Kids Eat Free Club

Helping parents everywhere feed the family for less

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Inspiration

As a dad, I know the burden of figuring out what to feed the kids each day and due to my limited culinary skills, my wife knows it better.

A local restaurant offering a kids eat free deal just makes everything easy, at least once a week, but they're scattered online across blogs, Facebook posts and restaurant websites.

So we built Kids Eat Free Club: one app that shows every kids eat free deal nearby, sorted by day, so parents can take the night off once in a while without the bill taking up half their pay check.

What it does

Kids Eat Free Club (link) shows parents every nearby restaurant offering a kids eat free deal. Parents can find the days and times they are on and all the particulars of each deal, and also view the restaurant menu or website to make sure its within budget.

Over 7,000 deals are live on the platform In USA, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore and more. Close to half of the deals are verified and we make it easy for parents to check if the deal is still valid prior to visiting the venue.

Restaurants can add 'hot deals' through our portal which gives parents even better savings, and local businesses can setup special offers via the same portal to advertise to parents.

How we built it

Everything was built in Cursor and Claude Code using a mixture of models and agents. We used React Native for the framework and Supabase for auth and database. Revenuecat for payments (obviously) and Posthog for analytics and Feature Flags. One Signal for notifications. We built a custom scraper in python that scoured the internet to find all the existing kids eat free deals. We built a website with a self serve advertising portal for restaurants and kids activities partners. We've even built our own custom AI powered outbound calling tool so we can contact restaurants at scale and verify their deal is still running (we also spun that out - link).

Challenges we ran into

App Store review was a marathon - I posted about it here: link

We were rejected several times - twice for our name, twice for screenshots, once for a missing EULA link and more.

Then Meta banned our Facebook and Instagram accounts mid-launch. We lost a few hundred followers which forced us to lean harder into SEO, Google Ads and partnerships.

We lost weeks of traction from this but we kept going.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud to help parents save money and feed their family for less by showing them where to find kids eat free deals. We're proud to put a product out there that is genuinely useful for parents. Our Mombassador program (https://kidseatfree.club/mombassadors) is helping some mothers monetiser their social media presence and take their first leap into the world of being an influencer. We're proud of the early traction particularly in SEO and we feel there is a sustainable growth model there.

What we learned

  • Double and triple check via multiple LLMs at critical moments. Build a consensus of AI opinion and DYOR
  • The telephone is an under-utilised weapon in the AI era. We closed our first four paying partners by cold calling before the app was even live
  • "Sell the meeting, not the product" beats any pitch deck
  • SEO is not dead and ranking can happen quicker than you think with the right approach

What's next for Kids Eat Free Club

Lots more marketing and a press release to go out. Some new features including a redemption wheel and better analytics for advertisers. Lots more outreach to restaurants so they take up our freemium ad package.

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