As of this week, kid.studio is the day job. I was laid off from my job at a tech company on February 4th, and the plan that had been a nights-and-weekends plan became the plan. When it happened, I asked my wife, Helena, whether I should start looking for work. She said: what about the kid.studio plan? She meant it.
Failure is the default outcome for something like this, and I’m not afraid of it. Enough isn’t replacing my old salary. Enough is launching. Not to friends. To the world.
I didn’t jump straight in. The first two weeks went to slowing down: long runs, a lot of writing, and a family trip, while I worked out what work and family look like now that neither one is fixed. I wrote about that part in Flow of the Universe.
The week has a shape now. Monday, Wednesday and Friday are work days. Tuesday and Thursday are for the boys. This week went to planning rather than building: a roadmap, a routine, the systems that come before the work. I start with pen and paper, then iterate with AI. Some of it was needed, and some of it was organizing the desk instead of sitting at it.
The build did move. The brand’s red got bolder: the muted coral from January (#E08B65) is out, and the red is now #FF1F1C, the red of the knob, with a sky blue (#88C0F9) for small accents. Every placeholder on the site was swapped for a real asset or a plain fallback, and there’s still no photo of a finished device, because there isn’t one. Version 0.2.0 of the player and app went out at the end of January, mostly fixes.
The red box is still the test platform, and it’s a prototype that needs a redesign. A second unit is being readied for a friend’s family, so someone outside this house can try it. So far, only my own family has used one.
Next: the redesign, on paper first. The boombox from January hasn’t lost any arguments yet.