a social network for people and their pets

A profile about Cuban e-⁠resident Gabriel Betancourt and realising his lifelong dream to legally register a company

"So Battista just fled, with $300 million in cash, and I don't know how many jewels. He was a multimillionaire, because he was stealing so much. He disappeared from the grid, you know!"

We were supposed to be talking about e-⁠Residency and wound up talking about Cuban history first. But that's how things roll with Gabriel Betancourt. He was raised in Cuba and has lived in Bulgaria and Spain. He brings warmth, passion, and a sense of humor to everything he does.

Gabriel Betancourt is a proud Estonian e-resident and owner of an Estonian company. And he also loves animals. Dogs, cats, you name it. He loves animals so much that he created a new social media platform for pet owners and their beloved furry friends. He named it "Petme."

"Petme is a totally new concept," says Gabriel. He is speaking to me from his home on the beach in Alicante, Spain. During the interview, his cat is moving around in the background, as is mine. At one point, he holds up his cat and I do the same, so that our cats can see each other. My cat then wriggles free and runs away. She is not yet prepared for feline video conferencing.

But she could befriend Gabriel's cat on the new social media platform, and Gabriel has designed Petme to make it easier for pet owners to add and manage their favorite pets' profiles.

"In all the social networks that exist, you can manage one profile at a time," says Gabriel. "This is true for X, or Instagram, or anywhere," he says. On Petme, instead, a pet owner has one profile, through which multiple animals can be added and managed. A pet owner could post as their dog or as their cat, as him / herself or as everyone together, without having to switch between accounts or log out and log back in.

"If you have four pets, you can create a profile for each one, and they will all be integrated with yours," Gabriel explains. "To post and everything you can do it from the main account," he says.

"One profile at the time isn't fair when it comes to your pets, because you dont send them to live in another flat, they are family," he adds. "And what Petme does is to create a mirror of real life."

For Gabriel, the creation of Petme earlier this year was the culmination of a lifelong dream, to found his own company. He studied IT at Universidad de las Ciencias Informáticas in Havana, but after graduation worked in real estate, selling colonial houses to foreign clients. Then Gabriel received an offer and went to Sofia, Bulgaria to work as an Android software engineer.

But he still wanted to branch out and do his own thing.

"When I was in Cuba, my dream was to run my own company under my own name, and that was my dream for a long time," says Gabriel. "In Cuba everything is black market, they don't allow you to legalize it," he says. "I love my country, but my desire to be a businessman was bigger," Gabriel adds. "I decided that this is not the place, and that is why I decided to leave."

In Bulgaria, as well as in Spain, though he found it difficult to open up a new company as a Cuban national. But then his colleague found Estonia's e-⁠Residency program on the internet.

"My colleague said, 'I have the solution to all your problems,'" says Gabriel. He applied and picked up his e-⁠Residency kit at the Estonian embassy in Bucharest. Petme was founded after.

Of his experience, Gabriel says:

It actually only took Gabriel about a year and a half to create the Petme platform. "The problem was not the code," he says. "It was the concept." He wanted to create a way where he could manage his cat's profile from his account. He wasn't willing to open more profiles on other social networks. "I barely use the profiles I already have, and I realized most current social networks bring me no real value," remarks Gabriel. "Open another one? No way."

He is also interested in building a community of animal lovers. He describes a childhood in Cuba surrounded by pets that imbued in him a love for animals. His mother had wanted to be a veterinarian, and there were always dogs around Gabriel while growing up. But there is also a general positive vibe among pet owners that he says is sorely lacking on other social media today, which support identity through differences -- membership in different Facebook groups for example -- as opposed to sharing a common interest, which in the case of Petme is pets.

"On Petme, you can be a millionaire and I can be poor, but if we both have cats, then we have something in common," says Gabriel. "You can see that we as people are not so different." Gabriel is keen to support this relaxed atmosphere on the site, as it grows. The platform is still in its early stages, but those who join tend to use the app a lot, and bring new members with them.

"We have seen one person join, and then four people will join after," says Gabriel. "This is how it works. We are advancing bit by bit." There is already a lot of content, with about 4,000+ posts. Gabriel says it would take a user four hours to scroll through the content available on Petme.

In terms of a revenue model, Gabriel says that monetizing is a focus, but building the community is the main current priority. Still, he would like to woo pet brands to the platform, noting that their main audience is gathered in one place, meaning they would not need to advertise as aggressively as they do on more general interest platforms like Facebook. He is also looking to court venture capital companies as potential investors to help out with marketing.

"I am open to talk with VCs but we are not chasing them, we just work nonstop, and we know we will meet the correct inversor at the correct moment, and then, with a decent budget for marketing, we can make Petme one of the top social media platforms," he says,

In order to open discussions with investors, Gabriel will visit Estonia next month. And though he has never been here before, Gabriel adds that he is looking forward to making his first ever visit.

"Of course, I want to go there," he says. "This is the country that made my dream come true."