SOPet
Individual journey — Wachirawit Siridachanon
Best, Wachirawit Siridachanon 6258064556
Chief Financial Officer and Vice head of Customer relations
By the end of semester 1/2021 consisting of 16 weeks, I and my group aim to set the semester goal as follows.
Semester goal:
- Fully operating website
- Application developed
- Sufficient amount of customer
- Sign MoU with hospital
- Company registration
Week 1 (16–22 August 2021)
This week we had an innodating to meet the team of computer engineers from the faculty of engineers and discuss the concept of our current services and inform the design and system of the application that we expected. Moreover, We allowed them to test our website to understand the system better.
Also, this week was the first time that our department started paying vet salaries on a half month basis and the result was pleased. Furthermore, we set the meeting among operation, financial, customer relations, and marketing departments to discuss the pricing and the targeted number of customers that we have to accomplish in the next quarter on the website since currently, our costs associated with technological aspects increase dramatically including server and database expenses affecting our margin reduced significantly. After meeting and discussing, we got the result that our sales price should be increased while maintaining the percentage of vet commission. The number of customers that our services should be around 420 people per month which will rely on the marketing substantially.
Week 2 (23–29 August 2021)
I would say this week was the most challenging for our team since we just received the announcement from the Vet Council related to the legislation of teleconsultation for pet owners mentioning that all vets in the system must be verified by the hospital or clinic that already registered to be a hospital providing teleconsultation. This would be a major obstacle for us to operate the system, however, we have a plan to solve this unexpected problem by adjusting the progress from the next phase to the current phase. We aim to expand our connection by partnering with the clinics and hospitals instead. For now, we have 1 vet in our system who owns his clinic agreed to partner with us.
Moreover, this week we had a meeting with P’Ronnie to update our progress which mostly related to the semester milestone that we did. He suggested that we should provide solid information with evidence to support the statement especially on the number of expected customers and retention rate. Currently, we set the number of customers to be 40 people per day with a retention rate of 30% to cover our expenses which rely heavily on database and server.
Also, for our mentor this semester, we opted for P’Tan same as the previous semester to guide and help us associated with operation management.
Week 3 (30 August -5 September 2021)
This week we officially launched our website on 1st September 2021 and make the website become the main channel of SOPet. Since day one after launching the website, we gain a high number of customers with an average of 8–9 customers per day and reach the peak at 10 paid customers on 3rd September 2021.
For the finances department, I have been assigned to gather insights from vets who are clinic or hospital owners for analyzing the required information including a pleasant way of shared revenue, commission percentage, interest, and so on. After interviewing some of the vets, I found that many clinics have a high amount of income with an average of 100k per month with a margin of around 20–30%. Based on that number vets agreed to divide revenue as a commission of 10–15% but should depend on cases as well since the price rate of each service is different affecting margin. Thus we can calculate roughly that if we have more clinics with the rate of income around this number, we will get a monthly income of around 10–15k per month. Moreover, after introducing our services that were intended to launch in the next phase, all interviewed vets were interested and think that this is a good concept whereas one of the vets mentioned that there was some platform that contacts and invites her to join. This would be another concern that we should launch this stage and come up with a competitive advantage before the war will begin.
For the meeting this week, we did not have a meeting with both P’Tan and P’Ronnie while next week we certainly discuss with them.
Week 4 (6–12 September 2021)
This week financial department continued to gather insights from a vet who owns a clinic and prepare for the business expansion in the next phase. Also, we gain a pleasant result which was similar to the previous week.
For the website traction, we gained the highest number of customers this week which was more than last week. On 8th September 2021, we had 13 paid customers who topped up on our website.
For this week's meeting, we discussed the dividends sharing due to a new requirement of the new CTO who is Chawin’ friend that needs a share as a return. For now, we roughly planned to divide our shares into 2 main parts officially (30% for CTO and 70% for Co-Founders which will be further divided). Also, we invited P’Tan to aid us in approving the new CTO and his team whether they are appropriate to work with us or not. Moreover, we discussed marketing strategies that we will use to promote our services, and based on the resource that we have, we decided to hire a vet in our system who is an influencer in TikTok to be one of the main channels for promoting our services.
Lastly, for meeting with P’Ronnie, we summed up what we have done so far via line since P’Ronnie was not available to discuss with us via call, and for the mentor, we decided to select Professor Mongkol to be an advisor but it needs to be insisted officially by P’Ronnie again.
Week 5 (13–19 September 2021)
This week we have continued to adjust our website based on the weekly milestone. According to the suggestion from the Vet council, we created details and informed vets to prepare for an alteration such as asking existing vets to reveal license numbers on the website in order to make our services more transparent and creating a consent form for customers to accept the conditions of telemedicine. Moreover, we start planning to recruit new vets who are clinic owners to our website as well.
As for the promotion, we asked one of our friends at BAScii, Natty, who is an influencer, to promote our website by creating a video and publishing it on her social media accounts both Tik-Tok and Instagram, and the result was really impressive with an engagement of more than 100 likes!. For the vet influencer that we mentioned last week, she sent us an example of the clip that will be posted on her Tik-Tok account. But we have to discuss and advise the law firm before releasing that post.
Furthermore, with respect to the financial department, this week we collected the transactions of customers and found that the number of customers was steady at 20–25 paid customers per week similar to previous weeks. Moreover, we did a cost-benefit analysis for our application to the engineering team by predicting our ROI and breakeven point in the next 5 years which are envisaged as 22.11% and 1.602 respectively with an expected sales growth of 30 percent annually. Also, the programmers just created a new feature on the admin panel allowing us to check the transaction of each vet daily.
For this week’s meeting, we had a meeting with new programmers to discuss the shortcomings of existing services and how to address them also, a discussion associated with the direction of our website and the possibility of application creation. For now, we divided the tasks to all departments to handle with our new platform which still further requires more vital resources in terms of user interface and design, law and regulation, and insights from the vet to make it more solid.
Week 6 (20–26 September 2021)
This week we receive a contact from LivingOS, a platform for residents in condominium and housing property to be a partner with us. On Wednesday, we had a meeting with them in order to introduce and discuss the future project. Basically, they want to integrate our services into their platform, This is a really good opportunity for us to expand our target customers of urban livings. After discussing, we roughly deal with a 15% commission deduction for every customer who comes from their platforms. However, this rate should be finalized again after we can find the balance among us, LivingOS, and vets.
Moreover, for this weekly meeting, we discussed with P’Ronnie related to the partnership with LivingOS and he suggested we start contracting the company registration in order to reduce the complex work from external organizations.
Week 7 (27 September — 3 October 2021)
This week the marketing department set a live session to attract more customers to our Facebook page with more than a hundred audiences in a live session. This will be a plan for the marketing team in order to gain a high number of customers which goes in the good direction as we expected. Moreover, for the financial department, we created a financial summary and gain revenue of more than 22,081 baht from top-up customers which are envisaged that we might have a margin of around 8,000 baht this month before an admin salary deduction.
Furthermore, we have a meeting on Friday to discuss the AI project which is a part of the AI course. And we decided to continue the project that we came up with previously which is symptom detection in dogs and cats.
Week 8 (4–10 October 2021)
This week we have a meeting to discuss the company registration in order to partner with Living OS. We contacted freelance to manage this registration and agree on the name list of shareholders including 2 co-founders and 1 programmer. The registration will be envisaged to be completed within the next 2 weeks. Moreover, after our company register, a task overload might be gathered in the finance department to complete a financial summary to audit and send it to the public sector in order to check.
Week 9 (11–17 October 2021)
The finance department start calculating the commission rate that Living OS informed us and we found that a 15% commission rate is the most reasonable one since they did not want to change the commission rate that they offered initially due to the small ticket size of our business thus we decided to remain a 15% commission as they required. Also, we received a contact from one angel investor who is interested in our business since the GSEA competition and we plan to have a discussion with him next week. Moreover, the finance department has done the revenue and expenses summary for September 2021 and found that we still faced a loss of 14k baht due to a high amount of budget spent on marketing purposes.
This week we did not have a meeting with P’Ronnie since our appointed meeting day was on the holiday so, we updated him via text instead.
Week 10 (18–24 October 2021)
This week is another tough week for finance since I have to prepare all financial documents to propose to investors such as a revenue projection in 2022–2024 and a financial statement to display the transaction of our business. The most important part is a calculation of the estimated amount of investment. On this topic, we decided to consult with P’Tan our ex-mentor for a reasonable decision and we come up with an answer of 3.5 million baht which can be separated into 3 main sides: Marketing 40% | server and maintenance 25% | hiring new workers 35%.
Another task that I did was an agreement of shares between each of the co-founders since in the previous version of the name list in a registered company document we have only the name of the CEO, COO, and programmers which might not be fair with other co-founders thus we decided to divide the share by making CEO’s share as a majority of 45% and other co-founders of 5% individually.
This week we have a meeting with P’Ronnie to report the current progress and receive feedback and comments on the financial calculation before proposing it to the investor.
Week 11 (25 -31 October 2021)
This week we have a short meeting to agree on a new logo design. After a group decision on a design and color tone, we came up with a concept of a warm and being an accessible brand by applying 2 different colors to represent the concept: Cerulean, and Light Orange. Then we hired an outsource to design a logo for us under the concept that we provided. For now, the outsource sent the first draft to us for feedback. For my task this week, I come up with a calculation of the return that we aim to propose to the vets for helping create this algorithm. Initially, we expect to share revenue of around 16–30% from this algorithm which mainly comes from advertisements and might not have many costs of operation thus we decided to share a high percentage of revenue. Another task done by finance is a summation of revenue in October. The result displays that our customers decreased around 40–50% this month due to a prohibition of services promoting from the Vet Council and some bottlenecks on the website because of delayed notifications affecting unsatisfied customer experiences; however, we are in the process to create a plan to address this problem immediately to avoid it happening again.
Week 12 (1–7 November 2021)
The great news of this week is we got a contact from CU vet hospital to hire us to create a telemedicine platform for them. This is a big step in our plan since we plan to expand our services within the next few years. For now, we have discussed the plan with representatives of CU vet hospital already but more details will be provided in the following week. Moreover, for the smart symptom system, we have drafted a contract for the vets and wait for a checking.
Week 13 (8–14 November 2021)
This week has been continued from the previous week. Our representatives join the meeting with executives from CU vet hospital to discuss the features and what they expect from our services also for my department, I have created a price proposal to CU vet hospital as an estimation of how we calculate monthly expenses. Moreover, the financial department also create a projected revenue with an assumption of 1 billion baht in revenue and we retrieve that we should have at least 5 million users in order to gain 1 billion baht in revenue and 200 million in profit.
Week 14 (15–21 November 2021)
For this week we successfully registered SOPet as a company and get an approval from DBD already. From now on we have to set up the system to be more specific and the financial department should have a tough work to deal with many tasks prudently.
Moreover, for application development, we get a chance from P’Ramade, Director of CU innovation hub who proposed us a software house to help us operate the application. We have representatives, Beam, Chawin, and Jaguar to join this session. After the talk, the software house required us to work on creating a software system layout of our application for the discussion of features/services that they are willing to work on for us.
