During the almost two years we’ve spent building the concept, there have been several times when I almost gave up. But I didn’t and here’s why: I love dog agility. I really do. And I love dogs. And I love competing. And I think most of us would succeed even better if we had more data and more focus. Here’s how the whole idea of AgiNotes started.

I’ve done marketing for over ten years now and I’ve always liked it. However, before I got to use a very powerful marketing tool, Hubspot, I was very frustrated with all the individual tools we used for emails, social media, blogs, etc. Because of these individual tools, the data about what we’d achieved in our work, was scattered in many different places and collecting it was time consuming. In fact, we often settled for guessing what was efficient and how we were doing. So we just ended up doing a little bit of everything, just in case.

When I started dog agility, I faced exactly the same frustration. I was practising 2 to 3 times a week, using massive amounts of money for coaching, but my data was here and there. I made notes in my training diary as well as on the notes app on my phone, and had a training list in the reminders app. My videos were on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, and my competition results were in my photos folder on my phone. Trying to figure out how we were developing seemed like too much work.

I also tried keeping a bullet journal. I created tables for competition results, notes and the coach’s remarks. I really tried to create a system that would make it easier for me to follow how we were developing. With this, I gave up. The data was still in too many places and I never had the bullet journal with me in training sessions or competitions.

Then I got an idea. Just like the marketing tool Hubspot allowed me to focus on essential tasks, gave me the data to know what was essential and helped me reach my goals month after month, what if there was a similar tool for agility? A tool that would help me see the facts and save me from doing guesswork. A tool that would show me the data and help me focus on the right things. A tool that would help me reach my goals.

I began sketching. Soon sketching was all I did when I wasn’t at work, training or competing. The idea consumed me. When I presented it to my friends, they were excited about it, sending me ideas to improve the original plan.

As I already mentioned, there were times when I wanted to give up; when it felt too much to have two jobs and take financial risks to get the application done. Every time, however, someone assured me that we agility people need this kind of tool and I have to continue. And so, here we are now. I truly hope you’ll enjoy what we’ve created and it helps you reach your goals!