Lovepets Community

Lovepets is a community for pet/animal lovers and providers

Under 10 Employees
Founders Code
Solo Founder
B2C
Community
Social Media

We volunteer for a cat and dog rescue and we've observed a need for an online community like this one.

January 2021 Decided to Pivot

We continued to try and make our other business successful through the end of last year and part of this month.

I decided that there really was no upside to continuing to try and make it work. Instead, I decided to move forward with my own involvement and ownership of the community site that I had proposed last year.

I started trying to find domain names and due to a previous IH discussion on TLDs, I decided to incorporate .so into the name. Some ideas included: welovepets.so, petbook.*, but I landed on lovepets.so.

January 15, 2021 Retooling a Community

I don't have the budget to pay anyone to work on our community site. From a technology perspective, it's LAMP plus MongoDB, RabbitMQ, Redis, and Node.js. It's hosted in an EC2 environment.

I struggled a bit but I was able to modify Route 53 and the app to get the new domain name functional. Then I deleted all of our old data (customers, posts, etc) out of our database. I enabled some new functionality (events, groups, and pages) that we hadn't been using and noticed some bugs (or unanticipated features).

After working too many hours to count during the day and into late at night, I finally resolved some of my remaining to-dos.

October 8, 2020 Concept Ideation

My company already owned a community site that we were using for a different product. I started talking to our other board of directors members about the possibility of using our community as their main website.

We learned that because of several different issues it was best not to have the community be owned by the rescue.

About

We volunteer for a cat and dog rescue and we've observed a need for an online community like this one.