Meet Dayo, the dog who started it all.

Dayo was born in Maine, and we brought him home while we were living in New Hampshire — he was a travel dog from the start. Over his life he put down roots in places like LA, St. Louis, Orlando, and Seattle, and passed through more than 40 states along the way.

Moving that much with a dog means one thing above almost everything else: constantly trying to book him into a new boarding kennel, a new groomer, a new vet, a new day care — usually on short notice, usually somewhere we'd never lived before. Call, wait on hold, explain the situation, get put on a list, hope the hours actually lined up with ours. Repeat it every few months, in a new place, for years.

That's the problem DayO Book set out to fix. Not just “add a booking calendar,” but actually make it easy on both sides — a business that wants to stay booked without a front desk drowning in phone calls, and a customer who just wants to get the appointment on the calendar and get on with their day.

What started as a way to help pet businesses — and people like us, just trying to get a dog seen wherever we happened to be — has grown into the same thing for salons, clinics, studios, and shops that run into the exact same problem: filling capacity, staying booked, and doing it without a second full-time job worth of coordinating.

We lost Dayo to cancer about two years ago. He loved almost nothing more than a new city and a new person to meet, so it feels right that his face ended up on a company built to make it a little easier for people, and the businesses that take care of them, to find each other.