What We Are Building

Today I want to write about why I am building this. Not what shipped. Not the technical wins. The actual reason.

Eight code fixes, the first real partnership confirmed with Crumb.pet, and the biggest build yet sitting ready on the queue.

Eight code fixes, two partnerships forming, a distribution strategy locked in, and the biggest build yet on the horizon.

Ten days in and the first nine were almost entirely heads down. Day Ten was about distribution. Not as an afterthought. As a deliberate strategy.

Day nine. Find a Stay launches in early access at /find-a-stay with a Stayz CJ affiliate deep link that pre-fills destination and pet filter. The nav is updated to lead with the feature, the homepage adds a section pointing to it, and four social channels and a daily Medium publishing pipeline lock in.

I work at Bunnings. I have ADHD. I pulled an old Intel NUC out of my cupboard and accidentally launched a website that 200 people found before I even knew it was public. This is the full story.

5 hours sleep, only my phone, a hospital waiting room, a nuked Reddit account, database errors, security hardening, Google and Bing search console, Umami analytics, GitHub backups. and I would do every single bit of it again.

Day three. Nana's post-surgery checkup, a coffee with my sister, and a moment with my nephew Malakai that reminded me exactly why I am building something that matters. Plus everything we fixed under the hood today.

Six hours before my Bunnings shift. Eight hours on the floor. Then straight back to the desk until midnight. Over fifty pages published, the first affiliate application submitted, and a rotating homepage that finally feels like Pawtrips.

I am writing this with a box of tissues next to the keyboard. Over 100 pages published. A server that needed fixing. A rejection that was fair. And a brain that refuses to switch off even when the body says stop.

The day we left the NUC behind. Vercel, Neon, a lead magnet PDF, Amazon affiliate links in twelve posts, a new homepage, and a winter announcement bar. All of it built while I was genuinely unwell. The honest account of the biggest single day in Pawtrips history.

The day I found the bug that had been silently undoing my work, monetised 45 guides in one pass, and got clear on exactly how Pawtrips scales from a content site into a real platform. A deeper look at the build, the architecture, and the plan.

Day eight. The CMS is live, 98 posts migrated to Sanity, the site now reads from a real content system, and I uploaded the first photo to a guide without writing a single line of code. The full deep dive.