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. Inititally, 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.

From that moment on, things really started building. That December, we introduced the now-iconic London Green colour and rolled out a brand-new logo to match the future we were stepping into. It felt surreal when we were named one of the UK’s most innovative pet products - I didn’t expect that at all. January brought our 100th article, and dogAdvisor officially became carbon neutral, which felt like a huge milestone. Weekly readership shot up to 1,800, and the site finally started to feel like it had its own personality. Between February and April, we kept refining Max and slowly shaping what would become Generation 2. But May flipped everything. I was profiled by Investopedia, then suddenly found myself on the front pages of Microsoft News, Student Entrepreneur, and Netizens Choice - all within days of each other. That same week, I got invited to an industry roundtable for pet care and sat down with founders, vets, and execs I’d never imagined speaking to. It completely shifted how I saw dogAdvisor - it wasn’t just something I built for my friend anymore. It was something that clearly mattered to thousands. With that fire behind us, we started pushing Max even further. We tested him with the most brutal questions we could think of and watched him fail around 30 percent of them. So we got back to work. That’s when we developed Safety Intents, a full AI Safety Constitution, and the Foundation Safety Framework, which massively improved how Max handled sensitive topics like medical issues or emergencies. In June, we thought things might slow down, but instead, we found out Max had already saved another three dogs. I remember checking the logs at a Starbucks and literally falling off my chair. That same month, dogAdvisor was named the world’s most sustainable pet brand, I was awarded Pet Care CEO of the Year, and we took home the Global Innovation in Design Award - three awards in one month, something no other pet brand has ever achieved. Then came July. We launched our most ambitious update ever: the new Fluid Fur design with subtle translucency, gesture-friendly layouts, a new mobile interface, and the official rollout of Max Generation 2. He was smarter, more fluent, multi-lingual, trained on our entire content library, and fully equipped with next-level Emergency Guidance. On top of all that, I sat down with NewsNation in the US for a full interview, finalised our trademark, and got named one of the top startups in the global pet space. It was wild.

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