Tobik

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  Set up a profile for your furry (or not so much) friend

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  Create an incident when your pet goes missing

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  Quickly share the incident with your family, friends and neighbors

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  Receive real-time sighting reports and find you unfortunate little friend

Inspiration

About a year ago, my friend’s dog ran away, and I joined the search efforts. For long hours, a small group of friends, family, and volunteers searched the neighborhoods, showing the dog’s picture to passersby and asking them to call if they spotted her.

During this time, I witnessed the enormous distress that owners of lost pets experience. It is pure emotional agony.

Eventually, a local resident we had spoken to earlier called us: they had seen a small dog sitting alone in a distant part of the city. To our surprise, it was indeed our friend. She had traveled far beyond the area where we had focused our efforts.

What struck me most was the generosity of complete strangers. Several dog owners, whom we had never met before, joined the search as if it were their own pet that had gone missing. Their spirit of solidarity ignited my imagination. I realized that if we could only coordinate our efforts better and spread the word faster, we could spare countless pets and families so much suffering.

That realization set me in motion, and, a year later, Tobik went live.

What it does

Tobik is a platform that empowers pet owners to quickly mobilize their family, friends, and neighbors when every second matters.

• Owners create a pet profile with photos.
• They mark the last seen location and open a new incident.
• With a single click, they can alert their close circle.
• First responders can immediately join the search and invite others, even complete strangers, to be on the lookout.

By serving as a virtual headquarters for search efforts and streamlining the flow of information, Tobik makes it faster and easier to reunite pets with their families.

How we built it

I built Tobik as a solo developer, creating a custom web server along with iOS and Android apps. Knowing this platform would be challenging to build, grow, and monetize, I set a long-term horizon from the start. This gave me space to explore different technologies and invest upfront in strong, flexible foundations to ensure Tobik’s quality and adaptability in the future.

Challenges we ran into

Reaching this milestone required mastering numerous new technologies: Kotlin Multiplatform and Compose Multiplatform for mobile apps; Spring Boot, integration testing, and Testcontainers for the backend; JWT for authentication; deep links for sharing; and more.

But the biggest challenge wasn’t technical, but time. Balancing such a demanding project with family life and professional responsibilities required much energy, persistence, and careful prioritization.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Actually building the thing, pouring hours of my free time into the project over many months. It was challenging )

What we learned

Tobik has just taken its first baby steps. I’ve learned a lot along the way, but I know this is just the beginning of a much larger journey.

What's next for Tobik

• Spread the word and reach pet owners in critical situations
• Help more families reunite with their missing pets
• Enhance and grow the platform
• And yes… eventually, conquer the world )

Built With

• composemultiplatform
• kotlin
• kotlinmultiplatform
• nginx
• postgresql
• spring
• testcontainers