Marta opened a laptop on her clinic's front desk and turned the screen toward me. The interface wasn't QVET. It wasn't Panther. It wasn't anything I had researched the week before. She had paid a developer to build it from scratch, because nothing on the market did what she needed.
I'm a software engineer based in Guadalajara, and for the last two sprints I've been trying to validate a B2B SaaS for independent veterinary clinics, one to three doctors, sometimes with a groomer in the back, sometimes with a small hospital, often all three under one roof. I started with cold DMs on Instagram and WhatsApp. Seven sent, zero answered. So I switched to physical visits: walk in, ask to speak to the owner or lead vet for ten minutes, no pitch because I have nothing to pitch. In two weeks I visited 16 clinics, had 8 to 10 real conversations, and 3 vets agreed to follow-up calls. My starting hypothesis was that small clinics handle appointment reminders manually and that a meaningful fraction of returning patients miss their scheduled date. That turned out to be partially right, Marta's clinic runs at a 20% cancellation rate, the only hard no-show number i have, but it was wrong about which problem the software should solve first.
Marta runs the clinic with one doctor (herself), a receptionist, and a manager who handles operations. She tried QVET, the Spanish veterinary PIMS that has become dominant in Latin American chains and hospitals and abandoned it. Then she paid a developer to build her own system. When I asked her why, she gave four reasons specific enough that I want to write them down before I forget them.
First, commissions. In Mexico, when a vet treats a patient, that vet often earns a commission paid out at the end of the month or end of a cycle. The clinic's payroll model depends on it. QVET has no native concept of per-doctor commissions because the European labor structure doesn't work that way. Marta would have had to track them in a separate spreadsheet, which defeated the point of the software.
Second, the payment flow is reversed. The systems assume you generate the invoice before the service and cancel or amend it if the procedure doesn't happen. In Mexico the norm is the opposite perform the service first, charge after. Marta said the QVET flow felt backwards from day one and her staff kept making mistakes.
Third, no integration across clinic, grooming, and hospital. Mexican vet operations frequently combine these under one roof and customers care about a unified record per pet. QVET treats them as separate verticals.
Fourth, legal consent. Each procedure requires the animal's owner to sign consent before it happens. Marta's custom system automates the signature flow. QVET, in her experience, did not.
Marta was the most articulate case, but she wasn't an outlier. Three of the other clinics had also paid for software QVET, Panther, or something one owner called "Cubet" (which I couldn't verify as a real product; my best guess is QVET misremembered) and abandoned it within months or years. The complaints repeated: too many features they didn't need, reminder emails that bounced because their clients live on WhatsApp and don't read email, inventory entry one item at a time. One clinic had paid 6,000 MXN a year for the Spanish PIMS before quitting. Another had paid 20,000 MXN upfront for a Panther license, used it for one month, and abandoned it because everything was stored in uppercase and there was no way to search. They went back to Excel. One vet said it plainly: "I'd rather pay more once than keep paying monthly. I want the software to be mine."
Two products dominate this segment. QVET, a Spanish cloud SaaS, owns the chains and the larger clinics and Panther. Both miss the same gap: small clinics with one to three doctors, mixed services under one roof, commission-based labor. The clinics sophisticated enough to notice the gap solve it by building custom internal systems. Someone in the segment spent real money to build the product because no one would sell it to them. I don't know what a stronger validation signal looks like at N=16.
I'm not building anything yet. I want to get more vets before I commit to a wedge what exactly to start with, what to leave out, whether the right entry point is the commission engine, the payment flow, or something I haven't seen yet. The question I find more interesting right now isn't even about vets. It's this: if you're building B2B SaaS for non-US markets, where else have you seen this gap dominant international software at the top, local desktop software at the bottom, and a layer of small operators in the middle that nobody has actually built for?
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