Rescue Spot: Simplifying Pet Adoptions

If you've experienced the joy of adopting a pet, you know that the wonderful feeling of welcoming a new family member to your home is often preceded by involves numerous challenges that can be both cumbersome and emotionally draining. Prospective pet owners frequently encounter a convoluted and extended application process, necessitating comprehensive questionnaires about their living conditions, lifestyle, and prior experiences with pets. This detailed scrutiny, while crucial for ensuring a suitable match between the pet and its future home, can be overwhelming.

These experiences can deter first-time pet adopters from considering adoption as a viable means of getting a dog or cat, which in turn results in deserving animals remaining in shelters instead of going to their forever home. Even experienced pet adopters admit that the adoption process is somewhat broken, largely due to the limited resources with which most shelters are forced to operate.

Years ago, one of my close friends, who has a passion for adopting senior dogs , attempted to build an app to serve as a universal database for qualified pet adopters, hoping to streamline a largely similar, unnecessarily repetitive process across the many animal rescues and shelters in the country. While his efforts were unsuccessful at the time, I had always thought it was a good idea, and wondered why the concept was unable to gain traction.

Fast forward to late 2023, when Daisy Chavez, BS, CVT , who appeared on Petworking earlier this year (Pet Insurance: Why Doesn't Your Pet Have It? ), introduced me to Nicole Patrick , Founder of Rescue Spot . When I looked at the Rescue Spot website, I saw my friend's vision from years ago, beautifully and elegantly brought to life.

When I sat down with Nicole, who is a former actress, she explained how her exposure to the horrors of puppy mills and pet stores selling designer dogs in New York led her to found a matchmaking service for pet adoption. Nicole decided to gear her services towards the people who were going to these high-end pet stores and looking for designer dogs, and instead connecting them with pets from shelters and rescue organizations. However, this business model was not without its challenges. As Nicole described:

"Essentially what I did was fill out thousands of applications to adopt pets all over America with all different kinds of rescues and shelters. And I was filling out all these applications that were essentially the same questions, but just being worded differently. [...] And so it was very frustrating for me. I was constantly filling out these applications and I was never hearing back from the rescues or shelters. I would just send them out, send applications, send emails, phone calls, and they would never get back to me. And if they did get back to me, nine times out of ten, that pet had been adopted months ago and the rescues and shelters just didn't have time to update their website and update the different pet listing networks that they used. So it was extremely frustrating. Most of the people that worked with me ended up going to a breeder or a pet store because they just didn't want to wait for a pet to come up that was adoptable. And most of them got very frustrated with the process saying, 'Well, I don't understand. I'm trying to do good. I'm trying to save an animal. Why is it that they won't give me an animal?'"

Notwithstanding the fact that she was trying to run her matchmaking service while working full-time as an actress, these other challenges associated with her efforts to provide an alternative to backyard breeders, puppy mills, or other places that may be fostering poor treatment of the animals from which they were profiting led Nicole to seek an alternative career path. She left her acting career, and after spending a few months in Africa, she returned to New York and began volunteering at various shelters and rescues in New York. This experience allowed her to understand the complexities and difficulties faced by rescue organizations and shelters in managing adoptions. Nicole observed that despite the high volume of adoptions and the significant effort required in this process, most of the funding in these organizations was dedicated to animal care and vetting, leaving limited resources for employee support. Her insights from both volunteering and working in employee roles at these organizations shaped her understanding of the challenges in the pet adoption and rescue process.

Ultimately, Nicole's experience led her to found Rescue Spot, which is a platform that simplifies, streamlines, and standardizes the entire pet adoption process for both pet adopters and rescue organizations. Nicole describes the platform as a double-sided marketplace that is differentiated from the two major pet adoption platforms, Petfinder and Adopt-a-Pet.com , by the fact that when a prospective adopter registers for Rescue Spot, they fill out a one-time universal application that they can use to instantly apply to any pet on the platform.

In addition to the universal application, Rescue Spot provides rescues with a system for managing and filtering applications for rescues, and an automated reference checking process. This system significantly reduces the time and effort required for the adoption process.

I was particularly intrigued by the discussion that Nicole and I had regarding the platform's business model, as Nicole emphasized that Rescue Spot does not charge rescue organizations any fees, but generates revenue through adoption fees and partnerships, like pet insurance sales. Given the cash-strapped conditions that most rescues and shelters operate under, the decision to monetize the platform through partnerships with corporations that can sell their products and services to pet adopters has tremendous potential to drive high levels of shelter participation, as it provides them with free access to platform-based automation of the time-consuming tasks that were once the purview of volunteers.

In addition to partnerships that provide corporations with a targeted distribution channel for their products and services, I also talked to Nicole about Rescue Spot's planned incorporation of AI to enhance the service offerings available on the platform. Although not yet publicly available, the team has been developing this feature for about three years. AI will be employed in various ways, notably in suggesting optimal pet products for owners. Leveraging the medical records of pets, the AI will analyze various pet foods, products, and supplements to recommend the best options tailored to the specific health needs of each pet, such as dietary sensitivities, chronic conditions like diabetes or glaucoma, and skin issues. In addition to personalizing and improving the pet adoption experience, Nicole sees this recommendation engine as the groundwork for a potential partnership with, or acquisition by, a major pet retailer (e.g., Chewy , Petco , etc.). While individualized diet recommendations do exist in the industry, they have largely been confined to a single manufacturer's product portfolio. Rescue Spot's efforts to provide an individualized, algorithm-driven diet recommendation that is manufacturer-agnostic would be a first in the pet space.

I mentioned to Nicole that a partnership with a DNA-testing service, such as Wisdom Panel , Embark Veterinary , or Basepaws could represent a logical next step, because so much of the market for these tests is driven by people who adopt mixed-breed pets, and want to know what they are. There is also tremendous potential for Rescue Spot to leverage DNA data in its AI-based recommendation algorithm.

Rescue Spot was only launched 7 months ago, but it already has 150 shelters/rescues on the platform, and has facilitated ~1,500 adoptions in that time. I can only imagine those numbers will grow, as more potential adopters and shelters recognize the beautiful simplicity in its model. In my opinion, there is no reason why a universal database of qualified pet adopters can't succeed, and contribute to ending pet homelessness. Especially at the holidays, there's nothing that makes you more sad than thinking of a dog or cat being on the street, or living out their days in a shelter.

Essentially, we're talking about a credit bureau or TSA Pre-Check for pet adoptions, and that is what Nicole has created with Rescue Spot.

Enjoy the episode, and please, leave your thoughts in the comments! Happy Holidays!