Dragon's Den Features WagIt! Booking Platform for Dog Owners

hoping her King Charles Spaniel Lola will be on doggy best behavior tonight is Italian Nadia lagel I adore dogs and I think they're the best companion any person can have we'll get you loads of treats

after growing up in Italy we always had dogs in our family when I mooved to the UK at the first opportunity I got Lola Nadia's startup aims to we going walkies with the web as a doo not I definitely

noticed there was something missing on the market so I decided to build a service that all dog parents could use the pooch friendly proposition has already sparked speculation in the den

rent a dog to have dinner with you dinner do.com we could call it doggy date 50/50 I mean the dragons appear to be in a playful mood so can Nadia bring them to

heal come Ona before parting them from their [Music] cash hello dragons this is Lola and I'm

Nadia and we're the co-founders of waget waget is the first dog friendly online booking platform in the UK we're here to seek £50,000 for5 a half% of our

business my background is in online reservations I was the first salesperson in Europe for open table and then I was director of sales at Booker table which is now a Trip Advisor business when Lola came into my life I realized how

difficult it was to book places to go with your dog when you looked online the options were limited and even when you found somewhere dog friendly you'd turn up and you'd be sat at the back next to the bins or asked to sitay outside even if it was raining and when it came to

groomers there's actually no way to book online you'd have to call and they never answered because they were grooming so I thought there has to be a better way there are now over 12 million uh dog owners in the UK and according to the

kenel club 98% of dog friendly Pub owners say that customers with dogs bring them better business that's where waget comes in our website enables people to discover find and book places

to take their dog so let me show you how it works you can select groomers pubs and bars restaurants or taxis you then

put the time and area and then you click submit after that you get a selection of what's available your preferences you can select one and look at the description if they have a doggy menu for example and all that information you

select the time and then you put in your details if they're not already in there that's how simple it is Lola and I are looking for a dog friendly dragon and we

know you all are to join the Wago pack a k9 compatible online platform for restaurant booking is the offering from Nadia

lagel who's seeking a £50,000 investment in return for a 5 and a half% share in her business I don't think she wants to take any questions I think we should let Lola go if she doesn't want to be in the

D okay Lola's work may be done but Nadia's has only just begun Peter Jones is first with the questions and he's clearly intrigued by this entrepreneur

CV Nadia yes your experience in the past is really interesting congratulations thank you what do you believe in terms of scale with your experience how are you going to achieve sort of growth for

the business the business model is interesting because having come from Open Table the business model for reservation companies like that is transactional so they charge for cover but with us it's more a benefit as a

marketing channel for the restaurants to Market to dog owners so it will be promotions and so on and there's so much we can do to a business you know offer offering them more um opportun to to

Market to dogs there's I mean there's so many events restaurants can fill their quieter times at lunchtime with dog owners and then the other side to monetize is once everyone falls in love and books through waggot the community

side of it so the consumers yeah I get the advertising piece on there as you grow but so how many people do you have to register on this site or can I just use this as a search engine you can just use it as a search engine how does that help you grab a subscriber or build your

data how do you do that you mean if you don't register yeah if I can go on there and use similar to a Google search the idea the Loyalty scheme will will encourage people to register what I like to do with waget is you can get points

if you go near in a restaurant if you book your groom or okay so you haven't got any registered users at the moment no I have you have how many about 400 Nadia's website is already gaining

traction but the Den's newest pet owner wants to discover exactly how she intends to convert dog friendly days out into Financial clout puppies I I've just got one so I

know exactly where you're coming from okay so the business model you've now told us how will you making income out of it we will charge uh operators so restaurants um groomers and so on a

monthly subscription fee it will be tiered so tier one tier two tier three depending on how much they want to Market with us I'm a restaurant sir so what will I have to pay on your subscription to enroll so £10 uh is a

tier one subscription £1 a month yeah how many restaurants have you got signed up at the moment 139 and the only way a restaurant can sign up as if they pay yes so if I'm a visitor and I want to go for a restaurant there's only 39 options

I have in the United Kingdom at the moment at the moment yes that's because you've put this huge barrier in the way of you achieving scale which is you're charging every single restaurant to list the reason why Open Table Yelp and all

these other websites have huge scale from day one is there's no resistance for a restaurant to join you've created resistance which means you have to now go around and knock on every restaurant store to sign them up one by one but I offered anyone who would join 3 months

free you must be the only person in the industry that's charging people to list Beyond 90 days there are a couple of other scale and also Open Table um was charged a monthly fee as well that's an

add-on they have a freemium model with the the premium upside if you want as a restaurant which you miss too high you get featured etc etc yeah right if you want to get scale quickly have a freemum model where every dog friendly restaurant in the land can sign up and

then charge them for better placement or else you're going to have to knock on every restaurant St so I think that's an existential risk to your model Steven Bartlet fears that Nadia

could be barking up the wrong tree with her current business model so will Sara Davies see greater potential in her plans to harness the pooning

pound honestly I think you've done a brilliant job getting to this point there's clearly demand in the market I think you've you've come into the market at the exact right time when you've got all of these dog owners now flooding into the market and things are opening

up people are desperate to get out there and obviously you've got the The Proven track record you've made this work for a couple of huge companies so or you know all of that together suggests it could be a recipe for success thank you how

big does this have to be for this to become a credible proposition 600 700 restaurants how many a day are you signing up at the moment so we get about five or six a day a week sorry five or six a week yeah but what we want to do

is really accelerate the business now um we need marketing to push a bit more and we need the developers to improve a few things um I build the website really quickly um to to get it up and and see how much interest it would get you built

it well I had it built unfortunately I don't know how to do coding and you don't think you can get from the place you at at the moment to that 6700 without having investment to improve the tech platform I can get that but'll take

me a lot longer you're building a tech company here you said that there's no one in your team that has built a tech company before well I my business partner and one of the investors is a friend of mine and he's a product

manager and helped build a tech business and then exited so he's the one who's helping me build a product I would feel from my experience building tech companies that you'd need someone in house that has technical expertise and if you if you are going to go out to Market and get investors the first thing

they're going to want to know is where's your technical co-founder who's the CTO yes and that's what I want with a background in Hospitality this entrepreneur knows her Gourmet

Bites but when it comes to megabytes her lack of expertise is giving cause for concern now the Den's most Ardent dog lover with four K9 Companions of her own wants to discover more about the

business's competition Nadia what was your actual role at Open Table I was sales so what does that website do to tell consumers

about dogs Open Table Open Table doesn't even have a tick box at the moment for for dog friendly ones so where would I go now if I was looking for pet friendly stuff I mean the way I used to do it is you put it in Google and just hope and

then it's always the same three or four that come up in my area but I guess I'm trying to understand what your added value is and I have a little bit of a worry for you I think it is going to become a tick box

any other site that just sells restaurants is just going to add that symbol and have a filter that brings it Forward whenever you put a search in which I think is a great shame because you know you kind of spotted it first

you but I'm afraid I I worry about that for you and you know going into investment with a worry for somebody is not a good idea so I'm really sorry Nadia I won't be investing I'm out thank you

deah disappointment for Nadia who has lost her first dragon will a techsavvy Peter Jones prove any more receptive to this

entrepreneurs attempt to computerize K9 Hospitality I like it I think it's a really good idea I'm slightly disappointed though with your background that you haven't come in with a much bigger number of customers on there

already 39 I would have expected you to have said I've got several hundred resturants already on board and I'm predicting by the end of this month I'll have a th000 restaurants 1,500 next month I'd expect

much more of a pipeline of where it's going so for that reason and I'm out but good luck thank you Nadia hi so My worry is that you're just going to shine such a big light on this that these other

companies are going to go oh look what we've been missing guys there's this huge business opportunity over here if we just make our website a little bit more dog friendly stick a couple of pictures of dogs on get some testimonials write a few blogs Bob's

your uncle we're all sorted okay you're going to raise awareness for then someone else to eat your dinner so as sad as I am to save cuz you

seem lovely I can't invest today in my I travel everywhere with my dog and I felt the pain that you're trying to resolve completely get that my issue is about the technical expertise within the

team and so with this type of business I would want to have seen technical expertise in the core team to give me peace of mind that this team will iterate through all of the problems that I know they're going to encounter and I haven't seen that today

so for that reason I'm [Music] out four dragons have now bowed out only fashion Tycoon to culan remains is he

prepared to trade the world of the catwalk for that of the dog walk I think the idea is great the way I see it is that you've got sort of three big challenges first challenge really is

to get your Tech right and have good techical support the Second Challenge is to get enough dog owners to use it MH and the third challenge is to get enough restaurants there's your free challenges

on top of that the main areas is the marketing because you know what the really needs if I have to be totally honest with you this needs a million pound thrown at it and and I I think

that your 50,000 ask is just a drop in the ocean so I'm going to say to you I wish you all the best and I'm out okay thank you thanks Nadia thanks all your feedback

thanks Nadia leaves the den without a deal