Shepherd Software
Building a Veterinary Startup From Scratch
My phone lit up one night in December 2015.
“I have an idea for an app. Will you design it for me?”
I rolled my eyes at my mom’s text. I had just settled into a new product design job a few months earlier, and she was always coming up with ambitious ideas. Honestly, I wasn’t interested. But this was probably the fifth time she’d asked.
“Ok, I’ll bite. What if I came out around Christmas and we talked about it?”
“Sounds great, can’t wait!”
In January 2016, I started a software company with my mom.
She was an emergency veterinarian running a hospital in Northern Arizona. I was a young designer living in Southern California. Neither of us had any idea what we were getting ourselves into.
The Problem Beneath the App Idea
She was frustrated. Clients would arrive in the middle of the night with sick or injured pets, and she had no access to their records. At 2 a.m. their regular vet was asleep. Even if they weren’t, most hospitals were still running on paper charts or outdated systems.
But as we talked, I realized she wasn’t really pitching me an app. She was pointing to a systemic problem in veterinary medicine.
Records were scattered and unreliable.
Vets were weeks behind on paperwork.
Practices were bleeding money through missed charges.
Work-life balance was nonexistent.
Veterinarians were burning out in a profession already known for having one of the highest suicide rates in the country.
We wanted to change that.
Our motto became clear: Vets deserve joy.
From a Whiteboard to Shepherd
The early days were scrappy. I would drive the eight hours from Southern California to Prescott, Arizona, to sit at my mom’s dining room table. We’d brainstorm on a giant notepad, sketching out what a better system could look like.
One of our first tasks was naming the company. We wanted something different from the dozens of “pet” or “vet” brands crowding the industry. We wanted something rooted in values.
When I wrote Shepherd on the board, we both knew it was right. It captured the idea of guiding and helping, which is what we both cared about most. It spoke to animals, and it reflected our faith. That night, I stayed up late designing a logo. The next day, we registered as a business online. Suddenly it was real.
I mocked up screens in Photoshop and we mulled over the details. What would a medical record need to do to actually make life easier for veterinarians? We carried those designs to a dev shop that specialized in helping startups build MVPs. It was a huge expense, and we were nervous, but passion carried the decision.
Surviving Day One
The MVP was rough. It only supported a single hospital and lacked critical features. But it was just enough to test.
Our first guinea pig was my mom’s practice. She walked in one morning and told the staff, “From now on, we’re using Shepherd.”
My phone rang constantly that day as issues surfaced. I had to listen, deconstruct the problem, and work within the dev team’s constraints to ship fixes. It was chaotic. I was young, newly married, still a full-time student, and now on call for a whole hospital running on my software.
But they survived day one. That was the moment I knew we had something worth building.
Designing for Best Practices
We started with the medical record because it drives everything else in a practice: billing, follow-ups, treatments, prescriptions. Most systems at the time treated records like glorified Word docs. Shepherd was different.
We built the record around SOAP (Subjective, Objective, Assessment, Plan), the gold standard in veterinary medicine. And we made it possible for vets, techs, and front desk staff to all use the record simultaneously.
This wasn’t always an easy sell. Paper felt fast in the moment, but it cost time and money later when records were missing or unreadable. We had to reframe that thinking.
And we had to be opinionated. Customers often asked us for features outside our lane: payroll, timecards, accounting. We said thank you for the suggestions.
Other systems tried to do everything and ended up doing nothing well. Shepherd was built to do one thing exceptionally: get your medical records completed on time.
Scaling With Empathy
We poured resources into conferences, sponsored events, and got our name out in an industry dominated by giants. I personally traveled the country, selling practices, onboarding staff, and troubleshooting in real time.
The sales cycle was long. Switching a hospital’s system is like replacing the engine on a moving car. Sometimes practices quit after a few days. Winning over a practice meant convincing not just the owner, but the entire staff.
Our secret weapon was support. We hired veterinary technicians as account managers and reps, many from my mom’s original hospital. They had lived the pain of switching. They understood the work. We embedded chat support directly into the app and guaranteed a response in under two minutes.
That combination of empathy and focus helped us grow. When we hit 100 practices nationwide, it felt like a turning point. Shepherd wasn’t just a project anymore. It was real.
The Hardest Season
Despite the growth, bootstrapping could only take us so far. By early 2019, we had run out of money. I had pitched to investors countless times without success. My wife was 7 months pregnant with our second child. I felt torn between providing for my family and keeping Shepherd alive.
Then, on March 1, 2019, Shepherd was acquired. On that same day, my son was born.
I signed the acquisition papers while my wife was in labor. Relief, pride, grief, and joy all collided in a single day.
What I’m Proud Of
Shepherd is still alive today with the same DNA we built into it. The motto “Vets deserve joy” still shapes its culture and product. They still hire vet techs for support. They still emphasize SOAP records.
That’s what I’m most proud of. We didn’t compromise our values. Shepherd remains one of the most authentic tools in the industry. I know it sounds cliché to use the word "authentic", but I truly mean that in this case.
Lessons Learned
If I had to do it again, I would go slower in some ways and faster in others. Slower in hiring. Slower in chasing the whole industry at once. Faster in prototyping and validating ideas.
The biggest lesson for me as a design leader is this: empathy is essential, but so is focus. Customers will always ask for more. If you build everything, you end up with nothing that works well. The job is to understand their problems deeply and then deliver a clear, opinionated solution.
Shepherd was my crash course in design leadership. I learned how to hold a vision, how to design with conviction, and how to build something that makes life better for people.
Shepherd taught me that the best products are built when you care enough to fix a real problem and stubborn enough to see it through. It was the hardest, most rewarding chapter of my career so far, and built the foundation for how I approach design leadership today.