HAPO connects dog owners in the same neighbourhood so they can cover each other for walks and sitting. The hard problem was never the software, it was the trust, so the whole product is built around it: distance-filtered search on a map, messaging that keeps numbers private, reviews, and safety rules published before anyone meets.
- Status
- Live
- Role
- Design and build
- Live site
- helpapetout.com (opens in a new tab)
What it proves
Authentication written from scratch, and a trust problem solved in the design: numbers stay private, real positions are never exposed, and the rules were published before anyone met.
OutcomeOwners cover each other instead of paying for it.
HAPO, as it is today
Full-page captures of the live site, 1 September 2026. Opens in a new tab.
What HAPO does
Local dog owners exchange pet care favours with each other, for free: no commissions and no bookings.
Joining is a four-step path the home page walks through: create your profile, browse the directory, connect and chat, then meet and build trust.
An interactive map and directory of owners in your neighbourhood, filtered by distance and preferences.
Messages stay on the site, one to one or in a neighbourhood chat for your postcode, so nobody has to hand out a phone number to ask a question.
Safety guidelines are published as a page of their own, alongside the terms of service and the privacy policy.
A help centre and a contact page for members who need a hand.
Inside the HAPO build
Where it started
Dog owners in the same street will happily cover each other for a walk. The barrier is not scheduling, it is handing a stranger your keys and your dog, and swapping phone numbers before you have met is exactly what stops people signing up. Every existing option treated this as a marketplace problem and answered it with listings and payments. It is not a marketplace problem. It is a trust problem, and trust is a design decision, not a feature you bolt on afterwards.
Keeping addresses private
Anything that shows neighbours to each other has to publish location without publishing where people live, and a map pin on a house is an address. So no real position is ever sent to the browser. An admin draws an area, and each member is placed at a random point inside it, generated once and stored, not recalculated per request. Recalculating would have been the obvious way to do it and would have leaked the true position: request the same profile enough times and the average of the scattered points converges on the real one. Distance filtering runs server side against the true coordinates, so search stays accurate while the client only ever receives the decoy.
Authentication, written rather than installed
PHP 8 and MySQL with no framework, and auth built from scratch: password hashing, sessions, email verification, resets and rate limiting. Writing it was the point. On a site whose whole proposition is that strangers can trust each other, the sign-up path is the product, and it needed to behave exactly as designed rather than as a plugin's defaults happened to.
Messaging that holds numbers back
Conversations happen in the app, so no one has to give out a phone number to ask a question. Numbers get shared when two people decide to share them, which is usually after a walk has already been arranged. That single ordering is what makes the first contact possible at all.
Reviews and rules as the trust signal
Reviews are attached to completed arrangements rather than left open, so the rating means something. The community rules and the moderation behind them were written and published before the first members joined, not added in response to a problem, because rules that arrive after an incident read as damage control and rules that are already there read as a standard.
What it has become
Today the home page walks a new owner through four steps: create your profile, browse the directory, connect and chat, then meet and build trust. That order is the whole argument of the product, and it is the one I set out with. Around it sit the pages a site like this has to have before anyone meets: safety guidelines, a help centre, terms and a privacy policy. The pitch on the front is still the plain one: no commissions, no bookings, just dog owners covering each other.
The stack behind it
The tools behind HAPO. Everything I build with is on the work page.
- PHPLanguage
- TailwindStyling
- MySQLDatabase
- APIsIntegration