PRESS RELEASE: How Lockdown Gave 26yo Joshua Fidrmuc A Million-Dollar Business Idea And Shares His Five Ways On How You Can Bring Your Next Big Idea To Life

– A mate with a sick dog during lockdown gave Joshua a life-changing idea

– The telehealth mobile app for pets was born

– Josh shares with readers his five ways on how you can bring you next big idea to life

During Covid’s lockdowns the telehealth concept came to the fore. Twenty-six year-old Joshua Fidrmuc wondered why it was only for humans. That nagging thought became Dial A Vet and changed everything for Joshua’s future. The recently launched venture is already a million-dollar business.

“I am such a huge advocate for finding a problem to a solution. In everyday life I want to know why it can’t be done better. And wonder if I could. I still ring my dad to ask questions and talk it through. Mostly, he answers with something like, ‘It might be challenging or you might not get enough funding to launch’. Except when I told him about my idea for Dial A Vet.”

Joshua hadn’t planned on being an entrepreneur. His cousins back “home” in England were in the army. At sixteen, he determined to do that too. Instead of going to schoolies, he trained for the Australian army and joined five months later, in May 2014. Army life suited him. He’d always had self-discipline bit he also had a head full of ideas. These began to be business ideas.

When he was stationed at home, Joshua worked on these. “Especially in the e-commerce space before it ‘blew up’,” he says. “And I did really well for a few years.” He also studied an Advanced Diploma of Financial Planning while he was in the army before he left to join a bank and then a fintech company. While he was there, he had a new business idea for a virtual debit card. He was unable to secure enough funding to launch but had learned a lesson that would be the foundation for his next venture. “I knew that I didn’t have to come from a tech background to make it work.”

Covid hit. People were stuck at home and pet ownership was thriving. A chance occurrence began to piece these things together on Joshua’s head.

“My best friend, who was at university in Adelaide, rang me at 10:30pm on a Saturday night and said his dog, Isla (a pug), was vomiting and had diarrhea. His partner was worried and

wanted them to drive to the emergency vet which was 30 minutes away to get an opinion on what is wrong with her. ‘Why isn’t there a vet service you can ring and ask for their opinion before bringing the dog to the clinic?’, I wondered. I told him to go to the vet and put his partner at peace. They were told that it was most likely due to them changing their dog’s

food and just to monitor the dog and his diet. He told me he spent $140 he couldn’t afford and waited over an hour for that.” Joshua began planning the mobile app he was to call Dial A Vet.

“Since I love finding a solution to a problem, I spent my spare hours outside of my consultancy work researching and looking at the leaders in the market, pain points that pet owners had and what was on offer. I did surveys with more than 100 pet owners, mostly family and friends, to gauge their opinion on a 24/7 service where you can speak to a vet in minutes,” Joshua recalls.

He contacted vets through LinkedIn to gauge their opinion of his Dial A Vet idea the idea and what limitations virtual care has in comparison to physical care.

He found that most vet clinics in Melbourne were receptive. Some had already begun a teleheath service of sorts. “I decided to start planning how I would start and build the mobile app. I contacted numerous app companies. In the early days of Dial A Vet, I pitched to a few start-up incubator programs. Most declined after the first meeting. I was told I wouldn’t survive as the market is too big for an idea like this. This only fuelled my ambition because I had spoken to vets and pet owners and I knew that a service like this would work.”

Eventually, Joshua found a likeminded app developer and funded the business entirely by himself. “I even sold my house to withdraw the equity I had in it to help fund the idea. Now that the app is created and the interest is validated by over 2,000 pet owners on our waiting list, it is giving me more fire to introduce this app to every pet owner in Australia.”

Joshua’s business model is very generous both to vets and pet owners. A good bond, he feels, is important. Dial A Vet has already been able to gain 250 plus vets and vet nurses working as self-employed contractors, most working in clinics or are mobile vets themselves. Over 1,500 pet owners have joined as members for unlimited calls, with up to 6 pets per membership all for $25 per month.

“The interest from the veterinary industry is insane,” Joshua says. “We have such a significant amount of interest. I am truly thankful that they want to help pet owners and support what I am trying to achieve.”

The young man with huge ideas and extraordinary determination still feels that feels that he owes everything to his mum and dad. “My parents have always been my inspiration. I truly see no barrier in life that can’t stop you from getting where you want to be.”

What you can learn?

Here’s Josh’s five strategies on how you can bring your next big idea to life:

Do Your Market Research

When pursuing the path of launching your business idea, you need to make sure it fits in the market—this is called product market fit. A simple way to determine this early on is by understanding what your potential audience looks like and testing it. Surveys are an insightful and cheap tool to use. Create a survey with Google Forms and post it on your social media to ask people who fit your audience to complete the survey for you. You can even offer a reward to one lucky entry if need be.

For Dial A Vet, I tried to speak to as many pet owners as possible and even had friends of mine who were experiencing costly veterinary consultations.

Drop Expectations

You need to drop expectations of a perfect product from the start. Building any idea, especially in tech, can cost a lot of money. A great way to get your idea to fruition is through startup incubator programs. These programs host pitch nights, and demo days, and even will help you build your product, the majority do in return for equity. In Australia, the startup community is growing year after year, with numerous incubator programs available for all business ideas. If going down the path of an incubator program doesn’t suit you, you can do what’s called “bootstrapping.”

Bootstrapping

Bootstrapping is commonly referred to as starting your startup without outside investments/capital and only using personal capital or the assistance of family and friends to help launch.

In building Dial A Vet, I went down this path.

I knew that if I could devote all my time to saving as much money as possible to help me build the product, it would be more of a challenge but a good one. Just like the incubator programs, you need to build a Minimal Viable Product, or MVP. This is the most cost-effective version of your idea that can be used for testing and launching to get your product quickly to the market. This is highly beneficial, as it lets you receive feedback as quickly as possible from customers without forking out significant funds to make your product perfect. Plus, you can use any earnings to build a better product! There are great tools online that allow you to build websites for free and even drag-and-drop app builders.

Accept that Plans will Change Constantly

Building a Minimal Viable Product requires a lot of thought. Business plans are very hard to do with an idea, but a rough or general one is great.

My business plan has changed over five times whilst I built Dial A Vet. It is very important to map out all the potential costs that you may be required to pay to launch this idea, from legal costs to accounting and even ongoing insurance costs. I would highly suggest you speak with a lawyer and an accountant once you have set your sights on building a product to ensure it is compliant and identify any potential risks you may face.

Build a Community

You’ve started building your product; now, how do you make sure your launch is as successful as possible?

The answer is community.

Building a community around your brand before launching puts you one step closer to having a successful launch. Tips and tricks for this can include running giveaways if you have a consumer-based product or visiting the local stockists of your competitors to brief them on what you are launching soon. We have seen a huge rise in user-generated content, or UGC, where organic videos are made by creators or customers, giving an insight into how your product fits into their daily lives and how it can benefit potential viewers. This can be relatively cheap; reach out to friends and family with a script and ask for a 30-second video of them talking about your product. We have seen really good benefits from this for Dial A Vet, with our pet owners saving hundreds of dollars by speaking to one of our veterinary professionals first.