It looks like a startup: You've seen the minimalist, mobile-friendly design before. It squawks like a startup: Twitter account? Check. But Qoopy, which purports to be a "waitlist only" doggy daycare for your chickens, is a ruse.
Couldn't tell? You weren't alone — Twitter was collectively scratching its head — and that's the point.
"People thought — 'hey, Is it a joke?,'" Qoopy's "founder" Andi Plantenberg confided to SFist. "And therein lies the kinda tension it pulled."
Sadly, she had to let us down. "The whole impetus was total boredom on Friday. I had a bit of a lull on my calendar, and I was shit talking. I ended on the idea of luxury daycare for hipster urbanite chickens," the shittalker slyly confessed. "Yes, it's all pretend."
Portland, Brooklyn, and Bernal Heights are Qoopy's rather convincing faux-locations, and Plantenberg herself is (not coincidentally) a Bernal resident. But on the phone with SFist, she shared her view from downtown San Francisco at 3rd and Market.
"I moved to San Francisco for the first bubble, and I've been in the [technology] industry for this whole time. I love this place and it's been interesting watching it change! It's a very schizophrenic time here, now, because you have a very well-meaning generation that wants to get back in touch with sustainability, with food, and they have a really strong sense of ethics, and they have all that awareness.
"But to the same extent, it's a very spoiled group as well, one catering to its own needs, because with the push of a button you can have someone who can bring you food or do your laundry. I wanted to ask: Are we building the right things?"
Everything down to Qoopy's name is spot-on — "I just wanted to grab something that was short and very nouveau-service industry sounding," Plantenberg admits. "The 'q' was pretentious and the 'y' made it available as a cheap domain." That's a common startup name story: Qoop was $30, while Qoopy was just $2.99. And ".co" instead of ".com' is as 2015 as it gets.
Plantenberg may have finally revealed Qoopy's real mission in an email followup: "Qoopy’s biggest innovation has not been our hand-crafted chicken curriculum," she wrote, "but our willingness to ask the question 'Is the innovation economy solving the right problems?'"
If we San Franciscans are shaking our heads, take solace in this one fact. Says Plantenberg: "We have had serious inquiries and they have all come from Brooklyn."
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http://qoopy.co/