In high school, student president candidates are sometimes known to offer their peers free ice cream as an incentive to vote.
In the moving business, it looks like baby goats might be the answer.
Case-in-point: Austin-based hauling startup Burro is offering a limited supply of on-demand baby goat orders to folks in Austin, San Antonio, Portland and Tampa Bay this Friday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Under the one-day offer, you can open the Burro app, set a pickup location for where you want the goats to arrive and, if you get matched to a partnering goat yoga company, Burro will bring two baby goats for you and your friends and co-workers to play with for 20 minutes. (The company notes that folks in offices might want to check with their boss and co-workers before bringing additional nature into the building.)
For the uninitiated, goat yoga is a thing. You do yoga with a group while baby goats roam around and even climb up onto your back. I've done it with friends in a parking garage downtown. So have thousands of others in Austin (and elsewhere).
Burro co-founder Ethan Hurtado said in a news release that he and his team talked about doing goat yoga for a year before taking the plunge. Now they want to share it with more people.
The on-demand baby goats play is part of a bigger effort by Burro to launch an affiliate model that lets people use Burro's backend tech to start Burro affiliates in other cities.
"As a bootstrapped company, it has been impossible for us to scale to over 50 cities requested," Burro's news release said. "We looked at other business models and concluded that an affiliate model would work for Burro. Kind of like local gyms, the barriers to entry are low, but these entrepreneurs are finding it hard to build the technology, have quality standards, and build a brand without outside investment."
