Horse Showing, Simplified: Barnlog Centralizes Horse Show Info with the Exhibitor in Mind

From live show results to decades of result data and complete horse pedigrees, Barnlog keeps you connected to the world of equestrian sport.

Stefan Parker, founder of Barnlog

Stefan Parker doesn’t have the background of the typical horse show exhibitor. The Ocala-based equestrian boasts a far more extensive history in software engineering than he does in the saddle.

In fact, he helped lay some of the earliest foundations in one of the digital world’s most popular equestrian marketing tools: Facebook (Yes, that Facebook).

And while Facebook may have a broader use beyond the equestrian community, Parker has applied the knowledge he gained from that platform to bringing horse show software up to date with the modern age.

The result: Barnlog, an exhibitor-focused mobile app designed to simplify the horse show experience across venues—and even disciplines.

Barnlog is the largest, most comprehensive equestrian database in the world—a place where users can find public information on millions of horses, riders and competitions dating back decades. Consolidating information from a variety of horse show systems, Barnlog also allows users to get real-time schedules and results that can be customized to specific classes and horses.

“As a software engineer first, and as an engineer who really specializes in user experiences and the front-end user interfaces that people interact with, coming to the horse world and seeing what was available in terms of apps or websites for horse information was kind of shocking,” Parker said. “The more I got into it, the more I noticed missing things here, missing things there. I found myself saying, ‘Man, I could do this better.’”

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Engineer-Turned Breeder

Together with his wife Christina, Parker now owns and operates the Ocala-based Coruscant Stables, a 30-acre breeding and training farm specializing in Belgian Warmblood sport horses. The couple met at a California barn where Christina rode and Stefan had begun taking lessons. His introduction to horses was completely organic, after he befriended an equine caretaker at a New Year’s Eve party.

“She took [my best friend and I] riding up in the mountains, and we watched the sunset on horseback over the ocean in California. I thought it was incredible, and then I wanted to learn how to ride,” Parker recalled. “I just googled ‘Where to learn how to ride,’ and I went to a barn and took a lunge line lesson. I ended up meeting Christina at that barn.”

Christina is the Director of the Belgian Warmblood North American District, and Parker received an eye-opening education in researching the backgrounds of horses she scouted for breeding, development, and sales. He quickly learned that the process involved a lot of open website tabs.

“If we got a horse that was originally from Ireland and then imported to Canada, we’d have to go to multiple databases—Showjumping Ireland, then Equestrian Canada, then USEF, and then at the horse show, Showgrounds Live…All that information is so lost and so mixed up that I wanted to find a better way,” Parker said.

“From Facebook, I got a lot of first-hand experience of seeing what it takes to grow a large-scale system. At that time, I think there were 200 million users, and now there are 3 or 4 billion,” he added. “It’s one thing to build something that can work, but if you’re growing quickly, you need to be able to adapt fast and be able to add features on top of features and pivot with the market’s preferences. That experience helped me see how to make a good user-facing product, and I wanted to apply that knowledge to an industry I’m really passionate about—that also has a big gap in infrastructure and capability.”

Exhibitor Focused

Initially, Parker thought about creating a better horse show software, but he realized that most existing systems were already designed for the horse show office and desktop computers. There wasn’t much out there catering specifically to the on-the-go exhibitor.

So he began building out a system that would make life easier for a rider, trainer, groom, or breeder. As Barnlog evolved, Parker established its pillars in rich data archives, information centralization, and a strong front-facing user experience.

“The real problem is the user experience. There’s no way to keep all the information that’s out there, together,” Parker said. “Nobody is really excited to use these show platforms from an exhibitor’s standpoint—if they even know where to look. I want people to be excited to look at Barnlog and get lost in its data and have fun with it.”

Instead of having to go to three different websites to enter a show, get orders of go, and view live timing, Barnlog allows a user to type in a rider, trainer, or horse name and receive all of the data in one place; the app’s rich data archive grows nearly daily as more event platforms are integrated into the program. A rider will see nearly every horse he or she has shown over the course of decades. A trainer will see how many trips out all of his or her students are without needing a direct line to the ingate. Orders of go are automatically populated if they are set by the show. If a trainer checks in at the gate, he or she can enter the selected order, input it into the app once, and it will sync for other users.

The New Horse Show White Board

Put simply, Barnlog has taken the age-old horse show whiteboard and digitized it. Not to mention, it updates changes automatically and syncs it with your entire stable. This provides value to not only riders and trainers, but also industry stakeholders like grooms, research-driven commentators, and even horse show media covering specific riders, horses, or classes at large, multi-arena events.

“Seeing that this sort of ‘forever’ way of doing something on their whiteboard has a new and improved method that requires significantly less time and effort is where I get the most excitement [from trainers],” Parker said.

Parker also hopes to serve the breeder, an often-greatly underserved constituency.

“With a big amount of data, I want to build out insights for stallion owners and breed organizations, so that they can see how their entire breed organization is doing or maybe help them make decisions on marketing their stallions,” Parker said. “’What stallions are doing better in a certain area than others? What breeding farms are having the most success?’ There are decisions you can’t make without any of this data.”

While Barnlog has its roots in the hunter-jumper industry, the app does not discriminate when it comes to disciplines. It is equipped to provide real-time data on nearly every equestrian sport from hunter-jumper to dressage, reining and vaulting.

“These disciplines have specific details to their results. Dressage has all the judges’ positions and scores, and driving will have the cones and the marathon, and endurance has the length and each of the checkpoints and your heart rate at each of those checkpoints,” Parker said. “Barnlog knows about all of that data structure and can display it.”

Barnlog is currently free to download and use from the App Store. To learn more about the application as it continues to grow, visit Barnlog.com.

“I am very proud of the breadth of its features and capabilities, the size of its data and how many things it connects through the complex algorithms I’ve made to bring all the data together,” Parker said. “It’s kind of a single source of truth. I built a foundation that I could add onto really quickly, and I think that’s something that’s very unique to companies in general—but even more unique specifically to the horse industry.”