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The person behind the app

Jimenez Julien, the developer who builds LeashReport

One developer, one product, and a support inbox that is not a queue in another time zone.

Why a dog walking app, and why this one

I did not grow up in pet care. I got into it sideways, through a neighbor in Toulouse who ran eighteen midday visits a day with two other walkers and a spiral notebook that lived in her coat pocket. She asked me to look at her invoicing, and after two afternoons in the passenger seat I understood that invoicing was the least of it. The thing eating her evenings was the report: twelve owners who all wanted to know how it went, all asking at the same hour, all getting an answer written from memory two hours after the fact.

What struck me is how much of the trade lives in the walker's head and nowhere else. The stool that looked wrong on Tuesday. The gate that only latches if you lift it. The neighbor's boxer who lunges at the fence, so you cross the street at number 41. That knowledge is worth real money, and it evaporates the moment a walker is sick, quits, or simply forgets. Every business I have watched since has the same hole in the same place.

So LeashReport was built backwards from the sidewalk. The first rule was that a walker with a leash in one hand, a poop bag in the other and a phone braced against a forearm should be able to log everything a walk produces without stopping and without typing. That is why the potty log is three fat buttons rather than a form, why photos caption themselves with the time and the cross street, and why the report composes itself while the walk is happening instead of afterwards. The end of a walk should cost one tap, not fifteen minutes at a kitchen table.

The second rule was that the owner is the customer of the report, not the audience for a marketing email. Owners do not want an app. They want a text with a map, two photos and a line saying the dog drank water and both jobs got done. Anything past that is noise, and noise is what makes people stop opening the message.

Experience and expertise

I have been building and shipping small business software since 2015, first as a contractor for service companies in France and then under my own company, MLJ, SASU, which I registered with the Paris commercial court registry in October 2024. My background is web engineering: front end that has to work on a five year old Android handset with one bar of signal, back ends that hold customer records without drama, and the boring discipline of data retention and export.

For this product specifically, I spent time with fourteen walking businesses in the United States and France before writing the first screen, and I keep that going. Twice a year I ride along on a full midday block with a subscribing company, in whatever weather that day gives us. Most of the design decisions in the app come out of those routes: the button sizes came from a walker in Milwaukee wearing winter gloves, the offline recording came from a park loop in Portland with no bars anywhere in the middle mile, and the key return checkbox came from a company that lost a key and spent four hundred dollars on a locksmith and a hard conversation.

I read the pet care forums, I follow state level rules on service business records, and I talk to insurers about what documentation actually helps when a claim gets made. I am not a veterinarian and LeashReport does not give medical advice: the potty log is a record for the owner and their vet to interpret, and the app is careful to say so.

How this product is built and maintained

LeashReport is developed and operated by MLJ, SASU. There is no outsourced support desk. When you write to the address on this page, I read it, and in most cases I answer the same business day. Bugs that stop a report from sending are treated as emergencies, because a report that does not arrive is a client relationship that gets a little thinner.

Editorial standards for this site are simple and I hold myself to them. Every number published here comes from aggregated usage across subscribing accounts or from the businesses quoted, and I do not round in my own favor. Testimonials are printed with the person's name, role, business and city, with their permission, and are never composites. If a figure changes when the next quarter of data lands, the page changes with it. Feature descriptions describe what ships today, never what is on my list for the winter.

On the product side, changes go out in small increments, with a written changelog for subscribers. Customer data is exportable at any time in CSV and PDF, and the export path is tested on the same schedule as the report path, because software you cannot leave is software that has stopped listening. Route traces, photos and potty entries are yours: I do not sell them, share them with advertisers or use them to train models.

Published articles

These nine reports make up The Midday Route, the magazine I write alongside the product, and all of them were published on September 3, 2026.

Contact the author

If something on this site is wrong, unclear or overstated, tell me and I will correct it. If you run a walking business and want to argue with a design decision, that is even better, and it is how most of the good ones got made. Write to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com, or send your route through the demo request form and we will look at it together on a call.

You can also read the legal notice for the full publisher details, the privacy policy for how contact data is handled, and the terms of service for the subscription rules.

Portrait of Jimenez Julien, the developer who builds and maintains LeashReport

Written and maintained by Jimenez Julien. He builds LeashReport at MLJ, SASU, answers support himself and rides along on live routes twice a year. Read more about the author, or write to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com.