We recently connected with Dana Valenti and have shared our conversation below.

Dana, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

My husband and I were visiting his father in Thailand for Christmas in 2014. We knew that there were cat cafes in Bangkok and I made it a priority to visit one. We spent Christmas Day at Purr Cat Cafe Club in Bangkok and pretty quickly decided that we needed to start a cat cafe at home. We both worked full time at our software company, so starting a cafe was not something we planned on, but we both felt really strongly that we wanted to share this experience with others. The other side of it was that there is a massive stray cat issue in Thailand and the cats at the cat cafes are all specialty breeds and are not adoptable, so it was very sad to watch people pay to visit the cats at the cafe, while this did not help the cats who really needed it. We knew that if we were going to do this we were going to solve a problem and help cats find homes. It took us 2 years from concept to opening day but it was really worth the time to get it done right. Partnering with Stray Haven Feline Rescue has been amazing and we have helped find homes for over 625 cats so far!

Dana, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Mauhaus is the first cat cafe in Saint Louis. We are set up like a coffee shop on one side and a cat lounge on the other side. We generally have 18 adoptable cats at any given time. You can come in just to visit and spend time with cats, or you can come in looking for a new member of your family. While our main focus is finding homes for cats, we also take pride in our cafe. We make all of our syrups and baked goods in house and use locally roasted coffee. We want people to have a high quality experience in all aspects of their visit.

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

When we really got serious about opening the cafe we decided to run a Kickstarter. This was partially to gauge interest in the idea, and partially because construction costs were going to be high. We met our goal in 24 hours and eventually doubled the goal before the campaign was done. That confirmed to us that people were very excited about this idea and it gave us plenty of funds for construction.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

We decided to start our social media presence well before we opened our doors. This was a little challenging as we didn’t have adoptable cats in our space, ready to be photographed, but we did our best to come up with content. We shared a lot of the construction process, tested out baked good ideas and shared those, and we set up ‘pop up’ cafe events with local rescues and invited people to come out and taste our coffee and treats and spend time with cats. We also went on the local news to announce the concept and the opening day. By the time we opened we had a pretty large social media following. Once we opened social media was pretty easy as cats make great content and we always have new cats coming in.

Asking our audience questions that they can engage with is huge. Even now if we want a little boost in visibility we will ask folks to share pics of their black cat or calico or whatever kind of cat we are posting. It gets people excited to be involved and the engagement will boost your posts for more folks to see.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.mauhauscafe.com
• Instagram: mauhauscafe
• Facebook: Mauhaus
• Twitter: mauhauscafe