TellTail was a marketplace connecting dog breeders and buyers, with its own payments layer. I was Head of Product and Art Director, and owned the product design, the design system and the brand.

The structural problem is that both sides want to leave. A buyer has heard about puppy mills and deposits paid for dogs that never existed. A breeder has been messaged by fifty people who were never going to buy anything. The natural instinct for both is to swap numbers, meet in person and settle in cash — which is precisely the moment people get defrauded, and the moment the marketplace earns nothing.

So the work was never matching. It was making the platform the obviously better choice for each side separately, without policing either of them.

The breed encyclopedia set the standard in public — health screening, genetic testing, breeding frequency, conformation — teaching buyers how to judge a breeder. That made verification something worth having rather than a hoop to jump through. Verification then sat at the top of the compatibility scale alongside OK, GOOD and GREAT, so an unverified lead read as a worse lead rather than an unfinished chore. And contact details stayed masked until both parties were verified, which meant the mechanism protecting our revenue was the same one protecting the buyer from a scammer. Those interests usually conflict. Here they didn't.

Payments were the hard part, because cash is a good product: instant, free and familiar. So the 3.5% fee went to the buyer rather than the breeder — the breeder receives their full asking price — funds landed the same day, and breeders could run deals they'd sourced themselves through our rails. Beating cash meant being faster and free, not merely safer.

Most of the design was states rather than screens. A single match card carried fourteen: new, matched, masked, verification requested, verified, payment requested, deposit paid, expiring, archived, restored. Anyone can design the path where everything works.

TellTail was acquired, and later wound down by the acquirer.