Scout
I coordinate 70 volunteers across a regional fawn rescue network in Bavaria. In the 2025 season — using WhatsApp groups and spreadsheets — we flew 175 drone missions, scanned 1,700 hectares, and found 90 fawns. I built Scout to replace that coordination chaos. I wrote more about the operational problems in this blog post.
The Domain
Every spring across Germany, tens of thousands of fawns are killed or maimed by mowing machines. Their survival instinct is to freeze and hide in tall grass — the exact behavior that makes them invisible to a farmer on a tractor. Volunteer drone pilots with thermal cameras can spot them before mowing, but coordinating dozens of fields, pilots, ground crew, and farmers at 4 AM across an entire region is the real bottleneck — not the technology.
I’m not just the developer — I’m a drone pilot myself (30 missions last season) and a coordinator in our county’s rescue network.
Decisions That Shaped the Product
Offline-first was non-negotiable. Missions happen in rural areas at dawn. Cell coverage is spotty. Every critical workflow — accepting a mission, logging a find, marking a field clear — works offline and syncs when connectivity returns.
Minimal UI for 4 AM brains. No one wants to navigate a complex interface before sunrise. Fawn locations are dropped as GPS pins on the drone remote and synced to the ground crew’s companion app automatically. The companion app is just a map with pins to walk to.
Zero-friction onboarding. Volunteers rotate constantly — a first-time helper at 4 AM shouldn’t need to create an account before they can help. Ground crew scan a QR code to join a mission and see the live drone position immediately. They can create an account later if they stick around, but the barrier to showing up and being useful is zero.
Built around the real workflow. The evening before: a farmer submits a field scan request. The system matches available pilots. At dawn, pilots scan with thermal drones and drop pins. Ground crew walks to pins, secures fawns. Farmer gets the all-clear. Every screen maps to a real moment in this process.
Find Out More
Visit the landing page at c200v.com/scout for more details on Scout’s features and the product itself.