Cue the Sarah McLachlan music. We're talking about pet adoption. While there's nothing more heartwarming than giving a grateful pup or an appreciative kitty a loving home, the process of being approved to adopt an animal can be a nightmare. But Artur Sousa, a globe-trotting serial entrepreneur who's set roots in Boston, is hoping to make it a whole lot easier - and faster - for fit pet parents to welcome their animals into the family.
Sousa founded Adopets, a venture focused on simplifying adoption applications, earlier this year. And it all began with his dog Frisco, named after San Francisco, where Sousa met his wife.
“I have a black lab I adopted from Texas,” Sousa explained. “He’s an albino black lab, a beautiful dog, but no one wanted to have him because of his health conditions.”
“We have an issue with an abundance of pets, where half the rescues are euthanized."
Even though Frisco needed a home and Sousa was eager to take him in, he wasn’t able to for three months. And, as Sousa found out, it was mostly because of outdated administrative processes. Every organization has its own criteria for prospective pet parents, along with its own set of lengthy questionnaires. Oftentimes, there’s no pre-screening process for applicants trying to adopt a pet.
According to Sousa, everyone who’s interested fills out a full application with normally about 50 questions. There may be criteria that they don’t meet right off the bat, but they have no way of knowing until afterwards - if they’re notified at all.
Worse yet, organizations also tend to not know if applicants are qualified to adopt certain pets until they review entire applications. “The process is the same as it was ten years ago: excel spreadsheets and color-coded dots,” Sousa explained.
Ultimately, both sides unnecessarily waste time, all the while pets remain without a home. And in the world of pet adoption, time is a matter of life and death. Space is limited in shelters and, in some places, animals that aren’t adopted after a certain length of time are put to sleep to make room for the next crop of rescues.
“It took me 3 months to finish the process of adopting my pet,” Sousa said. “We have an issue with an abundance of pets, where half the rescues are euthanized… In the last year, 2.7 million animals were killed because there was no space.”
Sousa realized if organizations had a more organized, more efficient process for reviewing adoption applications, they’d be able to save pets’ lives. In January, he started assembling a team and developing Adopets, an online platform that streamlines the application process mainly for organizations, but also consequently for adoptive parent hopefuls.
Adopets features a quick preliminary questionnaire about the people looking to take a pet into their homes. The screening is meant to sift out ineligible applicants for particular pets right off the bat, so they don’t have to waste time filling out a massive form. Furthermore, it ensures organizations will only spend time scrutinizing qualified applications, not reading every application that comes across their desks.
For example, the preliminary screening may ask whether someone has children at home. If they do, Adopets ensures they aren’t sending in an application for a dog who doesn’t play well with kids. As a result, organizations will have fewer applications to review because folks who aren’t the right fit for different pets will be well vetted.
Adopets is currently doing closed beta testing with organizations throughout Massachusetts, Texas and Missouri. So far, Sousa shared that participating organizations are spending half the time reviewing adoption applications than usual, which, as he explained, means they can essentially double the capacity for pets in their shelters.
The venture, which has bootstrapped up until this point, is offering their services free of charge to organizations. Instead, their revenue stream is coming from adopters. As it stands, anyone who takes in a rescue typically pays an adoption fee dependent on the animal, ranging from around $50 dollars for an elderly cat to $700 for a puppy. Adopets tacks on $20 to that fee and, so far, pet parents haven’t minded the surcharge. Probably because furry love is priceless.
Images via Adopets.
