What is the difference between a House and a Home? Some say a House in not a Home without a Pet.

Pet2mate fosters the idea that Pets do have a place in People´s community. And how to connect Pets and Petlovers? By creating a social network for pets, petlovers, professionals and associations. Pet2Mate is a startup that is trying to bring the pet-friendly community together on one website.

Share the story of your pet

You would never guess that pets need their social network too. Pets won’t share the news, they won’t post pictures and won´t chat with other pets either. So who needs Pet2mate? Not only pets, but mainly humans who can take advantage of this social network to offer a home for an abandoned animal. The most important goal of Pet2mate is to increase awareness for pet adoption.

The website is followed and used by anyone from dedicated petlovers through shelter activists, pet shop owners to non-profit organisations. If you register on Pet2Mate and become one of the 18.000 users worldwide, you don’t have to jump right into to the adoption. Actually, if you aren’t able to take care of a pet, you can also share your beloved one with the world and store all the photos of your dog or a cat you have. – Afonso Barbosa, CEO at Pet2mate

How Pet2mate works

Once you become a member of Pet2mate community, you may also register your cat, your dog, your bunny or all of them at once. When you create a profile for yourself and your pet(s), you will most likely want to add pictures as well. Now, this is not where your activity on Pet2mate ends at all. There is an option to sell your crafts and offer good prices to the whole online community. So, if you have any interest in making handmade sweaters for puppies, go for it! Even though, the dogs and cats are not usually “chatty” online, at least you – as an owner – can have an open conversation with other petlovers or ask for professional advice from an experienced associations.

The main mission and the best motivation for Pet2Mate has always been to promote the adoption. So the main feature of the site is to actually list and share the pets available for adoption. This includes the description or even the photos from the puppy/kitty times of a pet– so the new potential owner would have all the collection right there and wouldn’t miss the “first steps” of the new pet.

Weekly competition inside Pet2mate

To understand Pet2mate better – it is not simply just Facebook for pets and it works a bit differently. For example, you create a profile of yours as you do on Facebook, but then, when you create a profile of a Pet, it is like creating a Facebook page for each one. You can have as many of them as you wish. It is very simple to share links on Pet2mate with all the pets available for adoption than to promote one dog at a time.

There are a few more entertaining features worth mentioning. One of them is a weekly competition, announcing the top photos, based on the number of comments and loves (similar to like on Facebook). Another category – the most active dogs and cats can catch your attention. If looking for a Persian male Cat in the North of Portugal, you can check them all according to your criteria.

The first impulse to start

There is one real and cool story behind the initial idea to introduce Pet2mate. What would be the Social Network for pets without its CEO owning and loving many pets himself? Two years ago, the founder of Pet2mate Afonso Barbosa had a problem with one of his cats:

Afonso Barbosa – Founder of Pet2mate

I couldn’t find a boyfriend for my cat Mia and I realized the adoption seemed right to solve my problem. I organized the team and we decided to develop a mobile app, where it would be easier to find thousands of pets available for adoption (so Mia would find her friend). The mobile app market turned out to be not such a fortunate decision after a while. So after a year, we realised there was a better way to present Pet2Mate. Following up, the website was all ready to be launched in October 2013. The popularity of Pet2mate raised rapidly when creating the Facebook account. We reached 12.000 fans in the first 3 days and now we have 34.000 in total with constant engagement!

What will 2015 bring

Pet2mate wants to keep growing, not only in numbers, but as a global messenger to raise awareness for adoption instead of buying the pets. Afonso Barbosa shared the 4 main growth boosters of the Pet2mate´s Future:

• Integration with well-known American website PetFinder, which will bring the increase of 330.000 pets for adoption to the website.
• Introduction of the maps, so the user can see all the pets for adoption worldwide. One can compare and check where is the best place to find the pet that we´d wish to have.
• Increase of the speed of picture posting, so it would take 5 times less time.
• Rebranding – Afonso and the team are planning to change the name and the logo to showcase & focus on the value of adoption.

It is still 2014 and Pet2mate is already mainly focused on spreading the need of choosing the adoption before the buying. The holidays are coming and especially at this time of a year, it is more important than ever to try to prevent the high numbers of street and abandoned animals all over the world and offer them our House, so they could feel like Home.