| HN Mirror

Well, I had recently adopted an Australian Cattle Dog puppy but had a full time in-office job. They’re a very active breed and leaving her at home all day wasn’t an option. That prompted me to find a dog daycare, something I had never heard of (and honestly thought was slightly ridiculous). When checking out the first day, I noticed their business was a mess. Everything on paper, in messy stacks at the front desk. And then it took almost 5 minutes for them to be able to accept my card payment (one of my biggest pet peeves). That got me thinking- why isn’t there software in this niche? It turns out there was, but it was all CD-ROM software straight out of Windows 98 land. I didn’t know Jack shit about dog kennels so I emailed 10 local businesses asking if they’d beta test what I built and provide feedback. 1 wrote back so I drove over that day. The owner didn’t know anything about computers but he set me up with his manager- an aspiring product designer. We hit it off immediately and started collaborating. Eventually we became 50/50 business partners. Once we had built something we decided to show it off at a trade show. Turns out there was one in our city the following week! We bought a booth, and a shitty sign and 2 polo shirts and showed up. Every single person there lined up to see what we had built. We knew we had something. Got our first customer that day. Eventually it became more work than we could handle on nights / weekends, so I decided to pay my partner’s bills out of my own pocket (from my day job) so he could quit his and run the day to day until we had revenue to pay both our bills. We got there after a few months. After that, we worked 16 hours, 7 days a week for about a year. We started hiring people. The rest is history, as they say.

To this day, my partner is my closest and most trusted friend, even though we haven’t worked together in 2 years.

Dunno what else to share, feel free to ask!