Nobody does, and that's the problem. Buyers arrive at breeders with enthusiasm and misinformation; breeders answer the same questions on repeat with no shared resource to hand off. The gap lives in the space between them.
Buyers have read Reddit threads, watched YouTube, and arrived with fixed ideas about breed temperament, health testing, and what a "good breeder" looks like. For ethical breeders, this means hours of repetitive education per inquiry with no guarantee the buyer retains any of it.
Buyers who've done a lot of research and retained almost none of it. To surface this pattern, I designed and fielded a survey to 50+ ethical breeders through Facebook breeder and owner communities, asking what buyers consistently got wrong, what formats worked, and what they wished every buyer understood before making first contact.
A second breed-specific survey followed, gathering 126 responses (a 203% increase), capturing breed personality, environmental suitability, social needs, and exercise requirements.
Three things buyers consistently get wrong:
- They misread price as a quality signal
- They don't understand what health testing actually involves
- They conflate social media aesthetics with breeding ethics
I surfaced these patterns by processing survey responses in Python, coding open-text answers thematically, and visualising misconceptions as a word cloud.
The breed-specific survey, 126 responses and a 203% lift over wave one, gave enough data to build scenario-based content grounded in real breed variability rather than generalised advice.
You meet them where they already are: on their phone, mid-research, making a decision. I applied the SAM (Successive Approximation Model) iterative design process to build content buyers would actually finish. Analyse, prototype, evaluate, repeat.
I chose Rumie Bytes for three reasons: minimal setup barrier for buyers, easy sharing for breeders, and a mobile-first format aligned with where buyers actually browse. Each module is scenario-based, under ten minutes, and designed to answer one real question a buyer has when they're deep in the consideration phase.
Yes, each module answers one real question in the order buyers actually ask them. Drawing on breeder survey data, persona insights, and Emma's buyer journey, I sequenced four Rumie Bytes modules to match the decision arc from first sticker shock all the way through to pickup day.
Each module is interactive, scenario-based, and shareable via a single link. Breeders can drop the relevant link into any inquiry response. Buyers can work through them in any order, or all four before making first contact.
I converted the first two modules into a Genially interactive demo to prototype a richer, multi-modal learning experience, exploring what a full Puppy Pathways product could look like beyond the Rumie platform.
Yes. Completions grew, learners multiplied, and an unsolicited citation from an industry podcast confirmed the gap was real. Engagement data across all four modules validated the format: buyers finish content when it is short, scenario-based, and directly relevant to a decision they are actively making.
