About us

Nearly 7 million animals enter shelters annually, with 2 million euthanized or surrendered due to lack of homes, health issues, or resource constraints. While overpopulation and breeding remain a broader issue to solve, others are within reach.

A key challenge is outdated online listings, as shelter staff prioritize animal care over updating digital platforms. Families searching for pets to adopt face frustration when contacting shelters about animals already adopted, wasting time and emotional energy. This inefficiency slows the adoption process and extends shelter stays for animals awaiting homes.

PetPublish offers a solution: a mobile app allowing shelter staff to easily check pets in and out, collecting intake and outcome data, and automating online listing management across platforms using AI agent technology. The app also sends reminders about pets' availability status to facilitate automatically removing outdated listings.

This solution aims to reduce length of stay and ultimately lower euthanasia rates through more efficient matching of pets with potential adopters. Automatically improving online listing accuracy reduces frustration finding available pets and frees staff to prioritize animal care. Data collected eventually allows adoption pattern analysis across regions to help strategically relocate animals to areas with higher adoption potential based on breed preferences, size restrictions, and demographic trends.

The Idea

PetPublish was founded by Mike and Jamie Sparr of Missoula, Montana, USA. Over Thanksgiving holiday 2023, Mike authored a 3-part blog series about methodologies and frameworks for software startups and how to scale on the cloud. In the second part he invented a fictitious online dating app, eTumble, to illustrate how to apply the techniques described. Shortly after, Jamie suggested that he build a real online dating app for animal shelters to promote pets and help them get adopted quicker. She described how she follows our local shelters and the humane society and often when they’re desperate to find an animal a home, they create cute “dating profiles” for the pet like “fun-loving male seeking family to cuddle with” and the pets are snatched up quickly. It made sense and the idea began to simmer as they continued their research.

Jamie, a 20+-year competitive dressage rider, often prefers the company of animals over people. They recently adopted their kids’ first puppy, a 7-month-old pembroke welsh corgi named Willow, whom they rehomed from a family moving from their 1,200-acre ranch into a small condo and couldn’t care for all three of their corgis. Jamie’s passion for animals and Mike's background in software startups seemed like a winning combination to address known challenges — time will tell.

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