Talk about a minimum viable product. The co-founders of Fuzmo, a site that just lets you share pictures of cute pets with other enthusiasts, originally started out as a simple Instagram account, Insta_Animal.
But they clearly hit on a winner. In the last year they grew the account to 1.5 million followers, and from this have spun out seven other ‘cute pet’ accounts with a combined following of 2.5 million.
From this marketing base they created Fuzmo as a platform where people can share their own pet pictures.
They are now crowdfunding the development of a mobile app (going after £40,000 pin Seedrs) to build on that traction and spin out more products and features around a pets photo sharing app. Oh yes. So far they’ve raised over 16 per cent of their total.
If it works, it’ll make an interesting case study in how to build out from ‘boostrapped-from-nothing’ into an actual product.