HonestDog

HonestDog was born out of a simple frustration: buying a dog in Europe was opaque, risky, and full of bad actors. The dog market is the continent’s 3rd-largest illegal market — puppy mills disguised as reputable breeders, misleading health claims, and zero accountability.

I co-founded HonestDog as a consumer marketplace — the go-to platform for finding and caring for dogs in Europe, bringing transparency and trust to the industry. The MVP was built on Bubble, and I iterated relentlessly based on user feedback.

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

Building HonestDog taught me that the hardest part of a startup isn’t the product — it’s the relentless prioritization of what matters most right now. Every day is a triage exercise, and your ability to make good decisions under uncertainty is what separates companies that survive from those that don’t.

It also taught me the power of building in public, talking to users constantly, and being willing to throw away code that doesn’t serve the user. Technical elegance means nothing if no one uses your product.