About MeetMyDog

I should probably start with a confession: I am not a dog person.

Not even close. When I was 16, a dachshund chased me while I was out running, and I panicked so badly that I jumped onto my neighbor’s car. The cops were called. I had to “explain myself.” And then I spent the rest of the summer working at Subway to help pay my parents back the $1,500 in damage. So, yeah. Not exactly the origin story of a lifelong dog lover. Fast forward about 15 years, and somehow I ended up with Boots. Boots was a stray. A friend had found him and asked me to watch him for a bit. I’m still not totally sure what happened, but somewhere along the way I felt drawn to keep him. So I decided to keep him. He was around 8 or 9 months old at the time, which is a very cute way of saying: pure chaos with paws. At the beginning, our relationship was… complicated. I have very little patience, and Boots had no idea what was going on. Most days, it felt like we were both scared, confused, and mildly annoyed with each other. But then something changed. Over the next few months, we started to figure each other out. We found a rhythm. I learned what he needed. He learned how to communicate with me in his own weird, dramatic, boots-like way. Slowly, we became a team. Do we still get on each other’s nerves? Absolutely. But now it feels different. It’s less “what have I gotten myself into?” and more “okay, buddy, I see you need some attention.” Sometimes that attention is a walk. Sometimes it’s play. Sometimes it’s him staring at me like I personally ruined his entire day because I won’t let him eat something suspicious off the ground. But occasionally I think it’s that he wants a friend to play with… That’s what led me to build MeetMyDog. I wanted Boots to have more chances to socialize, play, and just be a dog. But as a new dog owner, I realized I had no idea how to make that happen in a natural way. There were dogs around. There were owners around. But connecting with them felt awkward, random, and weirdly harder than it should be. So I started building MeetMyDog — a simple way for nearby dog owners to find each other, help their dogs make friends, and turn “we should let them play sometime” into an actual plan. Boots needed a few friends. I figured other dogs probably do too.