Why we built flüf
We didn’t set out to start a company. It all started the way most things do between friends …over a catch-up.
I said to Maria, ‘I want to build a fitness tracker for my dogs.’
She wasn't surprised. Anyone who knows my dogs Bentley and Cooper and me will not be surprised.
I love a Garmin, Maria loves her Oura ring. We love to track sleep, steps, nutrition. If there's data available, I want to see it and try to make sense of it. It's just how my brain works.
So naturally, at some point, I started wondering: what would my dogs’ data look like? What would that tell me about their lifestyle? I want to know if what’s normal for Bentley is the same for Cooper, and if not, why? Once I started thinking about it, questions just flooded in.
Bentley is on the right and Cooper is the baby boy on the left
Bentley and Cooper are different dogs with different personalities, different energy levels, and different ways of living life. Much like humans. What would the numbers even tell me and more importantly, what story would they tell?
So I started looking into what already existed.
What I found was a lot of data. Data tracked and stored by many different products out there. And every single one of them, I found to have the same problem:
“It’s a lot of data with none of the story.”
Steps. Activity. Sleep. The numbers were there. But these trackers and gadgets couldn't answer the question I actually cared about: what does this mean for my dog, specifically?
What does 4,200 steps mean for Bentley, given his age, his breed, what he ate that week, the fact that he seemed slightly off on Tuesday for no reason I could name?
I couldn’t connect any of it.
The reality of today’s pet care
As a product specialist, I know the shortest way to find the problem is through the users. So, I started looking at how I actually managed their care day to day. The records I built over time for Bentley and Cooper. I quickly realised that my problem was not the data itself or the tracking. Everything I had on my dogs and I know about my dogs was scattered all over the place.
“The problem was how fragmented pet care is today for me as a dog mum of 2 .”
Vaccinations live in one place, insurance in emails and insurance claims in personal drives. Behavioural patterns… mostly in my head, but some in behaviour apps I have been trying out. Advice comes from everywhere, and not always consistently. Vet notes in emails and in my iPhone notes. Poop photos my vet asked me to take, buried in my phone.
“There was no thread. No continuity. No story. Just me, piecing it together from memory every time something came up and stressing I missed something important.”
What I really needed was their history, their patterns, their health records — all in one place, building over time into something actually useful. A continuous record of their life. I couldn't find that anywhere.
As a good friend, Maria had to listen to all of that and more. And somewhere in our conversation, what started as a throwaway idea about a fitness tracker for my dogs became something else entirely. A question worth taking seriously. A problem worth solving.
So we decided to build the solution ourselves.
We're building this in the open. No stealth mode, no corporate polish. We'll share what we're making, why we made the calls we did, how it's going, and what we're learning.
And yes. We promise cat and dog pictures.
