Willowbrook Goldens & Ragdolls · Proof of concept
“An app for dog and cat breeders” is really three products, with three different users on three different devices. Each one is prototyped where it actually gets used.
The argument
The breeder in a whelping room, the buyer scrolling Instagram, and the same breeder doing paperwork at the kitchen table are not one user with one problem. Forcing them into a single interface means every screen is a compromise. So we split it — and let each part be excellent at one thing.
A phone in a barn
One hand free, poor signal, gloves on. Husbandry is the only one that is genuinely an app.
A link in a bio
Buyers arrive from Instagram and Google. Nobody installs an app to browse puppies.
A laptop at the kitchen table
Wide tables, drag-reorder, contracts. Cramming this into a phone is the classic mistake.
Three prototypes
Each runs standalone · no login
Daily weights, health records, heat cycles and litter logs. Built for one hand, poor signal, and a breeder who is already holding a puppy.
Monday 20 July
Today
Weigh-ins, photos and treatments
logged at the whelping box.
Where buyers land from Instagram. A shareable, indexable URL — plus the application form that feeds the pipeline.
Applications, deposits, pick order and contracts. Drag a buyer between stages; the allocation updates live.
The moment that sells it
Day 12 of Bella’s litter. Six puppies are gaining as expected. Yellow has dropped 15 g since yesterday — the first sign of a fading puppy, and exactly the thing a paper chart catches days too late.
All three products already know. The app flags her on the Today screen, the shopfront still lists her as available rather than reserved, and the pipeline shows she is promised to nobody. That is what one shared data model buys you.
Open the litter screenWillowbrook B Litter
Day 12 · whelped 8 July · Bella × Cooper
Yellow · female
Supplemental feeding started
870g
−15 g
Red · female
Available
1010g
+34 g
Blue · male
Reserved · Sarah Chen
985g
+31 g
Preview · four more puppies in the app
Same data, three surfaces
Dogs and cats differ in gestation, heat cycles, registries and health panels — but not in structure. One schema, one species field, two very different calendars.
Bella
Golden Retriever · F · 4y
Nursing
Cooper
Golden Retriever · M · 5y
Active stud
Juno
Ragdoll · F · 3y
Due 2 Aug
Saffron
Ragdoll · F · 2y
In season
Marlow
Ragdoll · M · 4y
Active stud
The persona
Emma Hartley
Somerset. Golden Retrievers and Ragdolls, roughly three litters a year. Currently runs it on a whiteboard, a spreadsheet and WhatsApp — which is the real competitor.
Stack
Static HTML + Tailwind today. Next.js on Vercel with Postgres when it becomes real — installable PWA, no Expo, no Tauri, no app store review.
Known constraint
Push notifications on iOS only fire if the site is installed to the home screen. If “remind me the vaccine is due” is core, that shapes onboarding — worth naming early.
Open question
Is this Emma’s own operation, or a product sold to other breeders? Single-tenant is weeks. Multi-tenant means billing, subdomains and a templated shopfront — a different order of size.
What’s real here
Every screen is clickable with consistent demo data. Drag-and-drop, filtering and form validation all work. Nothing is wired to a database yet.