For families
Great options are scattered across websites, calendars, registration systems, social posts, and PDFs. KIDO brings the useful details together so families can compare what fits and make a plan with confidence.
Made for local life
More time doing.
Less time searching.
KIDO is building a better way for families to find events, camps, and programs, and for the people who create them to reach the families they serve.
Working out of The Builders Club in Waterloo, Ontario
Waterloo Region activity guide
Why we are building KIDO
Local life is full of good things for kids. Finding them should not be this hard.
For local organizations
Small businesses and community organizations do important work, but discovery is often expensive and fragmented. We want to help the right families find them without asking either side to fight an algorithm.
What KIDO looks like
Real choices, organized around the decision.
These are actual KIDO cards from the Waterloo Region catalog. Families can move from broad local organizations to specific camps and programs without losing the practical details they need.
What matters to us
Build the useful thing, then keep making it better.
People first
Every choice starts with the experience of the family or organization using KIDO. Clear beats clever. Helpful beats busy.
Ad-free, on purpose
Families should be able to explore without ads competing for their attention. Recommendations should be useful, not bought.
Trust through clarity
Dates, ages, prices, locations, and source links matter. We show what we know, make gaps visible, and keep improving the information.
Local organizations thrive
Good software should remove repetitive work and make small organizations easier to discover. Their success strengthens the whole community.
Our commitments
A simple service with its incentives in the right place.
We do not have every future fee or feature decided. We do know the kind of service we want KIDO to be, and the lines we do not want growth to blur.
Our commitment to
Families
- Keep the core discovery experience free and ad-free.
- Organize results around what fits, not who paid to appear.
- Respect people’s attention, privacy, and time.
- Make important details and information gaps easy to understand.
Our commitment to
Organizations
- Give organizations a fair chance to be discovered by fit.
- Reduce repetitive work instead of creating another system to feed.
- Keep source links, corrections, and organization identity visible.
- Make any future paid tools optional, transparent, and useful on their own.
Long-term sustainability
Keep discovery free. Earn by solving the next problem.
KIDO’s public discovery service is intended to remain an entirely free community service. We are collecting as complete a picture of local events, camps, and programs as we can, then working to keep those options available, current, and easy to understand. We do not plan to charge families, sell ranking, or put core local discovery behind a fee.
Longer term, we hope to support the service through optional program signup and management tools for organizations. Registration, rosters, communication, payments, and day-to-day program administration are real problems worth solving. Revenue should come from making that work easier, not from monopolizing community information or weakening the free core experience.
Starting local on purpose
Waterloo is our starting point and our test bed.
We are working out of The Builders Club in Waterloo and building KIDO alongside the community it serves. Waterloo Region gives us the chance to listen closely, solve real problems, and learn what a truly useful local product takes.
Our plan is to prove the model here before expanding to other regions. We want to scale what works, carry the lessons forward, and still make each new region feel genuinely local.
Start close. Learn deeply. Scale thoughtfully.
Where we are going
A more connected local activity ecosystem.
We see a future where families can quickly find what fits and local organizations can spend more time delivering great experiences, while keeping information clear, current, and accessible.
That is the problem we are here to solve, one community at a time.