A new-age veterinary care company came to me with a simple idea and a hard problem: build a holistic experience for pet parents — a relationship that spans a pet's entire life, not a transactional clinic visit — when all the clinical know-how lived in person and none of it lived online.
They had the team to deliver that warmth in a clinic but no way to translate it onto a screen. They needed a technology partner who could turn an offline brand into a digital-first business. I joined as that partner and stayed on as their acting Head of Engineering — owning the full arc of design, development, and maintenance, and building the team and platform that took them from a single clinic to a network of 80+.
The challenge
The company knew exactly what good care felt like in a clinic. The hard part was reproducing that feeling through a screen — and then making it hold up at the scale of a fast-growing chain. That meant solving several things at once:
- No engineering team to start from. The capability had to be built from scratch, alongside the product itself.
- One continuous relationship. Booking, payments, subscriptions, and medical care all had to feel like a single experience, not stitched-together tools.
- Fast, safe clinic onboarding. Each new location had to come online quickly — integrating the veterinary management systems and third-party tools it already depended on — without breaking what worked.
- Compounding scale. Everything had to keep working under a business growing month over month.
The approach
I treated this as building a company's engineering function, not just shipping an app. The company had deliberately chosen a model with no in-house technical resources — they wanted a trusted partner to own that entirely. So I built the engineering team from the ground up, including DevOps, set the technical direction, owned the architecture decisions, and managed the third-party relationships — so the founders could stay focused on care and growth.
From there we digitized the full lifecycle of a pet's journey — from birth to retirement — one capability at a time:
Online booking
Pet parents could find a clinic, pick a slot, and reserve care in a few taps.
Payments & subscriptions
One-off visits became ongoing care plans — and predictable revenue.
Clinic onboarding
A repeatable path to bring each new location online fast as the chain expanded.
VMS integrations
Clinics kept the veterinary management tools they relied on while plugging into one platform.
Medical records
A pet's history followed it across visits and locations, giving every vet the full picture.
…and the next stage
The platform kept expanding to cover each new stage of the pet's journey as the business grew.
The through-line was experience parity: whatever felt thoughtful and personal in the clinic had to feel the same online.
Because the business was growing while we built, every system was designed to be onboarded onto, integrated with, and extended — not just shipped once and left alone.
Outcomes
Just as importantly, the engineering capability outlasted my involvement. When it was time for handover, we left behind infrastructure built to handle the next level of changes — and a development team that could carry the vision forward on its own.
Tech & tools
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