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Why MaxPet exists

Hi — I'm Jay, and MaxPet exists because of one small dog called Max.

In March 2022, my wife and I were newly married, living in an apartment in Manchester city centre, and we wanted to grow our family. What we really wanted was a dog. By May we'd found him: a Havamalt — a Havanese crossed with a Maltese — so small he fit in the palm of one hand.

We spent the next few weeks buying everything a puppy could possibly need, and bickering about what to call him.

My wife wanted Max.
I wanted Brian.
At the end of May 2022, we brought Max home.
(I lost the row.)

The day I couldn't answer three questions

In early 2023, Max had an upset tummy — as most puppies do at some point. We video-called the vet, who gave us some at-home care advice and said to come in if it continued. The next day, to our horror, Max had an accident in the hallway. It wasn't the accident that frightened us — it was that it was entirely jelly and blood.

We rushed him to the vet hospital as fast as we could, blindly panicking that we'd done something wrong. Face to face with the vet, he asked me three simple questions:

I completely checked out. I couldn't answer a single one. I had no idea. I felt ashamed, guilty, and like an awful dog owner for not knowing the most basic things about the animal I loved.

Max was diagnosed with colitis and was back to his happy self within a few weeks. But leaving that hospital, I turned to my wife and said I would never let Max down like that again. If a vet ever asked me a question about him, I would know the answer.

Turning worry into data

I'm Autistic and I have ADHD, and when I care about something, I don't do it by halves — I go all the way in. So I started logging everything Max did. No detail was too small. The trouble was that it lived everywhere at once: scraps of paper, spreadsheets, texts to my wife. It was thorough, and it was a complete mess.

The same instinct sent me deep into the science. I spent hundreds of hours reading peer-reviewed veterinary studies, nutrition research and body-composition papers — the kind of evidence that usually never makes it out of a journal and into the hands of the people actually caring for the animal. I wanted to understand not just what Max was doing, but what it meant.

So I built somewhere to keep it all. With no background in coding or web development whatsoever, I cobbled together a website on a free site builder. It was clunky, and wrestling all that scattered data into it was a nightmare — but it worked. From then on I printed everything out and took it to every appointment. No vet would ever have to drag the answers out of me again.

“This would help all my patients”

That carried on until early 2026, when Max's vet said something that changed everything: all the data I'd been keeping on Max would be genuinely useful to him — if he had it for every patient. It had honestly never occurred to me that other owners were sitting in that same chair I'd been in, unable to answer three simple questions about a pet they adored.

My first reaction was that it felt like far too big a task. I wasn't a developer; the most I'd ever built was a fiddly website for my own dog. But I couldn't let the idea go. I kept thinking about all the animals who'd be better off if their vet could see a clear baseline — who this pet normally is — instead of piecing it together from an owner who's frightened and upset.

In early July 2026, I decided it was simply too important not to do. I went through a lot of names (BrainPet came a close second — I really need to let that go), but it had to have Max in it. And so MaxPet was born.

It's been a long road, and one I'm genuinely proud to have walked. I never imagined this would be my job — but it is now, and I'd love for you to join us, so that together we can improve pet health across the UK.

— Jay
Founder & Max's Daddy
MaxPet