A site, a waitlist, and a boombox in the margin.

This week kid.studio got a front door: a website with a waitlist, because there’s nothing to buy yet. I wanted something live fast that I could change fast, and it went up in days. The colors come from the app icon, and the red circle is the favicon. Everything on it is a placeholder until there’s a real device to photograph, and even the placeholder drawings of the device are small boomboxes.

The card from last week still doesn’t boot cleanly. The fix is close. The plan for what’s left is being made the slow way: walk through every screen of the app, note everything that’s wrong, and file each one as an issue. There are a lot of issues now. It feels closer.

There’s a new shape for the player, too. Yesterday I drew a small boombox: two speaker grilles either side of the controls, and a handle on top. Today I tried to talk myself out of it. A square with a grid of speaker and buttons: too much like the Yoto Mini. A flat cylinder: dumb idea. A long thin box. The boombox is still standing.

A notebook sketch of a small boombox with two round speaker grilles, a row of small controls along the top and a handle above.

The boombox sketch, January 15, 2026, cropped to the drawing.

A small toy boombox with a black handle riding on a red toy train wagon on a wooden floor, with a green engine and a blue wagon ahead of it.

Ten days before the sketch: a toy boombox on the train, January 5, 2026.

I also sketched the first five minutes with a new player. Plug it in, hear a loading sound, then a voice: press the big button to start listening, and something plays right away. A short booklet in the box has a QR code for the app, for adding your own. That only works once three things are solved: what’s on the player out of the box, the sounds between steps, and buttons a toddler can’t break.

Next: the Yosemite trip. After it, another hardware build, because there’s a family waiting to try one.