PetPeek

Discover your pet's secret personality, through the lens of your phone! Expertly designed to help you connect with your pet and have fun! Using the latest tech in AI, beautiful graphics and humour.

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Inspiration

This is a start-up my partner (CTO), myself (CEO) and our cat Lucy (CMO) are building. As you can tell, we are obsessed with our cat and have always wondered what she is up to. Just like thousands of other pet owners! With the recent advances in image comprehension and quality content generation the idea of PetPeek, a mobile app that tells you what your pet thinks, became a real possibility! We want to make something that pet owners all over the world can use to better understand and have fun with their pets!

What it does

It tells you what your pet is thinking. Our AI looks at the photo of your pet, their body language, their facial expression and the background of the photo and combines it with a fine-tuned sense of humour, to tell you their thoughts! We have even more features like pet astrology and daily readings, that deliver fun facts, historical events and pet-related legends in a fun and relatable way.

How we built it

We both have a strong experience with React so we chose to leverage React-Native via Expo. For our backend, database and auth we chose to lean into Supabase as a platform we have used before and gives us options to Self-host if we need to. The whole codebase is typescript with TRPC to handle the communication. This gives us a lot of confidence to move fast without breaking things. With expo using Revenuecat for handling payments was a no-brainer. The payments library for revenue greatly simplified our work within the app handling both Google and Apple. Additionally, its abstractions to consolidate products across platforms were very helpful.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest blocker has been Google testing. We have engaged with paid testers and had friends and family test but Google's reviews for Production access are very strict and they don't provide actionable feedback. We have also had some issues with styling for multiple devices but now we have a good process for working and refining designs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud we're now live on the Apple store with paying users. The first time we received a positive message on socials from a customer was amazing.

What we learned

Our development process and styling approach has become a well-oiled process. We have learnt about the Google accessibility app and how to use a screen reader to accurately test our apps for every user and produce a quality product. Over time our designs have improved and our styling has become more refined. The PetPeek app now has a clear element of polish and consistency.

What's next for Petpeek

The next phase is all about adding social features to PetPeek and securing sponsors. With features such as Peek of the Day, users can submit their favourite 'peeks' and be featured on our homepage, as well as seasonal/sponsored events. Events are themed competitions, where people can choose a pet to submit and upload photos (based on the theme) to collect points, through our AI. Winners will be awarded something based on the sponsor e.g. cat food, or dog accessories.

Our first event is a 'nice or naughty, Christmas list'. Users will submit a daily photo of their pet and win naughty or nice points. At the end, 2 winners will be announced and given credits, plus some physical products, depending on the sponsor we collaborate with.

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