My first dog was a handful, so I built the training app of my dreams. It became a $20 million business — and we’re still growing.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Natalia Shahmetova, the founder of Woofz by nove8. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I have a beagle. And if you know the breed, you know they can be little monsters.

When we got our dog, she was so cute, but literally ate all my socks and even my underwear. It was honestly a really horrible experience — not the dream of playtime and cuddly naps you think of when you think of puppies.

As a millennial, I saw the trend that people my age prefer to get dogs instead of having kids, and I realized that dozens of people must have the same problems as I did.

I’d previously worked in marketing for the app developer Gismart, so I knew that there are dozens, even hundreds, of apps for people’s fitness, from yoga to gym trackers and different kinds of home workout tutorials. But when I started this project, almost nobody had released apps for dog owners, even though it’s such a huge audience.

I especially felt the gap in learning what to do with your dog and how to train your puppy. You could go to YouTube, go to dog training school, or read a book, but the whole process felt so not modern. So it felt like a natural fit to build my own app.

We’re available in the App Store and Google Play Store worldwide and have been downloaded more than 22 million times. Our content is translated into 10 languages, and we have around 120,000 active subscribers.

Woofz is fully bootstrapped and quadrupling in revenue annually — we reported $20 million in annual revenue for the last year.

And we have a team of about 70 employees, part-time and full-time, including a group of trainers who help us develop our programs — all positive reinforcement to help with everything from separation anxiety to basic manners.

We just celebrated our sixth anniversary.

Obviously, it wasn’t all smooth sailing. I’m not a unicorn. In the first two years of our business, I met a lot of challenges: layoffs, the wrong budget, and wrong predictions in our business analytics. It was a really tough time for me.

It’s so important to find the right partners and investors in the very beginning and build the right relationships — you can’t know everything, so it’s really hard to start a business and to make it big without somebody who knows something about marketing, about budgets, about what you don’t know. You have to build very healthy surroundings to grow as a CEO.

It was a learning curve, especially as a female founder. I’ve had to learn to really believe in myself and my product, because otherwise, who would? While I’ve never experienced harassment or anything particularly terrible like that, I’ve been ignored in meetings, with investors directing all questions toward the men in the room.

But in my experience, when you show real traction and growth as a female founder, no one can question or manipulate you.

The key was that I really believed in my idea in this niche and what we’re doing with our app. Now, I see that the challenges were just a big part of our growth.

I’m sure there will be more lessons as we continue to expand — we’re planning to launch new features soon to monitor your dog’s health — but I’m not afraid.

Wanting to do the best for my dog, I created a product that is helping millions of others do the same. My goal was to help people understand their dogs better, and the financials that followed have enabled the business to thrive.

Do you have a unique side hustle or small business, or has your side hustle replaced your full-time job? Email Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert at [email protected].

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