Kiddo Hunt began as a text thread. Three of us, all new parents within a year of each other, had fallen into the habit of sending each other photos of things we'd bought — "does this actually work" — and, more often than we expected, "return this immediately." A shampoo that stung on the first tear-free promise. A sunscreen that left a chalky white cast. A body spray with an ingredient list none of us could pronounce.
None of it was expensive, exactly. It was the accumulation that got to us — the slow realization that "cheap enough to not think about" and "actually good" had quietly stopped meaning the same thing. We started keeping a shared spreadsheet of what had genuinely held up, sorted by age and category, mostly so we'd stop repeating our own mistakes.
By the second year, the spreadsheet had eleven tabs and a waiting list of friends asking to be added. That was the actual signal — not that we'd built something clever, but that the problem was common enough that strangers wanted our list too.
