May 3, 2026
What I learned researching a puppy I haven't brought home yet
I'm in the process of getting a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. The research has taught me things I wish someone had told me on day one, and pointed at a gap that became an app.
I don't have a dog yet.
I'm in the process of getting one. A Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. The months between deciding I wanted a dog and actually being ready to bring one home have turned out to be longer and more complicated than I expected. Most of the writing online about getting a dog skips this entire phase. It either targets people who already have a puppy ("here's how to crate train") or people in the very first moment of curiosity ("are you sure you want a dog?"). The middle stretch, which is months of real research and real preparation, is mostly empty.
This post is from inside that stretch. It's also the reason I ended up building two apps.
What "research" actually means when you take it seriously
When I started, I thought research meant picking a breed. A weekend on Reddit, a few articles, maybe a quiz, done.
That's not what it turned out to be.
Real research, the kind you do when you actually intend to commit fifteen years to an animal, looks like this. Reading every breed standard document you can find. Reading the health testing requirements for the breed. Joining breed-specific forums and lurking for weeks before posting anything. Watching prospective owners get gently corrected by experienced breeders when they ask the wrong questions. Slowly figuring out that the right questions are not the ones you started with.
For Cavaliers specifically, there's a heart condition called mitral valve disease that affects an unfortunately high percentage of the breed. There's syringomyelia. There's the question of MRI screening for breeding stock, what it costs, why some breeders do it and others don't, and what that says about the breeder. There's reading a pedigree, actually reading it, not just looking at the names. There's understanding which lines have which risks.
None of this was in the breed quiz I'd taken in week one.
The breeder problem is worse than I realized
The bigger discovery, and the one that actually drove me to build something, was about breeders.
Going in, I had a vague sense that puppy mills are bad and you should buy from a reputable breeder. That framing turns out to be useless in practice. The actual landscape is something like this:
- A small number of genuinely ethical breeders. They health-test. They breed selectively. They interview you before they'll consider selling you a puppy. Their waiting lists are often measured in years.
- A larger middle layer. They look professional. The websites are good. They claim health testing they haven't actually done. They produce puppies at a scale that should make you suspicious.
- A long tail of backyard breeders, accidental litters, and outright commercial operations that produce puppies for the lowest possible cost. These get routed through pet shops, classified ads, and increasingly, Instagram.
The middle layer is the dangerous one. Because it looks like the first category. The websites are clean. The puppy photos are adorable. The breeders use the right words. The only way to tell the difference is to know which specific questions to ask, which specific paperwork to demand, and which specific red flags to look for. None of which is intuitive. None of which is in any one article. None of which a first-time prospective owner is equipped to figure out under the emotional pressure of I want a puppy and these ones are available now.
I spent weeks learning to navigate this. Along the way, I watched friends and acquaintances buy puppies from breeders I now realize were almost certainly problematic. I saw people end up with dogs that had health issues better breeding would have avoided. I saw temperament issues from poor early socialization. In a few cases, dogs that ended up rehomed because the match was wrong from the start.
That last category, the dogs returned and rehomed and sometimes abandoned, is the one that haunts me.
A friend's first year with Archie
A friend of mine got a puppy named Archie a while back. Her first year was the kind of education no amount of pre-purchase reading prepares you for.
The vaccination schedule alone became a part-time tracking job. First round, boosters, the gap before he could safely socialize, the regional variations. The deworming cycle on a different schedule. The tick prevention on yet another. The heartworm cycle. The once-a-year stuff that's easy to forget about in month nine. She missed a booster by about a week, not catastrophically, but enough to feel the small specific shame of having dismissed a calendar reminder while traveling.
Then there's the data nobody warns you about. Feeding amounts in grams. Water in millilitres. Weight tracked weekly because growth curves matter. Not because the numbers themselves matter. Because the pattern tells you whether something's wrong. A flatlining weight chart is a vet visit. A sudden drop is a vet visit. You can't notice these things if you're weighing your dog "every now and then." You only notice them with consistent data.
By month three she was running three different tracking systems and trusted none of them. A spreadsheet that started clean and degraded into formatting chaos within ten days. A Notes app entry that was supposed to be the master log. WhatsApp messages with her partner about feeding times. The result was that when the vet asked, around month seven, when Archie's last deworming had been, she didn't know. The information existed. It was just scattered across three systems, none of which talked to each other, all of which had been maintained by a person operating on inconsistent sleep.
That story stuck with me. I heard variations of it from other friends, from forum posts, from comments under r/puppy101 threads. The first year of dog ownership generates a tremendous amount of important information, and almost nobody has a good system for keeping track of it. The default tools, things like spreadsheets and calendar reminders and scattered notes, all degrade exactly when you're least equipped to maintain them.
Two gaps, two apps
So I'm sitting in this middle stretch. Past the decision to get a dog, deep into research, watching the breeder landscape, listening to friends describe their first years. And I keep noticing the same thing. The tools that should exist don't, and the absence has real consequences.
The first gap is on the front end. Prospective owners don't have a serious tool for the pre-purchase phase. They have breed quizzes, mostly trivial. They have forums of uneven quality that are hard to navigate. They have breeder directories, often pay-to-list, rarely vetted. What they don't have is a structured way to think through breed fit for their specific situation. Or to evaluate honest cost over the dog's lifetime. Or to learn what to look for in a breeder. Or to avoid the categories of mistake that end with a returned or abandoned dog. That gap became WhichPuppy.
The second gap is on the back end. New owners don't have a calm, dependable place to track everything that matters in the first year. They have spreadsheets that fall apart. Reminders that get dismissed. Information scattered across systems that don't talk to each other. They have the equivalent of paper records in 2026. That gap became PuppyHQ.
I built them as two separate apps because they serve fundamentally different people at fundamentally different moments. (More on that in a follow-up post.) The underlying motivation is the same though. The tools that should exist for the journey of getting and raising a dog mostly don't, and the absence has real costs. For the people who get dogs, and far more importantly, for the dogs themselves.
Where I am now
I'm still in the research phase. Haven't brought my Cavalier home yet. There's a process to work through. Finding the right breeder. Navigating waiting lists. Long conversations about what kind of family the puppy is going to. None of which felt normal to me when I started. All of which I now understand is exactly what I should have been looking for the whole time.
When the puppy comes home, I'll be using PuppyHQ from day one. Not because I built it. Because by then I'll have spent over a year learning what makes the first year hard, and the app is what I would have wanted on day one anyway.
If you're somewhere in this same middle stretch, past the decision but not yet at the dog, both apps are live. WhichPuppy for the part you're in now. PuppyHQ for the part that comes next.
WhichPuppy and PuppyHQ are both on the App Store. The blog will keep documenting what I learn through the rest of the journey.