What’s the story behind AgiNotes?

Ten years ago I was living a normal Finnish family life with small kids. Then I took a sheltie puppy called Hippu. Hippu was meant to be an easy little doggie you could take on quiet walks and with which you could sit on the couch watching movies. Well, he wasn't. Instead he was, and still is, a very active, challenging and fun little creature. One thing lead to another and agility sneaked into my life and slowly filled it. My competitiveness also found a home on the agility field.

Too many unsolved problems in dog agility

Too much training - without a clear direction

In 2016, I started to realize how fast the sport was evolving and noticed how much people trained to keep up with the sport. However, the amount of training didn’t always seem to correlate with the results: the training lacked clear plans and direction.

The norm seemed to be that handlers simply drove to the hall, perhaps had some vague idea of what they would train, and then trained it or whatever sequence was set up in the hall.

In these, not so rare, instances the physique of the dogs was unnecessarily strained and the handlers got demotivated by not getting to their goals. This didn’t seem ideal at all.

The number of skills the sport required didn’t match

1. the time people had for training

2. how they prepared their training sessions

3. how many repetitions their dogs could take

Tracking competition results was guesswork

I also wondered why it was so hard to track your progress in agility. And you really need clarity if you want to develop.

People, including myself, made estimations on, for instance, how their performance had developed and what caused the problems they had: “I think that we’ve been performing better this season”, or “I think he’s not as fast as he normally is, perhaps something is wrong”.

Those who were very active wrote down their results and used excel sheets to get an idea of their clean run percentages and average speed in competitions. I wrote down mine in a bullet journal but it just felt so hard when I didn’t really want to do any calculations. I really felt that this should be easier. After all, I also had other things going on in my life besides agility.

Helping people get better results and enjoy the sport even more

I started to think that what if there was a tracking system that would not only save time and energy with not having to guess or calculate, but would also help direct all that energy into the things that can take your performance to the next level. What if there was a tool that would help people focus on the right things, get better results and enjoy the sport even more?

I started sketching a system that would make things easier for agility handlers and soon noticed that I was spending all my (and my husband’s and friends') free time with the plans. I have to say, the path hasn't been an easy one, but the idea has been so inspiring right from the start, and the feedback from other agility competitors so good, that it carried us through the difficulties. Now the service is up and running and serving agility handlers in over 30 countries! And there’s a long list of new features waiting to be developed ;)

We really want to help you reach your goals and succeed without compromising your dog’s health. And on a higher level, we aim at improving the quality of agility training and competition performance - and make the sport more enjoyable and motivating for everyone, both the handlers and the dogs!

Join us now and use the power of data in your training!

Mari / AgiNotes