It all started with one very particular cat.

This is Athos. He was born in 2016, and in every way that matters he runs the house he lives in with his mom, Julie, and his dad, Mike (that's the two of us who built PounceMatch).

Athos does not do love at first sight. New people get a slow, suspicious once-over first, strictly on his terms, in a calm room, no sudden moves. Pass inspection and you're his for life. Toys get the exact same interview process, except somehow worse. Some he's obsessed with for one glorious week and then abandons like they personally betrayed him. Some he loses his mind over the second the packaging crinkles.

We spent years, genuinely years, buying toy after toy trying to crack the code on what Athos actually wanted, instead of whatever was popular or showed up first in a search. Eventually we noticed it was never really about the toy itself. It was about the traits underneath it: how it moved, what it felt like, whether it made noise, whether he had to hunt it down or it came to him.

PounceMatch is that realization turned into something you can actually use, so you don't have to spend years being personally rejected by mice on your cat's behalf. Every recommendation is built the same way we finally figured Athos out: by paying attention to the toys your own cat already loves, ignores, or destroys, and finding the pattern hiding underneath it.