Welcome to Fully Baked, our Sunday newsletter where we validate one of our ideas with as much conviction as MySpace relaunching in 2026 💪
In today's edition:
💡 A $158bn industry where nobody is reading the data
🔬 We validated this idea - here's what we found
🚀 The go-to-market playbook for this product
🤑 What do the unit economics look like?
⚔️ How the competitive landscape looks
❓ Our verdict: is this a go or no-go idea
Let's goooo 🚀
🐶 Function Health for Pets
Nose your numbers
👤 Source: Half Baked #603
❌ Problem:
Americans spent $158bn on their pets in 2025, roughly the GDP of Hungary, and $41bn of that went on veterinary care alone. Owners have never spent more on keeping their animals alive, and they're increasingly spending it before anything goes wrong. Because unfortunately…it does.
One in three cats and one in ten dogs will develop kidney disease, and standard creatinine testing doesn't flag it until about 75% of kidney function is gone. Dogs and cats are evolutionarily brilliant at hiding illness. Their blood isn't. Here’s the idea.
✅ Solution:
A subscription bloodwork membership for pets. Two full panels a year, scored against breed-and-age baselines, with vets on call to explain every marker in English.
Results land in a dashboard that ranks markers by urgency and tracks a longitudinal Healthspan Score, so you're watching a trend line rather than squinting at a printout in a car park.
From there it expands: senior boosters, cancer screens, allergy panels, and a white-label version for pet insurers who'd quite like to know what's coming.
🧑💻 Prototyping: Google AI Studio demo | Remix this build
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🔬 Our Validation Process
🖥️ Desktop Research
The money is already flowing into this exact category, just not to consumers. The companion animal diagnostics market was $7.06bn in 2025, heading to $14.41bn by 2033 at 9.27% a year. Almost all of it flows through vet clinics and reference labs (IDEXX, Zoetis). The consumer-facing, at-home slice of pet diagnostics is a rounding error at roughly $85m.
The proof that pet parents will pay for pure data already exists too. Basepaws built at-home DNA testing for cats, and Zoetis acquired it in 2022, returning roughly 25x to early investors. The open question isn't "will people pay for pet health data" - it's whether they'll pay for it twice a year, forever.
📋 Survey (100 responses via SurveyMonkey, ~$1.50/response, ~$150 total, screened for US dog and cat owners who visited a vet in the past year)
The fear is real and widespread. 71% agreed their pet "could be sick right now and I wouldn't know", and 58% said their pet has only ever had bloodwork when something was already visibly wrong. The problem section of this idea basically wrote itself back to us.
Willingness to pay is there, but thinner than the fear. 46% said they'd pay for twice-yearly preventive panels, but when we asked for a number, the median landed at $12/month - only 24% would go to $25/month or higher. Intent jumped among the supplement buyers though: 61% of owners already buying pet supplements said they'd pay $20+/month.
The finding that changes the whole business: 63% said they'd only trust the blood draw if it happened at their own vet, versus 22% for an at-home visit and 15% for a retail clinic. Pet parents don't want to replace their vet. They want a better dashboard on top of them.
🚀 Acquiring Users
👥 Early Users
Go where the health anxiety already lives: breed communities. Golden retriever owners (r/goldenretrievers, 500k+ members, plus enormous Facebook groups) openly discuss cancer risk constantly because the breed's rates are so high.
Partner with 5-10 independent vet clinics in one city for the first cohort. Our survey says 63% of owners want the draw at their own vet anyway - so make the vet the hero, not the competition. The clinic gets a recurring revenue stream and stickier clients; you get the needle.
📈 Scaling Acquisition
Dog-mum TikTok and Instagram is the organic engine. The magic moment films itself: an owner opening the app to a Healthspan Score and a green trend line. "My dog's bloodwork just came back and here's what I learned" is peak shareable pet content.
The scalable channel long term is B2B2C: white-label the dashboard for vet groups and pet insurers. Insurers are desperate for exactly this data - a member whose kidney decline gets caught two years early is a dramatically cheaper claim.
🤑 The Economics of This Business
🏷️ Pricing
Membership ($299/year): two full panels, breed-and-age scoring, the dashboard, and a vet consult per panel. A single wellness panel at a clinic runs $150-300 pay-as-you-go, so two panels plus the software for $299 reads as a bargain.
Add-ons: senior boosters, cancer screens and allergy panels at $79-149 each. Function makes real money on exactly this layer - the membership is the door, the add-ons are the margin.
🧮 Unit Economics
Target CAC: $40-60 via breed communities and organic, before paid social. Pet parents are one of the highest-intent audiences on Meta, which cuts both ways - everyone else knows it too, so paid CAC will creep towards $80+ at scale.
LTV: this is where pets beat humans. Function's churn risk is that year two feels optional. A dog ages roughly seven years for every human one - markers genuinely move between panels, and every pet is marching towards the senior add-ons. A 5-year member at $299 plus one add-on a year is $1,900+ LTV.
The number that decides it: gross margin on the draw. Two panels a year means two lab runs plus paying a partner vet for two draws. If the all-in cost per panel comes back over ~$70, a $299 price point stops working and you're forced to $399+, where our survey says most of the market falls away. Get the lab contract right before you get the logo right.
⚔️ The Competitive Landscape
🏷️ Primary Competitors
Basepaws / Embark (DNA testing): proved pet parents pay $99-199 for data about their animal, and Basepaws exited to Zoetis. One-off genetic curiosity is a proven purchase.
MySimplePetLab (~$10m raised): at-home test kits for ears, skin and stool, now pivoting through Target shelves and PetSmart clinics with headcount down 61% last year. At-home pet sampling is brutal though. You can ask a human to spit in a tube. You cannot ask a labrador. Whoever solves pet bloodwork will not solve it in the living room.
Wonderdog (launched July 2026): built a similar idea to this, funded, with Mars-owned Antech behind the lab. Currently dogs only, in Manhattan, Brooklyn and LA County. They’re the early mover in this market.
🎯 The Gap
Every player sells tests. Nobody owns the trend line - a longitudinal health record scored against breed and age that follows the pet for life. In human health that layer is now worth $2.5bn. In pet health it's completely unclaimed.
✅ Go
I'm bullish on this one, but only if you build it the way the data says.
The lazy read is "Function, but for dogs" as a DTC brand. The problem is the draw. Function works because Quest's 2,000 locations already existed - all they built was software and a brand on top of infrastructure. There is no Quest for pets, and our survey was blunt about it: 63% of owners only trust the draw at their own vet.
So the play is to make the vet your distribution instead of your competition. Sell clinics a white-labelled membership their clients subscribe to: the vet does the draw and keeps a cut, you own the lab contract, the breed-and-age scoring, the dashboard and the insurer relationships. The vet gets recurring revenue and stickier clients. You get the data layer, which is the only part of this business that compounds.
Somebody needs to go and build it.
👋 That’s All Folks
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