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Story time. A few years ago, I sat around after one of our early Southeast Highland Cattle auctions, talking about the sale and asking for feedback on what we could change and do better. Somewhere in that conversation, an idea began to form.
When we first started the auction, I loved that we were providing a service people actually needed. In the beginning, it was small and pretty casual, and there wasn’t much pressure. We provided the venue, brought breeders and buyers together, advertised the cattle, and gave people another way to buy and sell Highlands.
Of course, the bigger the auction got, the more work it brought. There were photos to chase down, information to keep up with, listings to put together, and a million little things that I definitely didn’t think about when we first decided to have a cattle auction. I liked that we had created something useful for people, but I started thinking there had to be an easier way to do some of this.
I was also seeing a lot more cattle being bought and sold online. The problem was you had to know where to look, and you didn’t always know who you were dealing with. I had seen fake listings and stolen photos and heard enough stories about people getting scammed that I kept thinking there should be one place to actually look for Highlands and know more about the person selling them.
I started thinking there had to be a better way. I wanted a place where breeders could sell cattle when they were ready, buyers could actually search for what they wanted, and people had more information about who they were dealing with. I liked what we could provide through a physical auction and started wondering what parts of that could work online.
That idea became CowMatch. This was before every farm seemed to have its own online auction, and there really wasn’t one place I could send someone who asked me where to look for Highland cattle. I wanted to build the place I'd been wishing already existed.
It worked, but eventually I ran into a problem I didn’t really know how to solve. Technology kept moving, the way people sold cattle online kept changing, and individual farms and groups started putting together their own online auctions. I had all kinds of ideas for what I wanted the platform to become, but I didn’t have the technical skills or resources to actually build them.
Then life happened, my attention went elsewhere, and eventually I let it fade away. The website disappeared, the social media went quiet, and I moved on to other things.
The idea never completely left me, though. Over the next few years, I kept watching livestock sales move further online, scams grow more sophisticated, and buyers and sellers run into many of the same problems that made me want to build something in the first place. Every once in a while, I would think about what I would do differently now and what I wish I had known how to build back then.
For years, that was really all it was, an old idea I still believed in but wasn’t sure I would ever do anything with again. Then a few things happened this year that brought the idea back around in a way I never expected, and that’s where part two of this story starts.
