Sanchit Bareja’s Post

We had our first spammy user that tried to break our platform ‼ Steven and I knew this day would come. We were aware of the vulnerabilities and were patiently waiting for them to be exploited. Well that finally happened last month. 🐶 Try 1: A business joined WoofyClub and started spamming nearby users with promotional messages. Fortunately, we keep a close eye on platform activity and were able to shut them down before they reached their third victim. Try 2: Undeterred, they returned a week later and found a new loophole. This time we shut them down almost right away. But their persistence was almost admirable! Try 3: They managed to break our platform yet again, and I couldn't help but feel a twinge of pride that someone valued our platform enough to put in so much effort. Thanks to their registration details, we had their phone number on hand. A quick call explained they were in violation of our terms of service, buying us time to close the loophole for good. While I'm glad they're gone for now, I'm also genuinely excited about their potential return—once we're ready to welcome them back in a way that benefits our entire community 😀 There was clearly enough value for them to go to such lengths! P.S. this is how i imagine black hat hackers on the other side of the network 😂

🇺🇸 Living the American Dream. I've been getting a lot of questions from fellow founders, investors and friends lately about what it's REALLY like to be a founder. Here's the raw truth: 🎢 It feels like a game: I won't lie, it's a rollercoaster of emotions. But the longer I do this, the more it feels like I’m in a game where I get to keep trying until I reach the next level. Brush aside “failure” and restart. 🥰 Our users fuel our fire: Seriously, the love and support we get from our community is what keeps us going. When we see how much our product helps people, and when we get unsolicited positive feedback, it makes everything worth it and is a turbo-boost of motivation. Lastly, I’m so glad to be building a company here where the spirit of entrepreneurship thrives. Happy Independence Day! 🎆

What if your next breakthrough idea came from a conversation with another founder on a hiking trail? Sometimes, talking to another founder and learning from their experiences unlocks a new way to solve an existing problem we face. If you're a founder/early employee with a dog 🐶, join me and a few other entrepreneurial dog parents on ✨ Saturday, June 29th, 10am ✨ for a hike in Berkeley. We'll hit the trails, let our dogs socialize, and enjoy some much-needed fresh air and conversation. It doesn't matter what you’re working on – B2C, B2B, AI, hardware, or anything else under the sun. 💡 We can all learn from each other. Bonus: We'll grab coffee afterward ☕🍔 Interested? Comment "Furriend" below, and I'll DM you the RSVP link with the exact location. This will be a fairly small group so we all are able to chat with one another!

Going from v0 -> v3 I’m almost embarrassed to share these screenshots 😭 “We’re going to make such a bad first impression” I thought but I also knew I wanted to get feedback early so I pushed my feelings aside and released it. I sent the MVP to our early users and within minutes, I get a response I never expected “This is amazing!” (See screenshot below) The next few days, I consistently heard the same feedback and I realized I was overplaying the negative narrative in my head. That didn’t mean we had the perfect product, but we did solve a core problem very early and iterated to reduce friction. Fast forward a few months, we deprecated the website, launched an app and continued iterating! Now users are usually “Sanchit, the app is super intuitive but can you add filter XYZ?” I’m no longer embarrassed and now it feels like pushing on the cutting edge versus playing catch-up with UI/UX standards. My biggest lesson was to release and get feedback early and quickly. Every time Steven and I hear something taking over two weeks to release, we cut it down and question the core value we need to test. We reduce scope and push with a smaller version before building out our grand vision. Keep building, keep hustling 💪

The same time last year, Steven and I were gearing up to go full-time into WoofyClub. This week, we were reminiscing and looking back at how far we’ve come the last 12 months. - 30x Engagement (see chart below) - 7x Word of Mouth in the last 6 months (since we started measuring it consistently) How’d we do it? 1. Talked to users. A few a week if not a few a day. We had a ton of awkward conversations with many long pauses. But we always learnt a ton. We met some of our users in person as well! 2. Iterated like crazy. The vision is clear but we’re flexible on details. I looked at my first sketch for how WoofyClub would look like as an app and I laughed at how I got some basic design choices completely wrong. In fact, I look at the app we had 12 months ago and I was frankly embarrassed by it. Quoting Reid Hoffman, if you’re not embarrassed by your first version, you’ve launched too late As they say, the days are long but the years are short. I’m sure we’ll be back next June with dizzying growth!

Holy moly! This just made my day! Many dog parents tell us their stories and it inspires us to keep building and growing. If you've a pup and are thinking about traveling without them in the next few months, leave a comment (+1) and I'll reach out to you with a special promo code to give us a try 🐶

Moments like these that give us entrepreneurs fuel to stick to our guns and keep charging forward! Steven and I are always critical of our ourselves but we need to be reminded that if we found a 100+ (way more!) users that are ardently LOVE us, we can find the next billion 😁

Which social platform did you run to this morning? My heart skipped a beat when I was logged out of facebook and my password kept failing. I googled around and found on X that I wasn’t alone. I checked my last tweet on X and it was almost 8 years ago. I wonder which platforms won today from the episode this morning and if it would point to future winners or just a short term boost?