Cotl

The idea

No one knows your pet like you do. You know which pill goes in which treat, the noise that sends them under the bed, and the spot on the couch that is theirs. Most of that lives in your head, a few old text threads and a folder of vet paperwork. Your pet can’t explain any of it to the person holding the leash while you’re away.

Cotl (say it like “coddle”) is a pet care platform built on one belief: every pet should be spoken for. It gives you one place to keep what you know about your pet, and a way to hand the right parts of it to the people your pet depends on.

The company began with a harder question from our founder: what happens to my pets if something happens to me? The first version was a planning tool for that someday. The more we listened to pet parents, the clearer it became that the same knowledge goes missing on ordinary days too: a weekend away, a new dog walker, a vet appointment. So Cotl grew from planning for someday into helping with every day.

The name is an acronym. Charlie, Odin, Thor and Loki are four pets who shaped our founder’s life.

Who it’s for

• The pet parent heading out of town. Has a sitter arriving Friday and a head full of instructions. Wants to hand over something better than a four-paragraph text.
• The pet parent with a complicated pet. Medications, fears, a strict routine or a long history. Needs the details to survive the handoff, not only the basics.
• The multi-pet household. Several animals, each with their own needs, plus the things that are true for the whole house.
• The person stepping in. A sitter, walker, family member, daycare or vet. Wants to know what matters for this pet, today, without reading everything.
• The “just in case” planner. Wants the knowledge written down before it is needed, so their pet’s care doesn’t depend on them being reachable.

The product

One living record

Problem: What you know about your pet is scattered. Vet records sit in a folder, routines live in your head, and the sitter instructions are in a text from two years ago. Every trip means rewriting it from memory, and something always gets left out.

Solution: A profile for each pet that holds their health information, daily routines, personality, preferences and the people in their life. You start with the essentials and bring in the records you already have. Cotl then walks you through each area of care, so the things you would forget to mention get captured.

Outcome: One current record for each pet, built up over time instead of rewritten before every trip.

Care Notes for the person and the moment

Problem: A weekend sitter, a new vet and a family member don’t need the same information. Sending everything buries what matters. Sending a quick summary leaves gaps.

Solution: Care Notes. You say who they are for and what the situation is. Cotl points out what is missing or out of date, and you choose what goes in.

Outcome: Each person gets what they need for the job in front of them, and you decide what they see.

Sharing that stays current

Problem: Instructions start going stale the day you send them. The dose changes, the vet changes, and the old copy is still sitting in someone’s inbox.

Solution: Two ways to share. A PDF is a fixed copy, for when that is what you want. A live link always shows the current Care Notes, can be limited to the dates of a visit, and can be switched off at any time. Building the record and downloading PDFs is free. Live links are part of a paid plan that covers the whole household.

Outcome: The person caring for your pet sees what is true now, and their access ends when you say so.

My role

I’m a co-founder of Cotl and I run product. I lead its design and development: what we build, how it works and getting it into people’s hands.

I grew up with dogs, so I’ve never known life without a pet. I use Cotl for my own dog, Pasquale, the same one behind Aye Pasquale. That makes this the rare project where the user research and the rest of my life overlap.

What I’m responsible for

• Product direction. Deciding what we build and in what order, and turning what we hear from pet parents and the people who care for their pets into a roadmap.
• Experience design. The flows a pet parent moves through and the design system that keeps them consistent.
• Engineering. Building and shipping the application itself, from accounts and the pet record through sharing and billing.
• Release and quality. How a change gets from an idea to production: testing, a staged rollout and checking that it works for real people.
• Learning from use. Research with pet parents and product analytics, so decisions rest on what people actually do.

How I work

Cotl is a small team. I work alongside our founder and a few colleagues who lead the company’s vision, community and operations, while product, design and engineering sit with me. That keeps the loop short: a conversation with a pet parent can become a shipped change with no handoff in between.

It is also the clearest case of what I want from technology. The app is not the point. The pet is. If Cotl does its job, it fades into the background and the person holding the leash simply knows what to do.