616: The Bankruptcy of Wag!: What It Means for Us
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Pet Sitters Associates. Use ‘Confessional’ at checkout
Wag!, one of the largest gig economy pet care platforms, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and is undergoing a rapid restructuring. This episode explores the deeper issues behind Wag’s financial collapse, including its flawed business model, sitter churn, and lack of consistent, relationship-driven care. The discussion highlights how investor interest is shifting away from gig platforms toward higher-margin services like pet insurance and veterinary e-commerce. Independent pet care providers are uniquely positioned to meet modern client expectations through professionalism, trust, and personalized service. As the industry changes, quality and consistency are emerging as the new standard in pet care.
Main Topics
Wag!’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy
Gig economy pet care flaws
Independent sitter advantages
Investor market shifts
Trust, consistency, and professionalism
Main Takeaway: “Pet care isn’t like ride-sharing—you can’t just put a body in front of a dog and call it service.”
Apps may make booking easy, but ease doesn’t equal quality. True pet care is built on trust, consistency, and connection—not convenience alone. Your clients want to know who’s walking their dog, how they’re trained, and that they’ll actually show up and care. That’s something no algorithm can guarantee.
This is why independent pet care professionals matter now more than ever.
Links:
Episode 446 on Aggregation Theory
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A VERY ROUGH TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
Provided by otter.ai
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Wag bankruptcy, pet care platforms, independent pet sitters, dog walking, client retention, marketplace model, financial struggles, trust issues, pet insurance, high-quality care, professionalism, client relationships, business restructuring, gig economy, pet care industry
SPEAKERS
Meghan, Collin
Meghan 00:01
Hi, I'm Megan. I'm Collin. We are the hosts of pet sitter confessional, an open and honest discussion about life as a pet sitter. We appreciate you listening today, wherever in the world you are. We'd also like to thank pet sitters associates and dog co launch for sponsoring today's episode, and we cannot forget our two newest Patreon supporters. They are Kay and Key Largo. Pet Sitter
00:23
fireworks. Thank
Meghan 00:25
you so much for finding value in the show, for supporting it, wanting it to keep going. We appreciate you. If you are listening and you're like, hey, I want to support them too. You can go to pet sitter confessional.com/support, to see all of the ways that you can help out. And we are thankful for however you choose to support the show today, we are diving into a major industry update that has some big implications for those of us who own and operate independent pet sitting and dog walking businesses. I'm sure you've heard of this, but wag is one of the most visible gig economy pet care platforms in the industry. It rivals rover, but they've recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Yes, the Uber of dog walking as they tag themselves is going through a total restructuring, and today we're going to talk about why that matters to you and to us. We're going to cover what led to the collapse of wag why their business model was always on ground where investors are headed next, and why all of this is actually get this good news for local, independent pet care pros like us. So let's dive in. When we started back in 2012 we were newly married and just figuring things out. We had no idea what we were doing. We were trying to figure each other out and where we were going to go in life and what we were going to do. And at the time, rover was still relatively new. It had just come online a year before, and only in Seattle. It had just expanded nationwide in 2012 so it was still new, and it promised really easy client acquisition. It had built in payments. It had messaging clients. They could update their profile. It was really attractive for us as novice pet sitters and for clients too. Clients came to us. We didn't have to market ourselves. We just had to show up, do the meet and greet, do the pet care and get paid. What? Super easy. But by 2015 a new player emerged, WAG, and they came in hard with a focus on On Demand dog walking. They really wanted to beat rover at this game. While we never joined the WAG platform ourselves, we always kept an eye on what they were doing. I think the biggest complaint that we heard from walkers and sitters over the years about wag was that they took a whopping 40% of what the sitter got for just being on their platform and taking bookings. So whether you were on the app or not, they were reshaping the landscape. You can't deny that they were pushing forward with this brand new thing that had never happened before. Eventually, we stepped off of rover. We wanted more control, more professionalism, more consistency, and ultimately, to grow a team, which you can't do on these apps. Looking back, that move is exactly what platforms like wag and rover have always struggled with. That retention, the sitter retention, not just of pet parents, but walkers and sitters too. They have this constant churn of people coming and going, because sitters don't like that. They charge such a high fee. And clients are saying, well, we want the same person every time, or we want to pick who we get. And that's just not possible on WAG, yeah,
Collin 03:12
WAG and rover both act as marketplaces. They want to be the place where pet owners go to find pet sitters and where pet sitters go to find owners. They want to be that medium connection point. But these marketplaces only work if both sides of the platform, both the pet parents and the pet caregivers, are showing up and continue to show up. If fewer walkers join the platform, pet parents leave because they don't have options, and if fewer pet parents are booking and coming to the platform, the walkers, the pet sitters, leave because they're not getting the bookings that they need. This model thrives when it can control both the supply and the demand of the pet care. And we actually have done an entire episode on aggregation theory and its application to dog walking and pet the pet sitting industry, which is episode 446, we'll have that link in the show notes so you can actually can actually go back and listen to that one. But this balance again, it only works if the experience that the clients are getting is consistent, affordable and easy. Those three things have to be made clear. It has to be easy to find the solution. It has to be affordable to their pocketbook. It has to be competitive of the prices that they're seeing. It has to be consistent. They have to like what they get every single time. But as we know, pet care does not live in that kind of predictable and scalable box at that level that we're talking about here.
Meghan 04:39
Even if you provide solely dog walking. It doesn't work that way. Clients are always constantly coming and going, switching up their schedule. Maybe they've got a new job or moved away. We're not over here making widgets, and so we need to make 40 every week. There is a constant influx and outflux of things happening this month, July, 2025 wag announced a pre packaged chapter 11 bankruptcy. Filing, they're working with a private investment firm, which is called retriever LLC, but they want to eliminate debt and return the company to private ownership. They've secured debtor in possession financing to continue operations, and they expect to emerge from bankruptcy in about 40 days, which is pretty fast. So this isn't a total collapse, it's a restructuring. It's a strategic pivot to try and survive. But that alone should tell you something, that all is not well in the gig pet care economy. Before we talk about their downfall, we'd like to talk about our first sponsor, which is pet sitters, associates, all professionals should have specific pet business insurance. And as a pet sitter, you know how much trust goes into caring for someone's furry family member. But who's got your back for over 25 years, pet sitters Associates has been helping pet care pros like you with affordable, flexible insurance coverage, whether you're walking dogs, pet sitting or just starting out. They make it easy to protect your business. Get a free quote today at pets@llc.com as a listener, you get $10 off your membership when you use code confessional at checkout. That's pets@llc.com because your peace of mind is part of great pet care. I think
Collin 06:05
it's really important to note that wag isn't just about dog walking anymore. Over the years, they've slowly expanded their holdings and their offerings to include things like a company named petted a pet insurance comparison site. They've also launched dog food advisor, which is a really popular review site. They have woof woof TV, a pet content brand with over 18 million followers. They have Max bone, a modern Pet Products platform. And they have, this is the worst name of all pharmacy, which is a veterinary prescription service that they are actually now planning to sell as part of their restructuring process.
Meghan 06:39
So here we are thinking that they're only a dog walking company, but they have all of these subsidiaries associated with them,
Collin 06:45
right? And this, this, this move towards diversification, really showed how much, how much wag was trying to find a business model that worked. None of these things were actually in the direct service industry. They were all ancillary to that, and they were struggling to find that place. They knew that this dog walking model that they were trying to do and perform was not going to be profitable enough on its own, given the amounts, massive amounts of overhead that they had and carried, and
Meghan 07:13
that is similar to what we tried to do in our businesses. Sometimes, if we are exclusively dog walking and that is super successful, that's great, but we may want to add on other things like selling pet products or pet taxi services or grooming services. We try to do these other things that will hopefully elevate our revenue in order to serve more clients.
Collin 07:31
Yeah, each one of these things petted food, advisor, woof, woof, TV, maxbone and pharmacy, they're all in the same bubble, right? They were trying to build an ecosystem of services and solutions for pet parents and pet owners. But the key difference between this and the dog walking is that every single one of these is a high margin and potentially fast growth sector. Right? Pet Insurance comparison site. They weren't even selling pet insurance. They were selling a comparison site. Talk about advertising dollars for that, or the food advisor. All of these things had ways to monetize that didn't necessarily increase the amount of expense that they had. The dog walking model, where you have one person walking one dog, maybe a small group of dogs. It truly is a one for one for each additional dog walk. You do. You have to pay an additional fee. You have to pay an additional, you know, out full of money to get that dog walker, and it doesn't scale as quickly as selling things like advertising
Meghan 08:30
or a digital service. You also have to think that while a ton of homes do have dogs, a cat person doesn't need a dog walk. So they were trying to serve more clients, serve more people by offering different
Collin 08:42
things. Yeah. So what was that? What were their financials like? We really need to look at the cracks that were forming. So let's look at these numbers. Well, in q4, of 2024 revenue was $15.4 million still a lot of money, a lot of money. But if you compare it to q4 of 2023, well that quarter brought in 21 point 7 million. Their net loss was growing to 4.8 and the full year revenue dropped in 2024 it dropped 16% to only $70.5 million and they were losing 17.6 on top of that q1 of 2025 came in at just 15.7 and they were losing 10 cents per share, right? All of this is a really rough trend. They're losing money. They're continuing to lose money. Not just make less, but they are expending more money in order to keep the business going. It is important
Meghan 09:34
to note, though, that it wasn't just financials. So walkers and sitters on the platform have long complained about, again, what I mentioned earlier, the huge 40% fee that they take so low pay, lack of support. Their customer support wasn't that great, inconsistent, algorithmic promotion. They rank you based off of certain criteria, and that is sometimes not always fair. There's no meet and greets. That's the thing that the pet sitting world has long. It on about meet and greet. Must do it in order to get the client familiar with you. You familiar with the client, the pet is okay. We know that that breeds trust, and so because of that, when there is no meet and greet, when there is no support on the back end for sitters and walkers, there is this lack of trust in the platform as a whole. While the sitters have their own concerns. Pet owners had their concerns as well. There's horror stories of lost pets, random people showing up, because, again, there's no meet and greet, so there's no telling who is going to be picked for your pet. And there's zero consistency with that. Because remember, WAG was not a dog walking company, just like rover, not a pet sitting company. They were a technology company, first a marketplace for pet care, matching sitter to client. To do that, they had to use ICS, independent contractors. The IC model meant that there's no training, there's no accountability, and there's no way to guarantee quality, because the independent contractor is their own business. They set the rules for themselves, and ultimately they set their prices. So over the years, WAG and rover have really had a hard time walking that line of not telling people how to do the job, just offering them resources. Of here's a great way to do a meet and greet. Here are questions to ask. Here are some dog tips on dog behavior, or how to pill a cat. They can offer these resources, but they can't say this is how you need to do it in order to perform an excellent pet care visit. All the algorithm can do on their websites was say, how many repeat clients does this person have? What's the percent of client contact to booking? It's very factual based, but it's not well. Is the client actually happy? Is the sitter well trained and able to perform to a professional level. Wag was built to be fast, not careful. And in pet care, care is the whole point. And now a word from Michelle Klein and dog co launch.
Speaker 1 11:50
Are you attending the dog co Business Summit located in Winston, Salem, North Carolina, September 26 to the 28th This is a place for scaling pet care companies to come together, learn from industry leaders and level up your pet care business to the next level. Go to dogco summit.com to learn more and to purchase your ticket before they are all gone.
Collin 12:14
Wags whole deal, like Megan said, was to be fast. They want to be the Uber of dog walking. They envisioned a world where somebody would open up an app on their phone is very slick, well designed, easy to use app. They could hit one or maybe two buttons and have somebody come over and take care of their dog. But we know that pet care isn't like ride sharing. You cannot just put a body in front of a dog and call it service. It's way more than that. Pet Care is all about personal it's having that connection, that knowledge, that trust you have to build this on trust. It's the foundation of everything. Do I believe as the pet owner that this person will do what I am telling them, and they will do it well, and that I believe them when they say things it's effective. It has to be relationship driven. At the end of the day, pet care is relationship driven, and that's a relationship usually between the client and the dog walker, pet sitter, or the client and a company, but they trust the company who has employees to take care of them and service them well, because of the reputation, because of everything that goes into this, clients want to have consistency. Above all, they have to have clear communication, which leads to, ultimately, peace of mind. And if any of these things are missing, we know in our own business and the business that we run, if we are missing a personal touch, trust relationships, if we're missing clear communication and consistency, clients don't come back to us. If clients don't feel seen and they don't feel that trust, they're never going to be rebooking. How much more so on, something that is meant to be faceless is meant to be connectionless and no interaction there. This is these things about communication, peace of mind, consistency, these are something that apps just cannot guarantee.
Meghan 14:01
So while the WAG idea in theory is a good one, ultimately it's not sustainable. It's not tenable, because oftentimes on these apps, clients are just going for the cheapest option. A few years ago, in 2022 wag couldn't secure more investment. That was kind of the first warning sign to them that, oh, we're in trouble. Now, investors were starting to realize that the margins of pet care are tight. We as small business owners, we know that really well. We are intimately familiar with that problem. They also realize that growth is slow and labor intensive. It's hard to get clients in the door. It's no longer about just having a Facebook page and a nice looking website and going from there. You have to do the marketing constantly, or have amazing clients that rave about you all the time. Word of mouth marketing investors also realize that these are trust based services, like we talked about a moment ago, and as we know, they don't scale very easily. It's a one for one model, unless you do large group walks. So when investors start. To realize all of this, they started to move on. Now we are seeing that investment flow toward pet insurance, e commerce platforms, veterinary platforms, subscription, wellness, all of these things that they were trying to do and diversify themselves, is what we're now seeing these things offer better returns with less risk. We've talked about why the WAG platform is inherently flawed, and what exactly has happened over the years to them, the financial cracks and the fact that it wasn't just all numbers, it was the trust factor in all of this. So what does that mean for us as small business owners, pet care and dog walking companies? What does it mean for the independent businesses? You may be surprised to learn that there is actually good news for us. Platforms are struggling to do what we do, naturally. Independent pet sitters and dog walkers are uniquely positioned to not only offer employee based care with training and reliability, no more ICs, no more well, I don't know the kind of care you're going to get, because anybody could show up, and I don't know what kind of credentials or training or background that they have. We also have the added benefit of building these real relationships with clients, of having them in our software, being able to talk with them on a routine basis, celebrate their anniversaries and their pet birthdays, and email them with pet tips about what they're specifically needing or
Collin 16:15
even hosting get togethers, client appreciation things, sending those things in the mail about their pet birthday, getting them gifts, leaving them little thank you cards. These are little touches that we can do that really make a big difference in the relationship that we have with our clients. I know a big thing that we work on is not just acquisition of clients, but retention of clients. It's going to cost our businesses six, 710, times as much to gain a new client than it is to keep an existing one, and so we never want to take them for granted. And so when we can have this real world relationship with them, when they know us, they know our story, they have a connection to us, and they feel like they are seen and are part of a community that's incredibly powerful for their well being and for the care of their pets, and for the consistency that we can provide in our business
Meghan 17:02
as small business owners, we can also provide that consistency and that communication that clients really want, that trust factor. In short, we can actually scale trust and they can't. It's pretty simple. This restructuring is a signal not just that wag is in trouble, but that their model is in trouble, which ultimately is kind of a good thing for us, because that means the market is moving back toward quality. That's what we want, quality over quantity. We don't want to just throw food on the floor and walk out and not send an update and not have a vacation and not have transparency. We all want to work toward that professionalism, that care, that's personalized then thoughtful, and that's exactly what small, local pet businesses offer, and that's why this moment matters.
Collin 17:45
Whether wag survives or not remains to be seen. They're being taken private, so we don't know what's going to happen in the restructuring, and ultimately, what their financials are going to be, and really the goal for this on the other side. But one thing is clear, we hope at least, and it's that the era of on demand pet care, at any cost, is fading, and what remains from that is trust, professionalism, systems, high touch, high quality care. We want that to be what's left over and what's moving forward and what will sustain the industry for years and years to come, because those things are what truly matter. There used to be a thought a decade ago that if we made things fast and simple, that that would trump all things. But what we continue to find is that time and time again, it's about trust, professionalism, high touch, high quality, and that's because clients are valuing their pets more and more every single year. When we look at the relationship that clients have between themselves and their pets, it is at a much higher value than it was a decade ago. The relationship they have is making them as part of the family. They're a family member. To them, of course, a family member. You're going to want professionalism and high quality care for a family member, not something that you can just get real quick on an app and a random person is going to show up. Those trends show us that when we can focus on these, those fundamentals, that we really are setting ourselves up for success, and
Meghan 19:14
that's where we're going to succeed. That's where we're going to thrive. That's where you are going to thrive. So keep showing up, keep telling other people about what you do, and not just I'm a pet sitter, but I offer peace of mind. I offer all of these things that allow my clients to go take vacations and have days at work and go out to fun events, so people can see that quality in your service and in you as well you actually care. Thank you for listening to this episode, if you found it helpful or thought provoking, share it with a fellow sitter. Let us know your thoughts by emailing us at Pet Sitter confessional@gmail.com We'd also like to thank our sponsors, pet sitters, associates and.co launch for sponsoring this episode, and we will talk with you next
19:54
time bye. You.