Have you ever visited a shop or cafe, noticed a resident cat, and then got to thinking, “I wonder how many other businesses have these kind of cats?” Well, there’s now an app for that.
It was about a year ago that Seattle software engineer David Martin launched ShopCats, an app that lets you meet cats virtually or in real life and celebrate the joy of encountering a shop kitty as you are out and about.
The seeds of the app were sown about a decade ago when Martin’s girlfriend was living in San Francisco and regularly stopped into a book shop near her bus stop to pet the resident cat.
“She’d pet the cat for a little while and then catch the bus, and we would joke, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if you knew where all the shop cats in the world live?’” said Martin. “So that was sort of the genesis of the idea.” (Martin’s girlfriend, Nikki Châu, became his wife, and is a designer for the app.)
Martin said he had spent 15 years at his company that offers performance review software, and was looking for a fun project to work on.
“Nobody likes performance reviews, right?” he said. “I spent a lot of time building software that people never really enjoyed using. They just use it because they have to. And I wanted to build something that brought joy to people at a scale.”
Martin said there’s a moment of joy you get when you meet a new animal.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re young or old, what your political views are, none of that stuff matters. The animal is just ready to love on you and you make a new friend. It’s a wonderful feeling,” he said. “And I wanted that feeling to happen a lot more often in the world. That was the motivation behind it.”
How ShopCats Works
When you go to a store and visit a cat, you can check in and create a post to share photos and comments about the visit.
“You can tag the cats, you can create a cat profile, and you can say this cat is cuddly, this cat is affectionate, it’s playful,” said Martin.
Users can search the app for existing cats in the database, or add new ones. As you share visits, you earn badges and awards, such as “pet detective,” Martin said, “if you put up a cat profile because you found the cat.”
Instead of “liking” a post, as you would on Facebook and Instagram, on ShopCats you give “scritches.”
“It’s like you’re scratching a cat,” said Martin. “Because that’s more joyful than clicking ‘like.’”
The app lists cats around the world, and you can find cats by browsing a map, or browse by category, like bookstores, bike shops, or antique stores. You can also browse by city.
“I was doing some statistics once, and I found that Portland has the highest shop cats per capita,” said Martin.
Hunting for Cats
There are about 10,000 cats listed on the app, and Martin said for the most part they were found using artificial intelligence through a piece of software he wrote that scraped the internet for reviews of businesses that mentioned a cat was living there.
“People write reviews, and they’ll mention something like, ‘I found a new bike and they had a cute cat living there.'” Martin said his software scoured the Internet for reviews with similar words and phrases to find the cats.
Martin said he also takes images from Yelp and runs those through some AI and asks the AI if there’s a cat in the photo.
I wanted to build something that brought joy to people.
The way the AI works is it just reads text and assigns a probability as to whether a cat lives there or not,” he said.
Martin said if the probability is high enough—above 99.9%—it doesn’t need to be verified.
But sometimes the probability isn’t high enough.
“If it’s like 93%, I have a manual review process where I’ll actually go through one by one and validate whether or not a cat lives there,” he said.
ShopCat Super Fans
Martin said there are app users who have become super fans.
One of those fans is a geologist who frequently travels to Greenland and Antarctica for her work.
“She’s often away from home and doesn’t get to see her cat and so she uses ShopCats travelling the world to meet cats,” said Martin. “She’s going from place to place to place to get her cat fix, so we found that there have been some interesting users that have really glommed onto it and found it to be part of their life.”
Businesses with shop cats featured on the app are enjoying it as well.
“The business owners get into it, they think it’s a ton of fun,” said Martin. “And I’ve got door stickers that I made.”
The door stickers read “A shop cat lives here” and feature the app mascot, Tarô, a magical purple feline based on a real shop cat.
Martin, who is between cats at the moment, still works a regular “day job” so the app is not his main occupation.
But he is often commenting on user posts and giving lots of scritches.
“It’s a labor of love and an art project, not a business,” he said.