How BarkIQ launched a platform its biggest breeders run on

BarkIQ’s breeders kept health records and pedigrees in spreadsheets, answered buyers by text, and took deposits through payment apps. Final payments were reconciled by hand at the end of every litter.

Then the two largest breeding programs it was signing made a platform a condition of joining: their own logins, their own staff, and a portal for their buyers. Their next litters set the date. Two agencies had already tried; one ran over budget, the other delivered a prototype that could only handle one breeder at a time.

We spent the first two weeks with BarkIQ’s team and the kennel managers at both programs, mapping every step from waitlist to go-home day. The proposal that came out of it was a fixed price for five milestones, each with a date.

The platform was built for many breeders from the first commit: every program gets its own workspace, staff and permissions, and BarkIQ’s admins see across all of them. Each milestone went up on a staging link for BarkIQ to test before they signed it off.

The platform went live a week before the first litters went home, and both programs signed on. Breeders stopped chasing deposits by text; dogs, records, buyers and payments now sit in one place for everyone.

It now sells for BarkIQ too. The buyer portal is in every demo to new breeders, and the next two moved their whole programs over in their first month.