Walker Center for Global Entrepreneurship Blog

Animal lover Monica Ullrich stumbled on an idea for a new business venture when her miniature dachshund, Chuleta, ate a box of chocolates that she’d left on her coffee table. Ullrich, a 2000 Thunderbird graduate, became concerned about the possibility of “chocolate toxicity,” a condition she’d heard of that could be potentially lethal for dogs. So she went online looking for reliable medical advice, but all she could find were amateur blogs and pet care advertisements.

She mentioned the market gap to her husband, 1994 Thunderbird graduate Kim Schinnerer, but he assured her that somebody already must have developed an online repository of pet health care information. Yet if such a Web site existed, Ullrich couldn’t find it.

Finally she persuaded her husband to check for himself, and he came to the same conclusion. “There was a huge, wide open gap,” he said. “There was really no trusted source of information out there.”

So the Thunderbird couple living in Miami Beach, Fla., launched PetMD in August 2008 at www.petmd.com.

Less than one year later, the startup has 120 veterinarians on retainer writing content managed by 14 employees for an ever growing audience of more than 250,000 readers in English and Spanish. PetMD already is profitable and developing international partnerships for global expansion.

Schinnerer said PetMD has prospered in spite of the difficult economic climate because the company moved quickly to fill a market void that others overlooked. “As a small, entrepreneurial company,” he said, “we can spot opportunities in the market and respond quicker than large corporations can.”

In addition to expert veterinarian advice, the site includes a pet lifestyle section and an innovative “Medical Drawer” that stores the medical history of pets and makes the information exchangeable with veterinarians. PetMD also delivers trusted pet health information on iPhones and other mobile devices.

Schinnerer grew up in Germany, worked in Hong Kong and studied in Belgium before enrolling at Thunderbird. He met his wife after graduation at a yoga class in Miami and didn’t discover for three weeks that she was a Thunderbird alumna. Ullrich, who grew up in New York, calls the relationship a classic case of “Thunderlove.”

Schinnerer, a serial entrepreneur who left his last corporate job in 1997, said he enjoys the satisfaction of starting a business from scratch. “I’ve always had the itch to go and do my own thing,” he said. “I’ve always had it in my blood.”

Posted: 08|3|09 at 11:36 am.
Filed under: Alumni Profiles.
Comment | Trackback