BY NICOLE DIETZ
Plus every record, every ride, and every reminder, all in one place—meet Equibot and Proper Strides, built by two riders tired of guessing.
I bought two mares within a month of each other last year. One came with a beautifully detailed pre-purchase exam. She also came with a parade of issues the PPE did not catch. That is a story for another day.
Within eight weeks, I had the kind of life only a new horse owner can produce. A whiteboard in the tack room I rewrote every Sunday. A calendar full of farrier and vaccination reminders. Screenshots of texts from my trainer, my vet, and the previous owner. A folder of receipts I was already losing. I run a marketing agency. I am a color-coded-spreadsheet person, which is exactly why it bothered me that nothing I did for the horses stayed organized. And once I paid attention, I realized nobody else’s did either.
Everyone Keeps It In Their Head
My trainer keeps lesson notes in her head. My vet pulls records from a folder in the truck. My farrier has 80 clients in his phone and texts each one the day before he comes out. Everyone has built their own system. Every system works for the person who built it. None of them transfer to anybody else. People run their barns on memory and text messages. It works, but it also forgets things.
Why My Husband Built An App
My husband is the software person in our house. He watched me write the same farrier date onto three surfaces in one week, lose a Coggins the vet just sent over, and text our trainer to ask how today’s lesson was on my chestnut mare. So he built me an app. He builds me apps the way other husbands build raised garden beds. It is just what he does. We tested it on our own barn for months, and everyone we showed it to wanted the same thing: to stop being the one holding all the information in their head. So we kept building.
Then Came Equibot
The real reason we built this part was simpler, and more frustrating, than the rest. One of my mares had a string of issues nobody could pin down, and when you are in that situation, you run out of good places to turn fast. The forums are a guessing game—you never know if the person answering actually knows anything, and the advice is never specific to your horse. And you cannot book a vet appointment for every question and wait three weeks for an answer. There is a whole gap in the middle, full of real questions, with nowhere good to put them.
So we built something for the gap. We call it Equibot.
The first time I sent Equibot a photo of a mare’s hock, because I could not tell if the swelling was a thing or not, it came back with a specific answer that referenced her history.
You ask Equibot questions, and you can also send it pictures. Saddle sitting funny? Send a photo. A scrape you cannot decide about, or a pile of manure that looks off? Send those too. Every horse owner has stood over one wondering. Now you can ask and keep the conversation going until you actually understand what is going on.
Equibot draws on a vast body of equine science: veterinary references, biomechanics research, farrier journals, training, nutrition. And because it also knows your horse’s record—her vaccines, her shoeing cycle, her feed, her whole history—the answers are specific to your horse, not generic internet advice. The more you log, the smarter it gets. It does not replace my vet, my farrier, or my trainer, and I am not asking it to. It helps me make better calls in the moments between them, and give those professionals better information when I do call. That is the whole point.
What Equibot Does
Every horse gets a profile holding everything she has ever had done: vaccines, Coggins, farrier dates, vet bills, dental, bodywork, supplements, rides, photos, notes. You can even upload old paper records by photographing them. And it shares: your trainer sees the lesson notes, your vet sees the records before they pull in, and when you sell or hand a horse off, every record goes with it. That last part is the one I am proudest of. If you have ever sold (or purchased) a horse, you know what I mean.
Vets, farriers, bodyworkers, trainers, and equine dentists get the client and appointment tools free—no subscription, no card. The pros are the reason any of this works, and the more of them who are in, the more useful the whole thing becomes for everyone.
For The Rest Of Us
For horse owners, it is free for 14 days. After that, it is a monthly subscription that costs less than a tube of dewormer. To replace what I was doing, you would be paying for two or three different apps—one for rides, one for records, something else for scheduling—and none of them would actually know your horse. Proper Strides is one app. It is more affordable than any of them, and it is the only one that does what all of the others do, in one place.
If you have ever stood in the tack room trying to remember when they were last vaccinated, or which appointment was on which horse, this one is for you.
Plaidcast listeners can skip the waitlist and lock in founding member pricing at properstrides.com/plaid.
Nicole Dietz is the co-founder of Proper Strides, a records app for horse owners and the equine professionals who care for them. She and her husband, Carsten Dietz, built it together: two riders who run a digital marketing and solutions agency by day and manage their own small farm in Florida, two mares included. Proper Strides is what happened when their life with horses met their background in technology. Learn more at properstrides.com.
