The product
Every screen, every flow and every word of the interface — in every language it ships in. When something feels wrong, there is nobody else to escalate it to.
ZEEberton
A live map for pet owners — founded and run solo.
The problem
01
Owning a dog is a deeply social activity attached to a stubbornly unsocial problem: the people you most want to meet are the ones already walking past your door, and you have no way of knowing who they are. Existing pet apps solved adjacent things — vet records, marketplaces, breed forums — but none of them answered the only question that matters at 8pm on a Tuesday: who is out right now, near me, with a dog mine would get along with?
ZEEberton answers exactly that. Go online, see live pins of nearby owners, look at their profile, connect, chat, and meet in person. Repeat meetups quietly form packs. It is explicitly not a dating app, and that boundary shaped a great deal of the design.
What it does
02
One idea, carried through properly: show people who is nearby, and make meeting them easy.
-
01
A live map
Go online and see who is actually out nearby right now, rather than guessing. That single view is the whole product — everything else grows out of it.
-
02
Walks & playdates
Plan a walk and invite the neighbourhood, or join one already happening. Owners meet in person; the app exists to get them there and then get out of the way.
-
03
Packs
People who keep meeting quietly form a pack — the regular group you walk with. It is the retention loop and the point of the whole thing at once.
-
04
Lost-pet alerts
Raise an alert and reach the people physically closest to your missing pet within seconds. Nothing else in the category does this well, and it is the feature people tell their friends about.
-
05
Profiles & chat
Every owner and every pet has a profile, so you know who and which dog you are meeting before you go. Messaging is built in.
-
06
Free at the core
The map, chat and safety features are free and stay free. Revenue comes from local pet businesses appearing on the map, not from charging owners to meet each other.
Who it is for
03
Dog and cat owners, anywhere. The map works wherever you open it, and the app ships in multiple languages — there is no country gate and no waiting list for your city.
What a map product does have is a density effect: it gets useful the moment enough people near you are on it. So it grows neighbourhood by neighbourhood rather than territory by territory — the same way the walk outside your door does. Reach without anyone on your street is worth nothing; a handful of owners in your park is worth a great deal.
That is a growth pattern, not a boundary. Every new neighbourhood that reaches critical mass works exactly like the last one, wherever it happens to be.
What running it involves
04
Shipping it
Deciding what ships and when, getting releases out, and keeping the thing running afterwards. One person, one release cycle, no handoffs.
Going to market
Positioning, store presence, pricing and launch — then growing it neighbourhood by neighbourhood, because that is the unit a map product actually becomes useful in.
Partnerships
Vets, groomers, pet shops and dog-friendly places who want to be found by exactly the people already walking past them. That is the revenue side, and I sell it myself.
Trust and safety
A product built on location and strangers meeting has to earn trust before anything else. It is explicitly not a dating app, and that boundary shaped the design throughout.
Where it stands
05
The Android app is on Google Play in closed testing, localised into multiple languages and open to owners wherever they are. iOS is deliberately deferred until the Android product has earned it.
The interesting part has been the range rather than any single piece. The same week can involve a design decision, a release, an app-store policy review, and a conversation with a vet clinic about what a pin on the map is worth to them.