Show HN: Waulog – A digital companion for dog owners | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Waulog – A digital companion for dog owners

waulog.com

16 pointsxyborg18 comments

I've built Waulog (https://waulog.com), a web app to help dog owners track their pets' health and activities. It features:

- Activity logging (walks, meals, etc.) - Health monitoring (weight, vomits, feeding schedule) - Family sharing for coordinated care - QR code profiles for lost dogs - 100% Free

As a dog owner, I created this to solve my own pain points. I'd love feedback from the HN community, especially on:

1. Additional features you'd find useful 2. UX improvements 3. Privacy concerns and how to address them

Any thoughts or suggestions are appreciated!

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As a dog owner for 15 years I can honestly say I have never felt the need to track any of this. I'm curious, why would you need to? Do people forget to take their dogs for walks? Most dogs come with builtin alarms consisting of wagging, slobbering and pouty faces. Mine even runs back and forth between me and the bowl when he's hungry, hard to not notice the hint.

I think this kind of app's niche may be in elderly pets, where occurrences of vomiting/stool characteristics may be valuable when talking to vets and tracking patterns. Otherwise I agree, for the average healthy pet it seems to me like just another thing™ to have to get out your phone for when your hands should be busy giving pets/throwing toys.

I focused on puppies, but elderly dogs is a nice use case though. Thanks for the input!

The missus and I would benefit from this -- I even got part way into my own Flutter app of similar functionality: she does shift work and I have to travel a lot. We're often not at home at the same time (or one of us is sleeping).

Things we'd get value from:

1. Has the dog been fed? (am, pm)

2. had his meds?

3. Should I expect to walk him in an hour? I may be lazy, but it's cruel to not get at least one walk a day.

3b. Long term, are we splitting the effort well? does one person walk him WAY more?

4. Did he not poop on two consecutive walks? do I need to watch out for illness?

"Oh, just communicate more, have you ever thought of that? Be better spouses" -- this is* us communicating, to take the best care of our dog :)

*he averages 2x 1.5hours per day + 2x 30min training sessions.

This is a nice use case though, helping with communication.

I probably wont continue doing it for long as well. I thought about this out of the necessity of tracking my puppy potty training. And it's not that we forget about going for a walk, is more like getting an idea of at what time of the day, on which frequency they need to pee or poop, and arrange the walks around those times so they can learn to do it outside quickly. So, this might be useful for puppy and also elder dog owners.

My first question with such a project are: how will you pay for that service, and what features will I have to pay for in the future?

Don't take me wrong. This is a great idea, and I'll have a dog soon so I'd love to use such a page, but I'll dump my data into this and if I decide to leave because it has become a rip-off in a year or two, I'll still have to go back to some self-hosted solution and extract the data from your page somehow.

That's the same kind of question I had with other apps, and why I decided to build one myself. I will keep the current features free forever, and add more advance stats, alerts, maybe AI suggestions based on past activities, but those will be on a pro plan for sure. I am also working on a data exporting feature (it's listed in the features section as "soon"), because the data belongs to each dog owner, so it would be fair to let you export it whenever you want. When it come to monetization, there are several ways one can do it, without getting rid of the free tier.

Thank you very much. I'll check it out :)

There's an app called Baby Connect to do same things, but for human babies. Among the ones we tried, we liked it the most. It includes ability to add another person, and then it syncs data with them (the feature i liked most). Perhaps that app might serve a good set of inspirations.

I can also imagine creating PDF report between user-given dates that people might need when visiting vet, or emailing them.

Thanks! I will check that out. It's possible to share your dog with other people, when you add a dog, the app generates a unique ID with a three-word-format you can share with other people so they can add the dog to their profile. I thought about this for sharing internally in the family, or for when you want your pet sitter to keep tracking your dog activities. And as the owner, you can revoke their access anytime.

The PDF/report is a great idea. I will give it a look on how other apps handle this to get some inspiration :D

Neat idea. Agree with the below suggestion for screenshots. A video would also go a long way on the homepage for how to use.

Integrating google sign in might lower friction.

Small error in that there are no frequently asked questions in the FAQ section of https://waulog.com/guide#faq

I need to find some time to put some screenshots together, and record a quick video explaining how it works, and maybe split it so I can use it in the guide.

Noted! Google sign in is on my pending list now, it would also be very helpful for reducing fake/spam accounts for sure.

Ah, thanks for highlighting this! I must have messed up during the design fix I did last week :S

The FAQ section is fixed now.

Do you have some screenshots?

I included some here: https://waulog.com/guide But I will add a new section with more detailed screenshots.

Why do most of the screenshots have an attention sign?

Excellent question, I changed the icon to a dog face one, it's the "emergency card" quick access. I need to improve my UI/UX skills... :/ When you touch or click that icon, it will show you a card with all the information you might need to have at hand about your dog (owner info, allergies, medications, vet contact, etc.) You need to add this info into your dog's profile first. I will try to add a new section with more screenshots and update some of them.

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