I am writing this on 5 hours sleep and I have never felt more certain about something I am building.
The setup
No laptop today. Just my phone, a hospital waiting room, and my nana in surgery.
I want to be honest about what that looked like: it was not some cinematic founder moment where I had everything under control. It was me in a plastic chair, phone screen too bright, trying to do real work on a 6-inch screen while also just trying to get through the day emotionally. You do what you can with what you have.
And somehow, a lot got done.
First, the Reddit disaster
Let's start with the lesson that hurt the most, because it is also the funniest in retrospect.
I had been planning a Reddit post for days. The strategy was solid. post in r/AussiePetOwners, frame it as asking for feedback rather than promoting something, mention Astro and Monti, ask where people take their dogs. Good post. Real post.
What I did not account for: I went to post it and somehow, in the process, nuked my existing Reddit account and created a brand new one instead.
New account. Zero karma. Zero post history. Completely fresh.
Reddit does not let new accounts post in most subreddits. The algorithm treats a brand new account posting a link as spam, and it is right to. that is exactly what spammers do. So the post I had been writing and refining for days could not go anywhere.
The lesson: Reddit karma is infrastructure. You build it slowly, like trust. You cannot rush it and you cannot fake it. My new account now needs weeks of genuine comments and contributions before it can post freely. That is not a bad thing. it just means Reddit is a longer game than I thought, and I should have been building karma on my existing account from the start instead of treating it as a one-time action.
Mistake noted. Moving on.
What I actually got done from a phone in a waiting room
Despite the Reddit setback, today was genuinely productive. Here is everything that happened:
Google Search Console verified and sitemap submitted. This is how you tell Google your site exists and where all your pages are. Without it, Google finds you eventually by following links. but that is slow and unreliable for a new domain. Now Google knows every page on the site and when it was last updated. Indexing should follow within days.
Bing Webmaster Tools verified. Covers Bing and DuckDuckGo in one go. Same process. verify domain ownership via a DNS record in Cloudflare, submit the sitemap. Done from my phone in about 15 minutes.
Umami analytics installed. I switched away from Google Analytics. Umami is open source, privacy-first, and I host it myself at analytics.pawtrips.com.au. Real visitor data. pages, referrers, countries, devices. without handing everything to Google's ad machine. Within 24 hours of going live we had 157 visits and 8 real email signups from strangers.
LinkedIn post went out. The accidental launch story. The real one. left a Cloudflare tunnel open while tinkering, organic traffic found the site before I was ready, strangers signed up to something that barely existed. People responded to it because it was true.
Affiliate programs researched and bookmarked. Booking.com, Agoda, Commission Factory, Amazon AU. all the signup URLs saved so I can apply properly from a computer. Doing it from a phone would have been messy.
GitHub backup confirmed. Everything pushed. If the NUC dies tomorrow, the code survives. This one matters more than it sounds.
The security work
On top of all of that, earlier in the day before I left for the hospital, there was real work done on making the site less fragile and less exposed.
The day started with the homepage returning a 500 error. Completely down. The cause was a PostgreSQL permission error. the database user the app runs as did not have the right access to the tables. It looks like a disaster, sounds like a disaster, and then you fix it with three lines of SQL and the site comes back up. That is how most things go.
After that I added rate limiting to the email signup API. Without it, anyone can write a script and hammer the endpoint with thousands of fake signups. Rate limiting caps how many requests a single IP can make in a given window. Small change, meaningful protection.
Then SSH hardening. Password authentication for the server is now completely disabled. The only way in is with the correct SSH key file. No brute force attack works because there is no password to guess. It is a 5 minute change that closes a real attack surface.
Nightly database backups are running to the 16TB external drive. The code is on GitHub. Between those two things, a hardware failure is a recovery job, not a loss.
What the site looks like now
Two days ago this was a scaffolded Next.js app with a homepage that barely loaded.
Right now it has:
- A live homepage with email capture
- An about page
- A "What We Are Building" section with real posts
- Sitemap and robots.txt for search engines
- Rate limiting on public API endpoints
- SSH hardened with key-only authentication
- Nightly database backups
- Umami analytics
- Cloudflare Tunnel routing all traffic
- Google Search Console verified and sitemap submitted
- Bing Webmaster Tools verified
- Full codebase backed up on GitHub
No real listings yet. No booking integration. No search pulling live data. But the foundation is not embarrassing and the site is not one bad day away from disappearing.
The honest version of today
I was at a hospital. My nana was in surgery. I only had my phone. I accidentally destroyed my Reddit account. The site was down when I woke up.
And also: I fixed the site, hardened the server, got indexed by Google and Bing, posted on LinkedIn, got new signups, pushed everything to GitHub, and mapped out the next two weeks of work.
Both of those things are true at the same time and that is just what building something looks like.
I am running on 5 hours sleep, I have a new Reddit account with zero karma, and I am completely obsessed with this.
Astro and Monti approved this message. 🌭
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