Edinburgh mum launches app for parents after 'frustration' over finding fun things to do
An Edinburgh mother, frustrated by the difficulty of finding suitable activities for her children, has developed a new app to help parents plan family days out.
Lilija Bula, 40, lives with her husband Federico Leoni and their daughters Victoria and Rebecca.
In November, the mum-of-two says came up with the idea of Kiddy Compass during maternity leave “out of pure frustration” as every time she wanted to find something to do with her seven month and two-year-old daughters, she was jumping between Facebook, Google, and other websites.
The website was launched at the end of January and, with the newly-created app now having launched in early March, the Edinburgh mum says Kiddy Compass has “taken on a life of its own”.
It is a free map of Edinburgh with activities pinpointed across the city, and parents are then able to filter by age group, budget, and what type of event they’re looking for.
Mrs Bula, who formerly worked at Sainsbury’s Bank as a user researcher, says she produced the platform with her digital background from previous roles and projects as well as relying on artificial intelligence tools.
“The first time I posted about Kiddy Compass was the end of January. I received so much positive feedback,” she said.
“Parents were all congratulating me for the project.
“Some of them were saying a project like this is overdue in our community.”
Mrs Bula added that there are many parent bloggers who write articles about child-friendly activities while not listing the ages or interests of kids that the activity may be suited for - which is what Kiddy Compass aims to help with.
The website is completely free for parents to use. However, there is a Family Plan being trialled which gives parents the opportunity to pay £2.50 a month for a list of parent review insights on venue pages, interest tag search filters, and a personalised weekly email with venue picks tailored to your family.
As well as helping out parents across Edinburgh, the app has also helped Mrs Bula find activities for her own family.
“Even though we’ve lived here for 15 years, I struggle a lot with placing businesses on the map visually,” she said.
“If you tell me a name of a neighbourhood, if I don’t go there often, I don’t even know where it is in Edinburgh. So putting it all on a map gave me a sense of how far and close the events and venues are to our home.
“That helped me massively to plan our weekends out and we’ve been to plenty of new places.”
In recent weeks, the app has expanded to also cover Glasgow.
Mrs Bula hopes to expand the app further north of the country in the upcoming months.
She said: “The idea is to make parents lives a bit easier.
“In my case, I had a bit of anxiety every time I had to plan days out because of the number of websites I needed to check out. It almost felt like a part-time job for me.
“I really hope that Kiddy Compass takes away a bit of a pressure from parents where they can just come to the website, browse, and get inspiration without opening 20 tabs and calculating the budgets in their minds.”