Personalized Software for a Doggy Daycare

The first slide on screen was not a market forecast or a complex architectural diagram, but a simple picture of a dog. “That is my dog,” Derek said. “This is going to be a very dog-focused presentation.” This set the stage for a talk grounded not in abstract trends, but in a tangible problem Derek chose to solve for a small business he knew firsthand: the doggy daycare his own puppy loves.

Derek, who comes from a background in big tech and video games, recently started a solo venture called Good Karma Labs, an “AI product studio for good.” The story of the daycare project illustrates what that means in practice.

The Problem on the Ground

Derek’s dog was thriving at her daycare. She had, he joked, more friends than he did and a busy social calendar of walks and birthday parties. But this high-touch experience for the dogs was powered by intense, unseen manual labor. The daycare, he noted, was “not a very tech-forward company.”

He learned that their operational work, from van routing for pickups and drop-offs to scheduling walk groups, was “all manually done the night before.” This work was often done “outside of the hours,” was “error-grown,” and handled by different people on different nights, making it highly “non-standardized.” The core of their operation ran on fragile “tribal knowledge.”

Hearing Derek describe the daycare's operations felt familiar. The hidden complexity behind a smooth customer experience is often where the real work lies, and it’s a story repeated across many businesses run by passionate people who are experts in their craft but not in building software. This talk crystallized a thought I keep having: the most direct path to building something meaningful is to stop looking for a market and start looking for a person with a problem.

He saw a chance to apply his skills to solve a concrete problem for people whose work he appreciated. He decided to sit down with the founder and build something for them. This was a departure from typical side projects. “I made all sorts of food-related ones,” he shared, “but I really wanted to have something that was built on their requirements or being points of an actual business.”

A Tool for People Who Love Dogs

Derek’s solution is a simple web application, a platform built for the daycare's specific needs and its non-technical staff. The intended users are “people that love the dogs” but don’t spend their days behind a laptop. The goal was to give them a centralized place to handle their complex evening planning quickly and accurately.

He walked the audience through the system. The foundation is a “doggy database” that replaces scattered records. It houses profiles for each dog, tracking their designated daycare days and pickup needs. It also encodes the “tribal knowledge” that was previously held in the staff's memory. For instance, the system knows that “not all dogs get along with each other” and can flag that “Bailey and Tommy do not get along,” preventing them from being grouped together.

On top of this database, he built a “transport routing sort of tool.” It takes the list of dogs for the day and their addresses to help create routes for the vans. The staff already communicated via WhatsApp, so Derek integrated it directly. A single click in the console can send routing information for “each van or all vans,” complete with an editable message.

The same logic extends to on-site operations. The console helps organize walk groups, respecting constraints like “one person can only manage up to four dogs” and the social compatibility rules. It also helps assign dogs to the facility's “three floors of public paradise,” ensuring harmonious playgroups. The system even features a simple chat interface. A user can make a request like “move mochi from Monday to Wednesday,” and as Derek explained, “you can make a quick change just there.”

From a Favor to a Framework

What began as a project born from personal observation is now pointing the way forward for Derek's new venture. The experience of building for the daycare and seeing its impact crystallized a new direction. After building the tool, he walked past another dog grooming business, pitched them on the spot, and found “they're very excited.”

This is leading him to explore how to best serve small and medium-sized businesses. He is learning that reaching them requires a different approach. “I'm reaching out to SMBs for the very first time,” he explained. “A very different demographic.” An audience member asked a practical question, not about the business model, but about the original inspiration.

“Which?”

“Oh, this is a dog you retreat. It’s in the east,” Derek replied.

His work concludes not with a finished product, but with an open question he is actively trying to answer with his new company. He is looking for “advice for taking off your own AI solo business, doing custom software, consulting.” He is also looking for other SMB owners who might be interested in a free design partnership, hoping to turn the lessons from one doggy daycare into a way of helping many other small businesses.

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Michael