HonestDog

When I was 9, my uncle got me a chocolate Labrador puppy. I named him Romeo. I was over the moon — after years of moving every two years with my military family, playing with stray dogs wherever we landed, I finally had my own. A month later, he got sick. Vomiting, bloody diarrhea. Within 24 hours, he was gone. I was a zombie for weeks.

Years later, in the UK, I learned Romeo died of parvovirus — something preventable with a simple vaccination. Out of guilt, I started reading everything I could find on dogs. Vet books, wolf behavior, puppy raising guides. My library card showed over 100 books checked out on animals alone.

Fast forward to 2021: during my master’s at WHU, my co-founder Nik and I were ideating on startup ideas. By chance, we looked at what the process of buying a dog in Germany actually looks like. We found eBay Kleinanzeigen (craigslist equivalent in Germany) — puppies sold like used furniture. Puppy mills disguised as family breeders. Fraud. Cash-only black market breeders. Two-year waiting lists for reputable ones. The continent’s 3rd-largest illegal market hiding in plain sight.

One of the first breeders we spoke to almost started crying — the lack of transparency was hurting the good, ethical breeders as much as it was hurting buyers. We dropped every other idea and went all in.

Key Results

• Raised $750K+ from VCs and angel investors
• Scaled marketplace to $25M annual GMV and 30K monthly organic traffic
• Automated operations to run platform independently with zero team overhead
• Built the full product from zero — design, development, ops, marketing

What I Learned

Four years of building HonestDog taught me more than any job or degree.

Validate the business model first, not last. We fell into the classic VC trap — assuming that if we got big enough, the business model would follow. But our market didn’t work that way. You can’t scale your way to a business model when the unit economics don’t support it. The only proven model in European pet marketplaces was ads, and that only works at 1M+ monthly traffic. Multiple companies across the world that started around the same time as us went bankrupt learning the same lesson. Charge early, test willingness to pay before you build, especially in a market where the business model hasn’t been proven.

Not every big problem is an urgent problem. The dog breeding market is full of real, serious problems — genetics, health, fraud. But at the moment someone is choosing a puppy, they’re in an emotional state, not a rational one. People buy French Bulldogs knowing they can barely breathe. The health risks aren’t hidden — they’re just not urgent at the point of decision. I learned that businesses should be built on problems that feel urgent right now, not problems that matter in theory. Understanding the psychology of when people feel pain — not just whether they have it — changes everything.

Automate yourself out of the job. When I scaled the team down, I was forced to automate everything — customer support, listing verification, reporting. The platform now runs independently with zero team overhead. That constraint made the product better, not worse.

Knowing when to evolve is its own skill. I’m a cockroach by nature — I’d rather brute force my way through a wall than walk away. That resilience kept HonestDog alive through years of struggle. But it also made it incredibly hard to step back and redirect my energy when the signal was clear. Learning to distinguish persistence from stubbornness was the hardest and most valuable lesson of the whole journey. The mission still matters to me — I just found a more sustainable way to keep it alive.