In a Crowded Online Field, It's More Than a Pet Project

Dan Cohen's business career started at the ballpark, selling tickets and sponsorships for the Washington Wizards and, later, the Redskins. Now he's moved on to the animal park, as founder and president of AnimalAttraction.com, a social networking site for people who love pets.

"I help them connect with other people who share a similar and very strong passion for pets," said Cohen.

Cohen, 38, founded AnimalAttraction.com as a dating site for pet lovers three years ago with $400,000 of his own savings and $300,000 from investors. In order to expand its audience, a year ago he started changing the site from a matchmaking service to an online membership community for pet lovers.

The free site includes a message board, chat room and photo contest featuring pets and "parents." Cohen says he's in the process of adding user-generated videos, expert columns and a pet pals feature.

He said the company has been occasionally cash positive on a monthly basis, but Cohen has burned through his initial investment and is now seeking to raise another $500,000 to $1 million.

Emily Riley, an analyst with Jupiter Research covering online advertising and social marketing, said AnimalAttraction.com is competing in a very cluttered online business environment. And investors may not forget the tale of Pets.com, the highflying retail site (remembered for its sock-puppet ad mascot) that was a famous casualty of the dot-com bubble.

But Riley said it can make money if it maintains enough quality to attract influential members. "About 8 percent of online users use niche networks, such as pet owners," Riley said, adding that AnimalAttraction's current roster of 50,000 members is "small . . . not bad, but not enough to make advertising cover costs. With a few million users, there's a profitable business there."

Cohen, a self-described networker who knows many potential investors from his sports sales days, said a million users is too high a goal. He said all he needs is more than 200,000.

"Our membership threshold to be highly profitable is much less than a general mass market site," he said, "because we're able to sell advertising to pet industry companies for 30 to 40 times the rates that a general mass market site charges its advertisers."

Cohen and his dog Buddy, a Rottweiler-German-shepherd mix, have been guests on NBC's "Today." AnimalAttraction members have also appeared on ABC's "The View" and CBS's "Early Show."

"It's a little quirky, I will give you that," said Zack Gund, an investor in AnimalAttraction who knows Cohen from when they were classmates at the Kellogg School of Business at Northwestern University. "There's a lot of investment going into the pet space right now, and this fits well within that."

Cohen, who runs the site by himself out of an office in Dupont Circle, got the idea strolling the city streets four years ago.

"I came across a dog happy hour on a restaurant off 18th Street in Adams Morgan and was struck by how easily people were bonding through their shared love for dogs," he said.

Cohen spent the next nine months digging into pet market research, conducting focus groups and raising money. He found that there were 40 million pet owners in the United States, or 65 percent of households. They spend $40 billion a year.

PetSmart retail stores, VPI Pet Insurance and HomeAgainID, a microchip company that allows owners to track their animals through a microchip implanted under the skin, all bought advertising on AnimalAttraction last year.

"We are looking into this Web site to see if there is any opportunity for us to be a part of it," said Matthew Park, vice president of marketing for Del Monte Pet Products. "The site's approach to bringing passionate pet owners together to share their passion for pets is a fun and unique concept."

Besides the expected dogs and cats, Cohen says, one member signed up with a pet squirrel. Another with a tarantula. And while matchmaking is no longer the goal, Cohen says he knows of two people who met on the site and, when they got married, walked down the aisle with their respective dogs.

"If I wanted to keep the company as just me, we could become profitable tomorrow," he said. "But I . . . have bigger ambitions than being just a lifestyle company. My goal is to provide a great service to members, have a lot of fun doing it, make a lot of money doing it and if that happens, there will be people interested in buying it."