In our first call, she showed me her notebook.
Pages of pains and features, handwritten, for software she imagined someone would build one day for dog training businesses.
More than a decade in the industry. Thousands of trainers who trust her. And meanwhile, she was promoting someone else’s software as an affiliate for a one-time commission.
I offered her something else.
Instead of a commission, ownership.
Join us as a co-founder of the company she’d help build.
We found her through our research. There are an estimated 25,000 dog training businesses in the US. Business management software in this market runs about $60 a month. An $18M market, probably double that worldwide. There are already products in it making tens of thousands of dollars a month.
We’re three partners - Ran and I in Thailand, Yair in Europe - building a portfolio of companies that size, with no investors. She’s in the US.
First step: she ran a series of interviews, ‘Mom Test’ style. She reached out to businesses she knows and asked how they run their day-to-day.
Only the past and the present. No questions about the future. Not a word about what we were thinking of building.
The pain that came up in almost every call: there was no software built specifically for dog trainers.
Trainers take a CRM built around people and bend it to fit their business. The dog’s information lives in a custom field on a human.
The market was too small for anyone to bother building them something.
Based on the interviews, we imagined together what the software would look like and built a landing page that feels like the product already exists and is polished. The words on the page are the trainers’ words from the interviews.
We built the page with AI.
Our partner sent a video with comments. The AI pulled the comments from the video and applied them to the page.
I’m feeling more and more redundant in the process.
Yair, the CTO, hasn’t touched it yet. He’s focused on another company of ours, for insurance agents, which has already passed validation.
He’ll come in to build the software only after we prove trainers are willing to pay.
Now our partner is starting to send the landing page to her trainers. No “what do you think?”, no “give me feedback” - those questions mostly bring back polite encouragement.
There’s no price on the page, on purpose.
We’re waiting to see who asks commercial questions: How much does it cost? When will it be available?