Behind MouseWatcher: Where We’ve Been and What Comes Next.
Hey, remember us?
If you follow MouseWatcher on Instagram or Facebook, you may have noticed that things have been unusually quiet for a while. We also haven’t been posting here as often with Disney dining news and reviews. We recently shared on socials a little of what has been happening behind the scenes, but carousel slides can only tell so much of the story.
So we thought this was a good time to properly reintroduce ourselves, explain where we’ve been, and share a little about where we hope to go from here.
How MouseWatcher Started
I’ve always been a Disney fan.
When Jeremy and I got married, he took me to Disney World for our honeymoon. I had been before, so I told him we could absolutely go somewhere else if he wanted. But he had never been, and Disney was where he wanted to take me. It wasn’t hard to convince me.
I won’t tell you exactly how long ago that was, but let’s just say it was back in the days before MagicBands, when you could make Disney dining reservations 180 days before your trip.
Fast-forward to 2015.
I was planning another Disney World trip, this time with my best friend, and one night I complained to Jeremy that I could not get a reservation at Be Our Guest. The restaurant had already been open for three years at that point, and reservations were still ridiculously hard to find.
Being the brilliant programmer that he is, Jeremy sat down and, within about an hour, made me a little widget—super official technical term—to help search for an opening.
By the next morning, I had successfully booked multiple reservations.
Obviously, I was thrilled about the reservations. I was also a little blown away that he had listened to me complain about a Disney planning problem and basically solved it overnight. Coders of the world, take note: using your programming skills to solve a problem for your partner is hella romantic.
Once I got over the excitement, I pointed out the obvious: I was definitely not the only person having this problem.
Disney fans had been setting alarms, refreshing reservation pages, and rearranging their lives around hard-to-get dining reservations for years. The fact that Jeremy had been able to build something that helped me so quickly seemed kind of insane.
So I told him he could probably do something with it if he wanted to.
Over the next few years, Jeremy worked on that original little widget in his spare time, developing and refining it into something other people could use. In 2018, MouseWatcher officially launched.
At the time, we were both still working full-time jobs for other companies. We knew from our own Disney trip-planning experience that there was a niche group of people who would find MouseWatcher useful, but we honestly weren’t expecting very much. We mostly hoped it might grow enough to bring in a little extra income that we could save.
For the first couple of years, growth was slow but steady. MouseWatcher paid for itself, covered a few very small-budget ads, and gradually found more Disney people who understood exactly what problem it was trying to solve.
Then the COVID pandemic happened.
Disney World and Disneyland both closed in March 2020. (We weren’t set up to search the international parks yet.) No one knew how long the parks would be closed, what reopening would eventually look like, or when Disney travel would feel remotely normal again.
We assumed MouseWatcher’s brief run was probably over. We could not have predicted how wrong we were.
Walt Disney World reopened in July 2020, and Disneyland followed in April 2021. But both resorts reopened into a very different environment, with capacity restrictions, reduced staffing, and fewer available reservations.
Suddenly, dining reservations that had already been difficult to get became even harder. MouseWatcher sign-ups grew exponentially, seemingly overnight.
By 2021, MouseWatcher had grown enough that Jeremy was able to leave his outside job and work on it full time. In 2022, I was able to do the same.
What began as a little program Jeremy built because I couldn’t get a Be Our Guest reservation had somehow become our full-time business. And somehow, it was still just the two of us.
Yep. It’s Still Just the Two of Us.
Jeremy and I come from very different professional backgrounds, which has turned out to be incredibly useful because running MouseWatcher requires a mix of skills.
Jeremy is, obviously, the technical half.
Before MouseWatcher, he worked in web design and software development across industries ranging from education and marketing to financial management and global shipping logistics. Now, he manages the systems and servers behind MouseWatcher, develops new features, fixes bugs, troubleshoots technical problems, and is constantly optimizing the system to keep alert searches and notifications running as efficiently as possible.
He also has a knack for project management and handles a lot of the general business administration that keeps everything else moving.
I come from the creative side.
My background is in video production, photography, graphic design, and motion graphics. Over the years, I’ve worked in production and post-production on local news, lifestyle television, short films, a ton of commercials, and eventually social media marketing and design.
Which is how I ended up becoming the half of MouseWatcher that goes to Disney parks and eats all the food. A sacrifice I bravely continue to make.
When I’m in the parks, I photograph and film our dining experiences and other Disney content. When I’m not doing that, I plan our social strategy, manage thousands of digital media assets, write our dining reviews and experience posts, edit photos and video, write scripts and social copy, create graphics and animations, and turn all of those pieces into what I hope is useful—and occasionally entertaining—Disney dining content.
We share some responsibilities, particularly customer support, answering emails, and responding to comments and messages.
Over the years the technology has grown. The number of people using MouseWatcher has grown. Our responsibilities have definitely grown.
The size of the team, however, has not. MouseWatcher really is just the two of us.
There isn’t a separate development team, marketing department, social media staff, content team, customer service department, or mysterious group of employees hiding behind the curtain. Fortunately, our skill sets overlap in some places and offset each other almost perfectly in others. I like to call it our serendipitous skill offset.
That two-person setup has worked well for us for years. But it also means that when life hits both of us at the same time, there isn’t another department waiting in the wings to pick up the slack. It’s just Jeremy and me. Most of the time, we like it that way.
Then 2025 Happened…
2025 started with a new adventure: building our dream house.
It was our first time building a house, and we were very excited. We were also completely unaware that building a house is basically having a second full-time job.
There are meetings, decisions, selections, questions, inspections, emails, phone calls, and an astonishing number of things you suddenly discover you have very strong opinions about. Things that had never occupied a single thought in your brain before are suddenly the most important decision you have to make that week.
And that was before the project developed some serious problems.
By the end of 2025, those problems had reached the point where we needed to hire an attorney. We’re still working through that process and trying to find the right contractor to help us finish the house.
Because the situation is ongoing, that’s about as much as we’re going to say publicly about that part of the story. But it has consumed an enormous amount of our time and energy over the last year.
But Wait, There’s More.
Around the same time, because apparently the house situation was not challenging enough, I injured my wrist.
My doctor initially suspected a fracture, even though the X-rays were clear. What followed was about six months of doctor appointments, more X-rays, splints, an inconclusive MRI, cortisone shots, and a lot of waiting for someone to figure out why my wrist still hurt.
In May, I finally had arthroscopic surgery. The surgeon found a central TFCC tear and removed a ganglion cyst while he was in there. Finally, I had an answer.
Unfortunately, recovery did not go according to plan.
I developed another wrist problem during recovery, and now I need a second surgery. So instead of gradually putting this entire chapter behind me, I’m getting ready to start another round of surgery and rehabilitation.
Something Had to Give.
Somewhere in all of this, normal life kept happening too.
And eventually something had to give.
Social media was one of the things Jeremy and I agreed could give.
Since I’m the one who creates MouseWatcher’s content—and suddenly I had only one fully functional hand—it was also one of the more obvious things to put on hold. Creating posts, editing photos and video, designing graphics, writing blog content, and keeping up with social media takes a surprising amount of time even when everything else is going well.
So we made a choice about where our limited time and energy needed to go.
MouseWatcher itself came first.
We focused on keeping the system running, keeping the searches fast and the notifications flowing, and helping customers. We haven’t always answered every email, message, or social comment as quickly as we would like, but when we had to choose between creating another Instagram post and taking care of the service people were actively relying on, the service won.
And Now?
The house still isn’t finished. We’re still working through the legal process and trying to find a new contractor. I’m preparing for another wrist surgery and another round of recovery. And, like everyone else, we still have all the normal parts of life happening at the same time.
Honestly, we’re tired. We’re stressed. We’re burned out.
We don’t know exactly how long it will take to resolve everything that is currently sitting on our collective plate.
But MouseWatcher is still here.
So are we.
Quiet Doesn’t Mean Inactive.
One thing we don’t want our quieter social media presence to suggest is that we’ve stopped thinking about MouseWatcher’s future.
We haven’t.
Jeremy is always working behind the scenes to improve the system, and we still have a long list of ideas for ways we’d like to make MouseWatcher better and more useful.
There are improvements we want to make, additional features we’d like to develop, and eventually, we’d like to bring MouseWatcher to your phone as a downloadable app.
We’re deliberately not attaching timelines or making promises about exactly when any of those things will happen. We have learned enough about unpredictable timelines lately, thank you very much.
But those ideas are still very much alive.
Right now, our priority is continuing to make the MouseWatcher you already use as reliable and useful as possible while we work our way through everything happening behind the scenes. When we’re ready to share more about what comes next, you’ll hear it from us.
Just Two Humans Doing Our Best.
We’re not sharing any of this to make excuses or ask for sympathy.
We just thought you deserved a little context about the two humans behind the service.
MouseWatcher has been part of our lives for eight years, and we’re incredibly grateful for everyone who has trusted something we built to help with their Disney trips, recommended us to friends or clients, sent us their success stories, or simply followed along over the years.
We may be moving a little slower than usual right now.
But we’re still here, helping other Disney-loving foodies find openings for the reservations they want—and still thinking about how to make MouseWatcher better.
Thanks for sticking with us and giving us a little grace while we deal with some extra side quests.
