How Four Teens Raised $868 to Help Lost Pets
Tl;dr: My friends and I created an online lost pet database and app, funded by really kind strangers.
Back in 2015, I had a lot of ideas. I was working on a search engine to replace Google, something that respected the privacy of users. I was working on a social network to do the same to Facebook and Twitter. I was making a website to connect voters with candidates in a federal election. And I was fourteen years old.
One of the ideas that I kept thinking about was to create a website where people could post lost pets and other people could post sightings of those lost pets. If Leroy loses a cat called Becky and Jade sees Becky on the street two days later, she’d just pull out her phone, scroll through the local lost pet listings and see a cat that looks just like the one on the street. She’d tap a Report Sighting button, take a picture of Becky, then continue with her day, with an added feeling of satisfaction and good Samaritan-ism. It would be great.
I voiced my idea to four or five friends, including Stefan C., a really-interested-in-technology-but-not-a-programmer kid. He was thirteen, the others were about the same. While they all scoffed at the idea (mostly because of the number of users it would need), he seemed somewhat interested.
This was in the summer of 2015 and I was just finishing my last year of homeschooling. In September, I was going to start my first year at a somewhat-closer-to-normal high school, a public school a city over called Inquiry Hub. Indeed I was looking forward to it, mostly because Inquiry Hub is branded as the school where students get 50% of their time unstructured to do with as they will, and I saw this as an opportunity to continue work on some of my weird and unlike projects, at the time mostly the search engine.
I spent my summer working on the election project, a hodgepodge of bad code, good/bad design and some cool ideas and would every now and then pop over to my email, and later Google Hangouts, to show off what I was doing excitedly to Stefan, who was beginning to become quite a good designer. He’d politely make some comments and sometimes some mock-ups and try to understand the political-technology lingua franca that I had begun to speak, but in the end it probably bored him half to death until he finally said something to the effect of “yes, that’s very cool, but when are you planning on working on that lost pet database thing?”
Lost pet database. I’d almost forgotten that I’d told him about it! We wondered idly about what we would call it and how it would work and he made some really good mock-ups and some kind of terrible logos. With the election project wrapping up, I began to work on it more and more and even went to the lengths of creating a folder for it on my computer (I’m disordered/kind of weirdly ordered. Creating a folder means I’m going to do something.), but even after half a month of work, we didn’t have a name.
Neither of us were really good at naming things. VoteVancouver, the name of my election project, had been created by a family member. Calling my social network “You” was a stroke of brilliance on my part, though it really didn’t help things (I got into the habit of calling it “Afefo You;” don’t ask where the “Afefo” came from). The short of it was, for whatever reason, Stefan suggested “Find A Lost Pet” and we decided that that was probably the best. (I later found out that domains longer than twelve characters are considered more likely to be spam senders, but by then, we’d already decided on it and had built it with that name.)
By this time, I’d started school at Inquiry Hub and things were going pretty well. I’d gotten some support for my election project from the students and teachers, and when I mentioned that I needed a domain name for my next big project, Mr. Truss, the school’s vice principal, bought it for me: FindALostPet.org.
Okay, got a domain name, got some mock-ups and work had already started on the actual code of the website. Things were going fast! My brother had designed a slick logo for us, a paw print in a location pin, and another student at Inquiry Hub said he would work on the app.
But to launch the project, we would need funding. I’d run my previous projects with funds from my parents ($25 a month), but FindALostPet was going to need a lot more. Storage was the biggest thing, as each posting and sighting had the possibility of up to ten megabytes of images, and storage costs, but on top of that were things like buying an SSL certificate (we later found that Let’s Encrypt would give us one for free), paying for advertising for the project and paying for image recognition, to avoid people posting adult content. With nowhere else to turn, I asked one of my teachers to set up a crowd funding campaign.
We chose Indiegogo to crowd-fund on, mostly because we thought it more likely that people would fund a website there than on Kickstarter. Mr. Truss, the same person who had purchased the domain name, put some money into the campaign, but besides that, nothing else happened. Desperately, I began searching through my email address book for people who might be willing to help, but the email address book of a fourteen-year-old is not a particularly complete thing.
Fortunately for us, Diane Strandberg, a journalist with the local newspaper, wrote an article about the project. Apparently fourteen-year-olds making a thing about lost pets is cute, because within the day, we got several messages from two radio stations that were interested in covering it. We were thrilled.
Brandon, the student who was working on the iOS app, and I were interviewed on CKNW on the 10th of December. Four days later, in very early morning, Stefan and I were interviewed on CBC. In the interim, the Indiegogo campaign had had a few more donations, but these two interviews pushed us over the edge. We went from something like $150 to $800 in just three hours with one generous person donating $300! This was amazing! We had only set our goal to $500, but now we were nearly twice that.
The people that donated to our project were extremely generous and they helped a lot. They included friends and relatives, but they also included strangers that had heard us on the radio, or one person whose only connection to our project was that we were using his companies maps on the website. It’s people like this that make something like FindALostPet possible; good Samaritans will donate time, effort or money to something they believe in. Some people may see the technology behind websites as magic, but it is the donours to free websites like ours that are the true magic.
In July of 2016, after six arduous months of programming, design and writing, we finally released FindALostPet. That was just over two weeks ago.
Anyone who loses a pet can post it on FindALostPet. It’s free, because no one should ever have to pay to get their pets back, and because twenty odd people were kind enough to donate $868 to a project by teenagers.
When you see a lost pet, you can check lost pets nearby to report it. We’ve made this as simple as possible, because though we need people posting lost pets, we need people posting pets they’ve seen and pets they’ve found even more.
It feels good to help. Every lost pet matters to someone.
You can try it out at FindALostPet.org. Let’s make those $868 worthwhile.
