Dear friends,

As many of you know, I started dogAdvisor on the 24th August 2024, when my friend (who'd just gotten a German Shepherd) struggled to find information on how to take care of his dog. dogAdvisor started off as a simple blog. In the early days, it had just 15 articles and - frankly - looked terribly monochromatic. It had just 50 weekly users - and (to be honest) I was really proud; I know that doesn't sound like very many at all - but that morning when I woke up I realised 50 people every single week were trusting us to provide them with the content they demanded from us. We started our as a place where dog owners could get expert advice and product recommendations. To be honest, it was early days, the product recommendations had a sparse variety of recommendations. Yet behind the scenes we were building something truly special. Sometime we know was going to change everything. That was Max.

In October of that very year, in what was one of the most exciting site revamps of our history, we introduced Max to all of you. To be honest, it was a bit of a scary moment. AI was just taking off, and we weren't totally sure that Max was what owners wanted. But we took a chance. In October, we discontinued our product recommendations and forced all our attention on improving our articles, and in the process improving Max. We'd also built a more hidden feature into Max. One we genuinely hoped you'd never ever have to use - but to give you confidence that, if you needed him, Max would be there for you. That was Emergency Guidance. Then it happened. Someone's dog ate chocolate (which is toxic for dogs) and asked Max. I'll be frank - reading that conversation terrified me. It was chilling to know that someone had been faced with such a horrific situation. As I scrolled, I saw Max's guidance - I could almost feel the dog owner's relief when reading those transcripts. At the end, she finished with "thank you - you saved him". For me, that was one of the most heart-warming memories of dogAdvisor I'd ever had.

That December - as many of you will remember - we launched the now iconic London Green colour. That month, we also pivoted to an entirely new logo to celebrate the new 'future' we were heading towards. It came as quite a shock, honestly, when we were (that December) named one of the most innovative pet products in the UK. It was then that I knew - I'd found the killer combo (Max and our articles). Things only took off from there...

In January, we published our 100th article, and become (fully) Carbon Neutral. Readership increased to 1800 per week and our growth was starting to become sensational. We kept building out our article catalogue even more, and we (slowly but surely) started finding our own personal identity - introducing the now iconic dogAdvisor logo and primary font. From January to round about April things were pretty normal. We kept building out Max, now starting to prepare him for the 2nd generation. Then hit May.

May was.... CRAZY. We introduced Article Accessories for the first time ever, and hit 120 articles. Then - we exploded. I was profiled in Investopedia (yeah, that world-leading finance publication) and then (literally the same week) got around 10 alerts. Now, I was on the front page of Student Entrepreneur, Netizens choice, and (most shockingly) Microsoft News. Oh yeah, and then I also got invited to an industry roundtable for the pet care industry - it was a car-crash of a month (in a positive way). Honestly, sitting down with some of the most inspirational people in the pet industry completely changed my perspective on dogAdvisor. I always imagined it as a personal solution for my friend, but as I saw those user numbers climb I realised it was so much more than I ever gave it credit for. dogAdvisor isn't just a personal solution - it's the solution for people who value trust, simplicity, and their dog. This epiphany only pushed me forward. We pushed harder, and challenged ourselves not just to defy industry norms, but to redefine them. That same month, we finished our Max Generation 2 model safety report. Ahead of its launch, we'd been working (on copious amounts of tea) to deliver one simple promise: we'd create one of the most transparent, safe, and reliable AIs in the entire pet industry. We tested, and tested, and tested, with more than 20 of the most rigorous questions we could find - doing anything and everything to push Max to his literal boundaries. It failed a shocking 30% of all the questions we gave it. But we didn't stop. We pushed even harder, and launched three (truly) groundbreaking innovations: Safety Intents (our idea behind this was that if there was ever a question for which the answer could harm a dog, Max should never answer), our AI Safety Constitution (dictating our expectations for Max), and - most critically - the Foundation Safety Framework which was perhaps the most significant of these innovations - and intelligent system that used a new Semantic Index to better understand when Emergency Guidance or Safety Intents should be triggered. Our testing showed a 2x improvement in Emergency Guidance triggering (and far fewer unprompted Guidance triggers) than before. With that in mind, we pushed all of these amazing innovations into Gen 2.

(phew.... that was a looonnggg paragraph)

Then came June - the final moments before the big reveal of Max Generation 2 and our new design. What we expected to be a fairly quiet month was just the opposite. We won 3 awards - in a single month. Not a single pet care brand ever achieved that. Oh and that was also the month we too realised Max was the world's first life-saving dog AI. So we decided to check-up on Max again - and what we saw shocked us. Max had saved another 3 dogs with Emergency Guidance. I genuinely fell off my chair (it was at a Starbucks and horribly embarrassing). Not only had we been named (1) the World's most sustainable pet company (2) I was named CEO of the year in the pet care industry (3) Won the Global Innovation in Design award. It was a truly riveting month.

Finally, the moment had come. July 10th was the day we introduced the most significant redesign in dogAdvisor history, Fluid Fur. Fluid Fur delivered a new design with subtle translucent effects that make the dogAdvisor experience feel lighter, more fluid, and more alive. Animations are smoother and - on mobile - every element has been rethought from gesture-friendly layouts to clear and more tactile mobile experiences. The new design introduced London Night Green and - the long awaited - Max Generation 2, which now had a new, more alive, look, a new personality, FluidFlow, multi-lingual support, a stunning new Emergency Guidance, was now trained on 2x as many articles as before (now being fully trained on our entire catalogue of dog care articles). And then, in what was truly a highlight of my entire journey, I got to sit down with NewsNation (a genuinely AWESOME news broadcaster in the US that's politically unbiased) for an interview to talk all about dogAdvisor®. Oh yeah, and that month we also got a trademark on the dogAdvisor brand name and logo! And, to make things even more incredibly, not only were we named one of the most important startups in the pet industry that month by F6S, I also sat down with AI experts for a stunning dinner in London.

As I look back, I suppose I never really expected dogAdvisor would ever become this famous. This innovative. This well-known. After all, this started as a personal solution for my friend. Yet today, it's far outgrown that. For all the interviews, for all the press and all the industry breakfasts, the one thing I will never forget is you. Seeing you guys all interact with our dog cusor (clicking it obsessively for 10 minutes in a row - yeah I know about that), ask Max all the serious questions (my dog is bleeding catastrophically how do I save him) to all the slightly less serious questions (can I put my dog on a treadmill), or even read 18 articles at a time all in the hope of making your dog's life as good as it can be: Thank you. So much.

We've got some really really exciting updates in the pipeline, like Visual Paws (which we announced we'd be bringing in to dogAdvisor starting next year), even more articles, Max Generation 3 with article intents, and so so much more.

To be continued...

Deni Darenberg, dogAdvisor founder