The CritterFacts story begins as a well thought out and brilliantly executed prank! One of the co-founders, Cara, had a co-worker that was attempting to convince his wife to buy a goat. Since his wife wasn’t initially receptive to his goat idea, he began to send her goat facts each day as a way of convincing her to change her mind. Cara thought her co-worker’s idea was hilarious and genius.
After some thinking, Cara decided to take this idea one step further; she decided to start sending William animal facts each day, but tell him that she wasn’t the one doing it. One day, William opens up his phone to see this text, “WILLIAM, thank you for subscribing to Otter Facts! Otters are found on every continent except for Australia and Antarctica. To unsubscribe, reply STOP”. With that, the first CritterFact was sent.

 For the next three months, Cara would pick an animal each week and send William a fact about it each day. On Christmas day, while visiting her family for the holidays in Florida, Cara decided to tell William about the prank. She got down on one knee and said “Will, I have something to tell you…..for the last three months, between the hours of 1 o’clock and 2 o’clock, I have been sending animal facts to your phone”. William was shocked, impressed, and disappointed because he had gotten use to getting the facts every day.

A few weeks after the prank was over we realized that we could potentially do something much bigger with the idea for the prank and came up with the name CritterFacts. We decided to take the idea to Startup Weekend which is a entrepreneurial event held in cities across the world to help ideas come to life. We formed our team and competed over a three day weekend and ended up placing second at what is still the largest Startup Weekend event to date in Louisville Kentucky. 

Once Startup Weekend was over, CritterFacts began to take form. We launched an app on the app stores, created our website, and began venturing out to local events to promote our new company.

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We then started to realize that CritterFacts had a unique opportunity to make a difference for wildlife and the environment. A pivotal moment came while we were watching a documentary called Racing Extinction. During the film, they had a segment about the Kauai O’o bird that is now extinct.

They played a recording of a male O’o bird calling out that was recorded and held at Cornell Lab of Ornithology. It turns out, this was the last male of the entire species calling out for a mate that would never come. At that moment we were silent…..the gravity of realizing you are listening to the last call of an entire species is difficult to put into words. It was then we really understood that what we wanted to do with CritterFacts mattered.

You can see this exact scene below:

Our tomorrow, and future generation’s tomorrow, is shaped by what we do today. Each of us is playing our part and what each of us does, matters every single day. CritterFacts is dedicated, focused, and determined to spread knowledge, create curiosity and appreciation about wildlife and our environment, and reconnect people to nature.

It all starts with knowledge and is best summed up by this quote:

“We will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught”

– Baba Dioum

We thank you for visiting our website and sincerely hope that you find value and meaning behind what we are doing. We hope you join us along this journey and help to preserve the world around us for generations to come.