This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
Hey, what's up, welcome to Side Hustle School. Thank you for tuning in today. Wherever you are in the world, whatever your situation, I hope you're thinking about your own independence, your own freedom, your own security, what you can do to have extra money so that you have more choices. And I think you can do that even if you love your job and never plan to leave. That is our unifying mission here at Side Hustle School. And today is Throwback Thursday,
our weekly segment where we take an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved since we first featured them. Last week, we heard from the co-founder of a temporary tattoo brand that helps people cover up surgical scars. Today in our latest feature, we'll hear from Lee Isaacson, the co-founder together with her sister. It is a sisterly dynamic duo, the co-founders of Dig Dates. What is Dig Dates, you ask? It is the dating app for dog lovers. Yes, we first
featured them on episode 983, "Sisters Find Puppy Love" after launching dating app. In this next sentence, I'm taking directly from the copy on their app. If you live a dog-forward lifestyle and have struggled to find a partner, maybe you need the Dig app. Dog-forward lifestyle, that's the kind of thing that people who live a dog-forward lifestyle get it. And everybody else is like dog-forward lifestyle. Cool. All right. But just to be clear, that's good. For your side
hustle, you want something that people are really attracted to or really not attracted to. Okay, Lee has a lot of great info for us both about how this whole thing came to be and also how it's been affected over the past year and some really smart choices that they've made as well as a struggle that they had. So all kinds of good stuff here. Let's hear from her and I'll come back at the end to wrap us up. Hi, I'm Lee Isaacson D'Angelo. I am the CEO and co-founder of Dig and Tabby.
I'm from New Orleans, Louisiana, and I was last featured on episode 983. Dig is the dog person's dating app and Tabby is the cat person's dating app. Together, we're building relationships so pets and pet lovers can live healthier, longer, and more joyous lives together with the humans who love them. We first started with Dig and a few years ago, my sister was dating a guy who tried so hard to be a dog person for her. But by the end of the relationship, he didn't even want her dog in his apartment. He would put towels or blankets down on the couch so the dog didn't
touch anything. And you know, she said to me, I wish I just knew from the start that this wasn't going to work because of my dog. And at that time, dating apps were really changing and getting more towards the niche idea. You saw a lot of popularity with niches around religion specifically. You see Jade Ate and J-Swipe, Christian Mingle, a lot of hyper local ones. And we said, you know,
what makes sense to us is the idea of your lifestyle niche when it comes to pets. Because this is something that not only do you already love if you have a pet in the house, but it matters to so much of your lifestyle. And so we thought this was a great place to get started and go from there. We launched Dig city by city across the country by throwing dog friendly events. And when I say we, it was me and my sister. We were on the road every month in a different
city, bringing different pet people together. We brought pet businesses together for these big events. And then, you know, our events stopped with COVID like so much else. But what we recognized was it was an awesome opportunity to launch the second app that everyone had been asking us to all along. And we hadn't been able to yet. And that was Tabby, the cat person's dating app.
It made a lot of sense for the pandemic because cats were probably the least affected of the animals out there other than their humans were suddenly home a lot more than normal. But it was a great pandemic app as people were able to connect with each other, both Dig and Tabby, in ways that in person was no longer available. Our challenges have always been around the tech side. And that's because, and I think I mentioned this the first time I came on, the number one mistake we made was not launching with a technical co-founder from the beginning. My sister was in the advertising design world. And we were so excited to find our most recent
team things have really turned around. But the number one challenge, especially during COVID, as we were transitioning from basically telling people, use this app a little bit, then get out there, take your dogs, make sure they're meeting to a complete change in messaging to actually the safest thing to do is not bring your dogs to the dog park right now. And what does that mean from a technical perspective when you're suddenly telling people to get off of your app to telling them to stay on for a little longer? What does that look like in terms of the features people want and expect during a time like that? And so very quickly, we said, okay, this longer form change in tech, because we've had these outsourced technical teams, doesn't work when you need to make a pivot this quickly with this incredibly fast changing environment. And so the number one best thing we've done was
bring on our new CTO team. They're actually two brothers to join my sister and I, two sisters. So my best advice, if you're entering the pet world is find the pet business communities out there who are online. This world is so loving and caring and so family oriented, you will be welcomed very quickly. There are specific Slack channels, for example, with 600 pet entrepreneur businesses, you can reach out to Mars and be a part of their kinship Slack channel, you can reach out to Purina and be a part of the pet care innovation network.
There is so much going on that you can immediately reach out to people for help. And that leads me to my next point, which is you're going to be asking everyone for help. You're going to be asking your lawyers to take a discounted rate. You're going to be asking people to download and rate your app. You're going to be asking for help reviewing your website for SEO, whatever it may be. What you need to do is have something to give back every single time. And that
does not have to be related to your business at all. One of my favorite examples from the pet world was someone who was just really good at drawing cartoons. And if they asked you for help in that email, they said, send me a picture of your dog. I'll reply with a cartoon version, whether you ended up helping or not. It was just an incredible way to start that relationship and they're giving back. For me, I can edit someone's press release for them, which I can do really quickly, but also
it's a major help when people have a lot of anxiety around reaching out to press, which is something I've certainly seen among my colleagues and friends. And so make sure you've got something ready to go that's actually helpful and useful, or maybe even funny, because you're going to be asking for a lot of help. Awesome. Thank you so much. I am grateful to Lee for helping us out with this segment.
Check out the apps Digg or Tabby. As mentioned, Digg is all about the dog forward lifestyle. Tabby, their tagline, find the perfect match. The perfect match. I love it. I should sign up.
Check it out if you're interested in finding that special someone who also loves your dog or your cat. You can also go directly to digdates.com. And if you already have your perfect match or your dog forward lifestyle companion, perhaps send it along to a pet lover who is single. All right. That's it for today. If you have a question, if you have an update for us about
your side hustle, sidehustleschool.com/questions, we're going to link up everything from this episode at sidehustleschool.com/1678. I'm very grateful for your five star ratings on Apple podcasts. You can also subscribe or follow wherever you listen. And I hope you'll join me again tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau. The program is side hustle school.
From the onward project.
