feed. So once
we see that deviations, those deviations, we start informing you
via different notifications like what are the deviations and how
to fix them? And via different feature starting from a
symptom checker if a dog is not feeling well, or
to the content library with like four thousand verified articles,
or the training videos like hours and hours of training content.
Speaker 5: We have everything covered.
Speaker 6: More you use the app, more we'll learn about you
more precise recommendations, will give those these very proactive so
every day you enter the app, you get personalized daily
tips across ten most important categories from healthcare to MythBusters,
and all of those tips are about your dog specifically.
If you have a question, despite the level of the question,
we'll have two ways for you to get an answer.
Speaker 5: One is the community chat. When you type in your question.
Speaker 6: Let's say you live in Florida, in Tampa, Florida, and
you're a labrador owner.
Speaker 5: You type in your question.
Speaker 6: All the labrador owners in dosty will receive that question
and share with you real life personal experiences, or alternatively,
you can go to the dosty assistant type in your
question and get personalized AI that answers your question considering
all the data we know about your dog. So hypothetically saying,
if I want to take my dog out to the
beach and I ask for pet friendly beaches near Tampa,
I will receive an answer, but then I may receive
a notification saying that don't take my dog today, take
her out tomorrow because it's been vaccinated yesterday, and there
is a correlation between vaccine and water and we know it.
So these are the kind of tips. These are the
kind of day to day cases that you may refer
to while having those tick. That's your assistant in your pocket.
So whenever you have a question, whenever you debate on
something or or you know, considering something, you always have
a little helper that can guide and make you more aware.
Speaker 2: Okay, let me ask you this. She brought up something.
I mean, you said that the data corresponds with the breed.
What what if you have a mutt? A lot of
us have breeds. Both my dogs that are now you know,
unfortunately gone, they were both mixed breeds. And you don't
always know what the mix is, so then what.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, that's the great question. Okay.
Speaker 6: The immediate solution is that you select a mixed breed
from the drop down list and you indicate the size,
so you tell us if it's a small excess as
mL and so and so forth. So once you indicate
that size, and obviously you have the guidance to make
sure that you get the right size. What we do
We get the breeds of the same size category and
we provide you. We don't have a standard though your dog, obviously,
so that's why as a standard, we take some average
of all the medium breeds.
Speaker 5: Let's say if you selected the medium breed.
Speaker 6: But then once we know stuff about your dog, we
start guiding you from there, Like when we know the
date of your last vaccination, we inform you about dewarming,
the nextly warming, and then when it's a next vaccine.
If you're feeding your dog not right, because for the
medium sized dog you need X and Y type of
food or you're missing X and Y type of vitamin,
we're gonna tell you that. So it's always about your
dog specifically. But in case of March, the mixed breeds
we take the size. Obviously, the more Dusty grows, more
information we get from the mixed breed owners, more our
own knowledge based grows. We've been around for a year now,
it's so so we were also learning and growing in
a process.
Speaker 2: Okay, And with mixed breed. Are you able to because
a lot of us with mixed breeds know that, Oh
it's probably you know, like mine, we're border Calli mixes.
One was border Calla and flat hair Retriever. My nephew
dog is jack Rock. So dogs and so sometimes you
know the mixes. Are you able to input that as well?
Speaker 6: You will be able to upload yet once you upload
your at the moment, no, we don't have the functionality.
But we're working on the picture identifications of what you
will be able to do. You will be able to
take a picture of your dog, send it to our
doors the AI assistant, and based on the picture, we
will send you the options of what we think that
is and you can confirm like saying yes yes, let's
say if you know it, you can say yes and
yes or no.
Speaker 2: Okay. And then what about for cats because the sizes
for cats are they're not as varied is for dogs
and the breeds are a lot harder to distinguish. I mean,
so many of them are mixed, you know, Tabby's or
house cat. You know, they're just domestic short hair, They're
a mixed of so many different breeds because there's so
many cats just from shelters. So how would someone enter
use your app with a cat?
Speaker 6: Unfortunately, with cats, we don't have that functional as with dogs,
when you can select the size or a cat obviously,
as you rightly mentioned, but what you can indicate, you
can indicate that's a mixed breed or just domesticated cat,
any kind of cat, shelter cat, and we try to
get as much information from you as possible about certain
specific parameters of your cat or the habits of your
cat or whatever. And once we get that information, we
try to learn as we go because with cats, unfortunately,
it's impossible to indicate by size or to make advices
by size.
Speaker 2: Right and cats they're definitely harder. They're harder for even
for pet parents to distinguish what's going on with them
because they're such stoic creatures. And that's just a well
known fact about cats. Where does Dusty get its information?
So keis you mentioned assisted AI. So is this from
that information that's out there that Dosty condenses and makes
it just easier for the pet parent to understand rather
than looking in a basilion places or because some of
the other apps you're speaking to a vat. So where
is Dasty's information coming from?
Speaker 5: As a house rule, and that's an unbreakable we have
that all the healthcare data has to be verified.
Speaker 6: So let's say the feature as a symptom checker that
we have in our app, what it does. It has
about sixty to seventy most popular symptoms in cats and dogs.
Speaker 5: So let's say if your dog is eaching, you can
go for.
Speaker 6: A symptom and then we can tell you the most
most likely and less likely it causes. So that symptom checker,
those questions and advisors that come after they came from
vets and there are names of those bets there and
their credentials and so on and so forth for the
general type of questions that you can give an hour
dose the AI system chat as a language model, we
use GBT that's the most advanced model. But since we've
earned a grant from Microsoft, we have the advanced usage
of the GIPT model. Basically, and we'll put a lot
of rules around it. So when you ask about a
pet friendly beach, data comes from GPT. But the advice
not to take your dog today, take her tomorrow because
it's been vaccinated, it comes from us. Because once there's
a water in the mix, we have to check the vaccination.
That's the rule, and that's what the system does. It
checks the vaccination, comes back and gives you the answer.
So the general data comes from the GPT and the
pounds of content that we have, the articles that we've
been buying. Everything about healthcare comes from verified resources, including
the content, like we have a training content inside the app,
hours and hours of training content. That trainer in that
video is a certified trainer dog trainer.
Speaker 5: You have her credentials there as well.
Speaker 6: Right, So if you read an article and that article
is about food, then there is a nutritionist who is
behind it, and there is a name and credential of
that nutritionists. We spend a lot of money on content
on verifications, but we believe that it works it because
if you advise something that is in relation of healthcare,
you have to have profession the mix.
Speaker 2: Right exactly, We're gonna take a short break while we
break back.
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Speaker 2: Welcome back everyone. We're talking to Ayas he is the
CEO of Dosty that is an all in one app.
So talking more about Dosty to simplify it for the
pat parent. What does dostage? What are the services the features?
I know there's a lot of breed information in the app.
What are some other features that you would want our
listeners to know once they download Dusty.
Speaker 6: Yeah, first and foremost, we provide personalized, ongoing and emergency care.
So in case of emergency, we have a bunch of
healthcare issues, like a feature story like symptom Checker, like
our assistant, as I said, the healthcare content.
Speaker 5: Or it's a lifestyle.
Speaker 6: If you want to play a game, if you want
to learn a new game to play with your dog
and your kids, we can go down to assistant, ask
them to send you the some sort of games.
Speaker 5: It will lay down for you.
Speaker 6: Or you can go to content typing games and read
an article about tens and hundreds of different games you
can play with your dog at home.
Speaker 5: Like and as I said, the emergency, they don't come
every day.
Speaker 6: We as pet parents, we are more into ongoing care.
And that's what I was looking for with my dogs
when I was especially when I was locked up in
a pandemic. Like I didn't really need emergency care, Like
I didn't need to connect with a vet or something.
Speaker 5: I didn't need to learn about the food to feed
I need.
Speaker 6: Don't go and stuff like my dog picked something up,
or I would like to give my dogs some apples,
let's say in cucumbers whatever, How what's the proportion to mix?
Speaker 5: You know, I needed very quick advices.
Speaker 6: I needed to be able to take a picture of something,
send it over and get a response, but that response
about my dog personally, So it's a personalized, ongoing and
emergency care to put it in short.
Speaker 2: Okay, thanks. What user trends are you seeing on Dusty
that show that pet parents need more knowledge and support
in you know that particular.
Speaker 5: Area humanization of pets?
Speaker 6: Like of course, yeah, I see yeah, like sixty one
percent of my base the dogs are a bit overweight,
like there is a dog deviation with a brig standard,
Like people think that it is fine to do certain
things that are not fine. Or what is the first
thing that we do, Like when we have a problem
with the pets, we pick up the phone, we call
somebody we know who has a dog to advice if
that person has experienced that sort of thing in his life.
But sometimes we don't.
Speaker 5: Consider the differences in breeds.
Speaker 6: Something that is okay for a people may not be
okay for a labrador and vice versa. So what we
do We take away that guess work and we try
to help people to make more aware choices. But the
trends tell us that no matter how much help people have,
we still tend to humanize pets. We tend to treat
pets as humans, and sometimes that is very harmful, like
we project ourselves to our pets. That's the main trend.
Fifty five percent of all the pet parents, as I
said in our app are the new pet parents, are
the new dog owners or cat owners. And we see
a lot of mistakes, emotional mistakes like those people make
with their pets by overfeeding them, giving them very large portions,
not walking with them too much because they think that's
not good for their health, you know, like walking right
after food or whatever, like mistraining them, training them in
the wrong way, but humanizing them basically. That's that's one
of the main friends that we see.
Speaker 2: I kind of agree with that, I do. I think
that there's too many times that people will do that,
and I think that's becoming kind of a natural thing
in this day and age. You know, you think about pets.
Just in the last two decades, we went from i
mean maybe three decades now. You know, raw food is
kind of common for it wasn't heard of probiotics fhere
pets that's so commonplace. And before that and got help
and you know, it tends to hit the human trends first.
And then trickle down to pats. You're very okay, let's
talk about you're very breed focused on dusty. So why
do you focus strongly on the.
Speaker 5: Breed at the moment.
Speaker 6: The only reason that is so industy is because there's
a lot of breed specific information that is available, the
verified information. There's not so much with the mixed breeds
because mixed breeds are also work in progress. There's a
lot of ifs and butts in mixed breeds. So we
made sure that we covered everything that is not We
mix it up. We created the mechanics that gives you
personal advices by everything we know and for us to
concentrate more or understanding and learning stuff about the mixed
breeds because forty percent of our database are the mixed
breeds owners small to medium mixed breeds, so we do
have focus groups.
Speaker 5: We talk to people.
Speaker 6: We hear their comments, we see what they ask, you know,
to learn more, and you know, sometimes people don't know
the mix breed. That also makes it difficult. You have
a dog at home and you can see that there
is a husky there, but you don't know where that
husky was.
Speaker 5: Is it the grandfather or the father or is the
mom or a grandma.
Speaker 6: You know, you see the husky, but you don't know
what husky it was, and for a long for a
lot of cases, people don't know themselves. So that's why
it's very hard to do some specific researchers or get
some specific informational mix breeds.
Speaker 5: So that's why it's it's the work in progress. Okay,
you know it better than either you have mixed breeds, right, I.
Speaker 2: Mean most mixed breeds you can tell you know what
the mixes are. Not always it's not always obvious. But
sometimes when you're talking about breeds specific, are you going
to such detail or do you get let's let me
ask this. Are there questions such as a lot of
dogs with short snouts, they can have respiratory issues, you know,
be careful when you're what time or day are walking
them for extremes in temperature. Are you getting questions like
that because you said a lot of your users are
new had parents or is it something more involved with
the breeds such as you know German shepherds have hip
dysplays here that's just a common without with within the breed.
So is it more something obvious that the new pet
parents just not aware of or is it more detailed.
Speaker 6: At the first, it's actually speaking to stages at first,
when Ted Turns is new and he doesn't or does
have an experience in having a bad the questions are
more not bread They more general, like like a snout
one like what what's the difference? How does this this
shape and head form of ahead of my dog influences
in healthcare? But then it goes to the goes to
more breed specific questions like are these dogs are good guardians?
Speaker 5: Or are these good dogs are good in training? Are
these dogs are group good with other dogs?
Speaker 6: And stuff like that, like breed specific questions, But honestly,
usually the questions are very general and they're not really
about the healthcare itself. There's a lot what we see
in trend that there's a lot of emotional questions that
people ask, like kind of questions like do you have
that feeling that your dog is not feeling well by
looking at it? Like I'm looking at my dog now,
I don't know what is wrong. I don't see any
wrong size, but I feel that my dog is feeling
wrong because.
Speaker 5: Eyes are sad.
Speaker 6: We really have those kinds of questions, and you know,
those kinds of questions are being asked in community chat,
not in the AI assistant. The questions you talked about,
they mainly ask in something very right, you know, in
in chat like where AI helps you, but.
Speaker 5: More emotional ones like the one I mentioned.
Speaker 6: They're being asked in a community chat from other pet parents.
Speaker 5: But in general, as I said, it's faces first, general questions,
and then it goes into pre specific like what I
can do with this breed, like how well can it train?
Speaker 6: What kind of commands over the basic obedience training I
can teach this dog?
Speaker 5: So on and so forth.
Speaker 2: Okay, interesting, I could see where when you said earlier
that people are putting their own emotions and feelings onto
their dog, but just looking at a dog's eyes saying that, oh,
my dog is sad instead of you know, puppy eyes
can be sad or happy, but they're puppy eyes, right,
They're hard to interpret. I mean, it's a puppy you know.
Speaker 5: Consid there. I'm very sorry for interrupting. You have to
consider one thing.
Speaker 6: The medium age of my user is nineteen twenty five, okay,
it's female, nineteen twenty five. Sixty percent of my user
basis this so the questions are more emotional because the GM,
you know, the factor of the generation, like you would
ask various I asked very specific questions from those two,
like very very specific thanks, Like can I mix this
and this and give to my dog if I feed
my dog in the morning with the pote chiese, Can
I give whatever whatever in a couple of hours?
Speaker 5: Yes, you can. That's that's the balance you have to
keep and blah blah blah, you know what I mean.
Speaker 6: So and then the new generation, the question is very emotional,
they're very general because those are the people who MANI
the pets, like gen Z and the late millennials, those
other people who humanized pets, who brought this humanization and
made it a trend.
Speaker 2: No, you're absolutely right. I mean I'm not gen Z.
I'm a little before that, a few generations before that.
And I could see in and I've had pets for years,
and I could see the differences. And I mean I've
just been doing I mean pet Life Radio has been
around since two thousand and seven, so just in that time.
And I've hosted Best Bets for Pets since twenty ten,
so fifteen years. So just in fifteen years when I've
had concentrated knowledge of it. I've seen the different changes
with how people treat their pets. How there's things that
we do today that even a decade ago would have
been what you do that for your dog? We don't
even call them, you know, dogs and cats anymore. They're
fur babies. So yeah, I could definitely see that we're
definitely humanizing them more, which I'm not saying that's a
bad thing, but we have to remember their needs are
different than than humans. It's not always the same thing.
What do you see as the future for for babies
pet care?
Speaker 6: Oh, the future is definitely, you know, the future is
after the assistance, Like and we see the whole AI
kind of topic, it's shifted towards the different and various
assistants that can help because AI is best utilized when
it assists you is something, and there's so many of
them right now, various assistants. So the future of pet
care I see as an assistant in your pocket that
you know, you can refer to for doing everything from
scheduling a vet appointment to getting your pet passport, you know,
just going through the information from your pet passport, exchanging information,
talking to users that are abroad that are not from
your country, that are overseas the same breed users. You
know that that's where it's all going. Because it's all
about the phones, it's all about the technology. It's all
about being right right now, especially when it comes down
to pets. As I said, I'm a parent, I'm a
child parent, human parent as well. So when something happens
to my child, I want to know now, like what
is it? Like, what is happening? Same thing with my dogs.
Like I consider myself I'm not a gen z either.
I'm forty and you know when but when I see
something happening to my dog, like I can't find a
place for myself. I want an answer now, even if
it's five o'clock in the morning, four o'clock in the morning,
I can't wait for vet. I want to know now
what is happening. And sometimes knowing it now, you know,
sometimes it's a very easy thing to handle. You don't
even have to take your dog to the vet if
you know what is happening. So again, assistance, I think
those assistance in your pocket. They will first of all,
simplify the life of vets as well, because vets are overcrowded,
and that is also inevitable. That's not going to change.
That's an institutional problem. There is much less vets comat
graduating every year than pet parents coming into the world,
so that there is no chance that that is catching up.
So as what vets needs help as well. And sometimes
it's better when the aware client comes to AVE knowing
what is happening, and ve can log into the information,
see the log see everything that the dog was doing
the last month, and once the patient comes, you know,
it just goes real quick without the necessity of going
through the data all data asking questions like waight and
blah blah blah and so on and so forth, And
that's what actually will be doing. We the next thing
for thosity, we are building B two B solutions. We
are building the vet clinic management platforms. We are building
the grooming, the shelter, the breeder and retail platforms that
will be connected to our app as well and provide
even more convenience of pet parents. So now when once
you down with your symptom checker, you will be able
to schedule a vet appointment right away like the vet
clinic near you, and you will be reminded before that appointment,
and your vet will be reminded about that appointment, and
your vet will be able to log into your file
and see everything you've been doing with your dog before
you even come. So those those are the things we
are working on. And definitely the future is that the
future is the fullest distance and with you twenty four
to seven and that goes both ways. You have for
for vets and for parents and so for one we'll
be to see and it just.
Speaker 2: Makes sense because with all the technology available, we just
want information faster and faster. So definitely makes sense. Where
can people find Dusty.
Speaker 6: You can download it from Appstore and then Google Market
it's available and if during the October on our website,
any clinic and any Google Mix alone, we'll be able
to download the full company management platform as well. That
doesn't have to be connected to those feed It can
work separately.
Speaker 2: Okay, and it's Dusty dot Co d o s t.
Y dot Co is your website. You also have a
lot of information on your website with breeds and unusual
breeds and a lot of articles and you know a
lot of data for pet parents.
Speaker 6: You will be amazed on the variety of dogs we
do have in our system. Obviously, the majority of dog,
as I said, are the mixed breeds, and then you
have the standard breeds like German shepherd's, labradors and friends,
bulldogs and blah blah blah. But then you have dogs
like we have a couple of breeds that are like
ancient breeds from Africa and those dogs live in Poland.
And then guys need they use those two like almost
every other day to get assistance, to get advices. They
write so much feedback that thank you very much. It's
very hard to find information about this breed. But now
with dusting, it made it easier to keep all the
information aside, you know, and consider everything. So yeah, the
variety is huge and that's growing. But you have to
remember we all have to understand one thing. A dog
is a dog. Like the eighty percent of everything is
applicable both to labradors, German shepherds, mixed breeds and other
dogs right in terms of behavior, in terms of psychology,
those are the pack animals and there are rules of
the pack basically how they live, how they socialize, and
that's very different to humans in many cases. So more
we learn about you, about your dogs specifically, we applied
knowledge which is available about that so called tac philosophy,
as I said, and then we apply it to your
specific dog, and then we'll provide you with more direct
answers to what to do and you know how to
behave so as as you said on our website, you
also have a lot of that information available for free
for everybody who wants to go on and read it.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for coming on Best Bets for Pets,
and I think you have a very interesting app and
I'm excited to see more of it in the future.
Speaker 5: I appreciate that. Michelle, thank you very much for having me.
Speaker 2: Thank you. I would like to thank my guest I
Ask for coming on Best Bets for Pets and sharing
his information about Dusty. What a great app. I would
like to thank everyone that's listening to Best Bets for Pets.
Thank you so much for listening fifteen years strong. I
appreciate your loyalty. Thank you to my cat crew, Dennis,
Charlotte and Molly for keeping me in speA, hired and grounded.
And of course a huge thank you to Mark Winter,
my producer, for doing all he does and working is magic.
And remember You never know what we're gonna have next
on Best Bets for Heat.
Speaker 4: Let's Talk Pets every week on demand only on petlifradio
dot com