Building India's missing layer between injured animals and willing helpers

India is home to over 62 million stray dogs and a vast population of stray cats, birds, and urban wildlife. When someone encounters an injured animal, they typically want to help. Most of the time, they cannot — not because help does not exist, but because it cannot be found quickly enough.

Three specific barriers make this problem persistent:

1. No single point of discovery: There is no platform that consolidates volunteers willing to treat strays, that is also easily discoverable by first call responders.

2. Rescue organisations have no visibility: Their contact details are scattered across social media pages, outdated websites, and closed WhatsApp groups. These channels fail completely in an emergency.

3. No consolidated database of volunteer vets: They have no way of showcasing their willingness and availability to help.

Paws on Call is a location-first web application that eliminates all three barriers in a single, no-login experience. A person who finds an injured animal opens the app, describes what they found, and shares their location — the platform immediately returns a sorted list of the nearest volunteer veterinarians and rescue organisations, with phone numbers they can call directly.

On the other side, vets and rescue organisations register once through a short form. Their pincode is converted to coordinates, their listing goes live immediately, and they become discoverable to anyone who submits a report near them. No approval queue, no ongoing maintenance — register and be found.

The entire system runs on free, open-source tools: Next.js for the application, Supabase for the database, Nominatim for geocoding, and Leaflet for maps. This MVP product was designed to be simple enough to enable user adoption and robust enough to demonstrate real product thinking end to end.

User Personas

Priya - The Animal Finder

Defines success as facilitating real help quickly

Needs immediate access to help- their address and contact during high-stress situations
Will abandon the flow if friction is introduced
Uses mobile-first browsing patterns on Android devices
Expects a lightweight experience with minimal inputs

Dr. Sneha - Volunteer Vet

Success = Connected to nearby rescue outreach requests

Is willing to treat strays and volunteer time and efforts
Wants to make her willingness to help publicly discoverable
Prefers a one-time, low-effort onboarding process
Expects location-based discoverability of her clinic

Raj - Rescue Org Member

Success = Increased inbound rescue requests through the platform

Manages high-volume rescue coordination with limited resources
Needs emergency discoverability beyond fragmented social channels
Needs to specify which animal types her organisation handles

Approach

The product was built around a single constraint: emergency users should be able to reach help with the least possible friction.Instead of optimizing for feature breadth, the MVP prioritized speed-to-help, anonymous usage, and operational simplicity. Features were sequenced based on behavioural urgency, implementation complexity, and real-world usability.

LINK

MVP Specs before Code

Before any development began, a detailed Product Requirements Document was written covering user personas, all user flows, page structures, data models, matching logic and explicit out-of-scope items. The PRD served a dual purpose. It was the product specification and the primary input for Cursor to build the application.

AI-assisted Product Development

The process became less about generating code and more about continuously validating technical decisions: evaluating geolocation reliability, debugging geocoding failures, configuring anonymous database access safely, and balancing simplicity against long-term scalability.The result was not just a shipped MVP, but a working exploration of how AI tooling changes the speed and ownership.

Constraints defined the architecture

User behaviour research consistently shows that people in high-urgency contexts abandon digital experiences the moment they encounter friction. This led to the product's defining constraint: the entire experience for animal finders must work without any form of authentication or login. No user profiles meant no users table. No sessions meant stateless API calls. No tokens meant database security had to be configured for anonymous access. The report form was capped at three fields. Results appeared immediately.

Matching logic simple and replaceable

When a finder submits a report, their coordinates are captured through the browser's geolocation API. If the user declines location access, they can enter a pincode, which is converted to coordinates using Nominatim, a free geocoding service built on OpenStreetMap. The application then retrieves all active veterinarians and rescue organisations from the database, calculates the straight-line distance from the finder to each one using the Haversine formula, sorts the results by proximity, and returns the nearest ten of each. There is no real-time availability matching, and no filtering by animal type. These are deliberate exclusions since everything beyond the MVP is future scope.

Explore

Tech Stack

Next.js 14

Framework that powers the app and handles both the frontend and backend

TypeScript

Adds type safety so code errors are caught before the app runs

Tailwind CSS

Utility-first CSS framework that makes styling fast and mobile-friendly

Supabase

Database that stores all vets, rescue orgs, and reports

Nominatim

Converts a pincode into map coordinates, completely free

Leaflet + OpenStreetMap

Rendering-free, open-source alternative to Google Maps

Vercel

Hosts and deploys the app

React Hook Form + Zod

Handles form inputs and validates data before it's submitted

Future Scope

These features were out of scope for the MVP - not because they don't matter, but because the first version needed to prove the core value before adding complexity. V2 focuses on closing the loop. V3 focuses on scale.

Scaling 1-10

Connect to public databases for vet and rescue orgs - connect via APIs to available databases of of their contact information like JustDial.com
Vet & rescue org login portal - let registered vets and orgs manage their listings
Automated notifications - alert nearby vets and rescue orgs via email or SMS the moment a report is submitted near them. A better way of notifying would also be through Whatsapp given India's widespread penetration of the product.
Animal type filtering and other sorting - let finders filter results by the specific species they found
Admin dashboard - review new registrations, flag fraudulent listings, and track report volume by city to aid marketing efforts and urge more people to improve usage.
Aimed partnership with NGOs - partner with government and verified NGOs to enable product adoption.

Scaling 10-100

Real-time availability - let vets signal live availability and accept or decline incoming help requests
"Still need help?" prompt - if no one is called within 5 minutes, surface a nudge with alternative contacts
Distance unit toggle - switch between km and approximate travel time based on traffic
Multilingual support - Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Bengali, and more to reach non-English speaking users
Vet verification - credential checks before listings go live to build trust with finders
Native mobile app - React Native build for push notifications, better geolocation, and offline access
Report photo upload - let finders attach a photo of the injured animal to help vets prepar
Low-connectivity mode - cache the nearest 10 helpers locally for areas with poor signal
Impact reporting - track how many animals were helped, response times, and city-wise coverage