Petsy - A Pet sitter's dashboard
Hackathon Replit + Resend
Time: 8 hours | Date: 21/03/2026
Team:
2 UX Designers + 1 dev full stack + 1 dev back-end
Problem
Pet sitters often manage pet routines without any centralized, accessible documentation.
My participation
End-to-end. From the initial idea (a PDF of the pet's routine sent by email) to the pivot that repositioned the pet sitter as the main user. Also delivered the pitch.
Results
1st place
Winners between ~40 teams
Pivot in 3h
From PDF by email to a management tool
01 - Context
I defined that the idea we had to solve was a real problem and it should fit the event's timeframe.
We evaluated three paths:
Student management system (Too complex)
Onboarding for autistic children (Sensitive data)
Pet care documentation
We chose to improve a documentation process that already exists and tends to happen in a disorganized way.
02 - Discovery
Informal conversations with pet owners at the hackathon revealed two patterns:
Information relevance depends on the animal
Most owners didn't know all of their pet's details
Zero friction as a product goal
Everything optional except the pet's name and species. Each owner knows what matters to share, whether it's weight, medication or walks.
03 - Pivot
With 3 hours left, we discussed the idea with event mentors. Wagner (ex-500 Startups) and Marcelo (ex-Y Combinator) were direct:
"You're trying to convince the owner to convince the pet sitter."
The end user was already the pet sitter and focusing on them would allow us to scale. An owner has one pet sitter. A pet sitter has countless owners.
We adapted quickly since the onboarding flow didn't need to be rebuilt, only expanded.
04 - Building
We positioned Resend as the core of the value proposition
Pet sitter: no more answering 200 owners on WhatsApp. Marks a task and the email replies for them. Looks more professional, attracts more demand.
Owner: no need to check in. Gets a notification, opens the email, stays informed and at ease.
05 - Pitch e results
With only 2 minutes we went straight to the problem and the live app as the solution.
We won by showing value delivery and a fully working application. (Ian went home before the results )
06 - Conclusions
Learnings
Zero friction as part of the value proposition
Talking to pet owners made all the difference. Every step became a question. Login for the owner? Friction. Mandatory photo? Friction. Required fields? Friction.
Pivot without discarding
Keeping the product's core allowed us to improve it without throwing away what had been built. The goal remains informing sitters about pets, but now in a scalable way with more value delivery.
What I'd do differently
Factor technical challenges into the schedule. The Replit-Resend integration had issues that consumed time meant for polish and double checks.
Next steps
Validate with real pet sitters and owners, refine MVP with prize credits, go-to-market.
