The thing that started TopParent wasn’t a gap in the market. It was a sentence I kept hearing from parents, worded differently every time and always meaning the same thing: I know there are a thousand things I could be doing with my child, and I still have no idea what to do right now.
That’s a strange problem, when you sit with it. Nobody was short of ideas. They were short of a decision.
I’d watch a parent open something at half past four, scroll a list of perfectly good activities with a child pulling at their sleeve, and close it again without starting anything. Not because the ideas were bad. Because choosing was one more job at the end of a day that had already used them up.
More options was never the answer
The usual answer to a stuck parent is more. More ideas, better filters, a bigger library, a cleverer feed. I understand the logic, because it’s almost reasonable. If someone doesn’t know what to do, give them options. If the options don’t land, give them more.
But more choice is the thing that broke the moment in the first place. A library is a lovely thing when you have a free afternoon and a cup of tea that’s still warm. It’s the wrong shape entirely for four spare minutes and a child who’s already unravelling. What reads as generosity on a feature list can land, at the wrong hour, as one more decision you don’t have in you.
I’ve spent most of my working life around education, and one thing keeps being true: the best activity is the one that actually happens. The most brilliant idea in the world does nothing at all while it sits on a screen.
So we built the opposite
TopParent gives you one activity at a time. Not a shortlist, not a curated top ten. One, shaped around the child you actually have and the moment you’re actually in. That’s what it’s actually paying attention to when you tell it about your afternoon.
The case for it is easy to say and uncomfortable to build: a suggestion you act on is worth more than ten you consider. If you and your child start something together at four o’clock, the product has done its job. If you browse beautifully and start nothing, it hasn’t, however good the browsing felt.
That’s the whole bet. We’d rather be the thing you use once, today, than the thing you keep meaning to look through properly.
What this costs us
I’d rather be straight about the trade-offs, because there are real ones and we walked into them knowingly.
One suggestion demos badly. Show someone a library and they see the value instantly: look how much is in here. Show them a single activity and the first reaction is often, is that all? We’ve had that reaction more than once, and it’s a fair question to ask.
It also makes us look smaller than we are. We can’t compete on catalogue size, and we’ve stopped trying to. There’s a version of this product with a much more impressive front page and a much worse Tuesday afternoon, and turning that version down is a choice we have to keep making.
The hardest part is that it puts all the weight on being right. A library can be wrong ninety times and still feel useful, because you did the choosing, so the miss belongs to you. If we hand you one thing and it doesn’t suit your child, that’s our miss, not yours. It’s a harder standard to hold, and I’d be lying if I said it was the comfortable option. We picked it because the alternative quietly hands the work back to the person with the least energy left.
The measure we hold ourselves to
So here’s the principle, and you’re welcome to hold us to it: the measure of TopParent isn’t how much it contains. It’s whether you and your child actually started something today.
Everything else follows from that. It’s why we don’t pad the product to look fuller, why we’d rather suggest one thing well than twenty things adequately, and why “how many activities do you have” is a question we find much less interesting than “did it fit”.
Close to parents, and in the open
Which means we have to keep listening, and not only to the parents who tell us it’s working. The useful messages are the ones that say: this suggestion missed, my child would never have gone for that, you’ve clearly never tried this at bath time. Those are the ones that change the product.
We’re building this near the people using it rather than at a distance from them, and I’d much rather be corrected early than admired late.
If you’ve ever closed an app at half past four and started nothing, you’re exactly who this is for. Come and tell us where we’re getting it wrong.