petfeed/PRODUCT.md

Product

Platform

web

Users

Primary audience: dog and cat owners — the core target for messaging, product priority, and design decisions. Every other supported species (birds, horses, rabbits, guinea pigs, hamsters, mice, rats, chinchillas, snakes, lizards, turtles, geckos, spiders, aquariums) is fully first-class in the data model and feature set (own Species/Breed taxonomy, same posting/story/health capabilities) but secondary — a niche audience, not the one design and copy should be optimized around by default.

Situation: pet owners tired of their animal being a supporting prop on a human-first, ad-heavy, trend-driven social feed. They want a calm space that exists only for their pet's life — ordinary daily moments, adoption stories, health milestones — without scrolling past ads or forced lifestyle content to get there.

Product Purpose

PawFeed is a social platform where the pet — not the owner — is the identity: its own profile, posts, followers, DMs, 24h stories, milestones, and health record. The owner manages the account but is never the "user" the platform is about. Exists to give pet owners a space that is only about the animals people love. Success = the pet visibly reads as the star (its own profile, its own social graph), not content buried in a human's feed.

Positioning

The mechanism a neighboring product (an Instagram/TikTok pet account) cannot truthfully copy: the entire social graph — posts, follows, reactions, comments, DMs — is pet-scoped, not owner-scoped, at the data-model level, not just in UI framing. Combined with an explicit no-ads, no-forced-trends, no-lifestyle-noise promise (confirmed founder positioning, see Brand Commitments). A pet account on a human-first platform is still hosted inside that platform's human-centric algorithm and ad model; PawFeed's graph has no owner columns at all.

Operating Context

• Web-first, mobile-responsive — no native apps.
• Short-form video only (Mux-powered), no long-form.
• Pre-launch invite gate currently active (INVITE_REQUIRED); official public launch is 2026-09-01 (stated on the live "Über uns" page as a real, binding date, not a placeholder).
• Species/breed taxonomy is fully data-driven (prisma/seed.ts) — dogs and cats carry the complete official FCI/FIFe breed lists; every other species has its own curated breed list.
• Self-hosted deployment: OpenMediaVault NAS, Docker, 3 load-balanced replicas behind Nginx Proxy Manager — not Vercel, despite next.config.ts output settings suggesting otherwise.
• Legal/privacy-conscious: GDPR data export, health data private by default (shareable only via a tokenized Health Card link), AI-content disclosure requirement on posts/stories, an owner-level "Arachnophobie-Helfer" opt-out that fully excludes spider content from feed/explore/search.
• Content and UI are currently German-first (all live copy); next-intl scaffolding (en/de catalogs) exists with further locales planned post-MVP.

Capabilities and Constraints

• Two-layer identity: Clerk manages owner accounts for auth only; Pet is the app-domain social identity.
• Photos, short-form video, 24h stories (with paw reactions and comments), milestones, pet-to-pet DMs.
• Health tracking: weight logs, vet visits, vaccines, a shareable Health Card.
• Admin/moderation panel gated by a secret path segment plus role (SUPER_ADMIN/MODERATOR).
• Owner-facing insights: a small analytics dashboard per pet (reactions/comments received, top post/story) reachable from the pet's own profile.
• Undecided/open: further locale rollout (ES/IT/FR) has no committed timeline.

Brand Commitments

• Name "PawFeed" — fixed.
• Personal, warm, solo-founder voice — the "Über uns" origin story (a late-2025 night scrolling ad-heavy lifestyle feeds, wanting a space only for animals) is a real, binding founder narrative, not disposable marketing copy; future copy should preserve that first-person, heartfelt register rather than flattening it into generic corporate voice.
• Orange as the core brand color (Tailwind orange-500/600 family) — used consistently for CTAs, active/selected states, badges, and accent elements across the whole product.
• "Paw" motif and terminology, recurring — paw-print iconography, "Paw" as the reaction verb/name, PawRing (story ring), PawBack — this vocabulary is product identity, not incidental naming.
• Launch date 2026-09-01 — real and referenced live on the marketing site; do not treat as a stale/placeholder date.

Evidence on Hand

• Live, real-time public counters (member/pet/sponsor counts) on /ueber-uns, sourced from the database (stats.getPublicStats) — explicitly framed on-page as "keine Marketing-Zahlen" (not marketing numbers). Safe to reference as real evidence; never replace with invented figures.
• No testimonials, case studies, or press exist yet — pre-launch. Do not fabricate any.
• A soft/beta period has been running since 2026-08-10; the official public launch is 2026-09-01.

Product Principles

• The pet is the profile, the owner never is — every feature should route through petId, not ownerId.
• No ads, no forced trends, no algorithmic outrage — the calm, animal-only space is the product, not a growth-phase compromise.
• Dogs and cats are the design/messaging priority; every other supported species stays fully functional and equally dignified in the product, just not the lead audience.
• Health and everyday-life documentation matter as much as social posting — this is a utility for the pet's life, not just a content feed.
• Privacy-conscious by default: health data private unless explicitly shared, GDPR export available, opt-outs (e.g. spider content) respected everywhere content is surfaced.

Accessibility & Inclusion

No product-specific accessibility requirement has been established beyond the general WCAG 2.2 AA practice already followed in this codebase's engineering standards.