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Software for nurseries and preschools started by a 19-year-old in his mother's daycare — over 20 million złoty in revenue, half a million parents, and one in three Polish parents with a child in private childcare
500,000 parents using the apps across markets · 4,000+ nurseries and preschools as paying customers · 90% of revenue from the institution side, 90% of users on the parent side · GMV passing PLN 1 billion, recent month at roughly PLN 1.2-1.3 billion, on which they take a small percentage worth a few million złoty a year · bootstrapped to about $1M ARR (~PLN 3.7M) before taking any fund money
To sell an iPad-only app to nurseries that had no iPads, they bought used iPad minis on Allegro and resold them at 400 złoty a unit — they think they were the biggest buyer on the platform, and those 80 iPads were their first 80 customers.
Fewer bars = easier, cheaper, or faster for an AI-assisted solo builder. Editorial judgments based on the case details.
Kuba Pawelski went to a technical high school in the telecoms and electronics stream — not the computing stream, so nobody taught him to program. He learned anyway, and by the end of 2017 he was working as a professional iOS developer at a Kraków software house whose revenue was 90-95% a single US B2B client that eventually exited for around $400 million. He wanted to make something end to end rather than implement other people's tickets, and he had a test environment nobody else had: his mother runs a nursery. So the first MVP was written in late 2017, at his mother's nursery, on iPhone and iPad only — because iOS was the only thing he knew how to build, which in the Polish market was, as he puts it, a brilliant business strategy. He was 19. He did not quit his salaried job until May 2019, and by then there were already about ten people on board and real revenue. His personal threshold was explicit: he had a target of PLN 40,000-50,000 in monthly recurring revenue and told himself he needed 50,000 a month from LiveKid to keep most of the team paid before he would give up a job that was paying him nearly double what the company paid him. He jokes that for years his ace in the hole in any investor conversation about founder compensation was that he still earned less than he had as a 19-year-old programmer. Six years later, depending on how you count the start, the numbers he gives are: over PLN 20 million in revenue, 500,000 parents using the apps, more than 4,000 nurseries and preschools paying, and operations in Poland, Spain and Mexico.
Two channels, both physical. Mateusz Kulesz, his co-founder from the same technical high school class, rode a bicycle from preschool to preschool, and the first 50 customers were closed that way, door to door.
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Data credibility: Founder interview in Polish. The headline numbers are first stated by the host in the intro and then confirmed and refined by Pawelski in conversation — he says 'today, 21, twenty-something million... above 20 million' for revenue and confirms half a million parents and somewhat over 4,000 institutions. No dashboard, financial statement or third-party data appears at any point; nothing is audited. Figures kept in the original currency because the transcript never converts, with one exception the founder makes himself: he says they bootstrapped to '$1 million of ARR, so let's say about 3.7 [million złoty], the dollar then was roughly what it is today,' which is his own conversion and not ours. Self-reported figures: over PLN 20 million revenue, 500,000 parents, 4,000+ paying nurseries and preschools, 90/10 revenue-to-user asymmetry between institutions and parents, GMV over PLN 1 billion with a recent month at roughly PLN 1.2-1.3 billion earning them a few million złoty a year, original price around PLN 100, used iPad minis resold at PLN 400 with about 80 sold, first 50 customers sold door to door, roughly 10 employees by the time he quit his salaried job in May 2019, a personal threshold of PLN 40,000-50,000 MRR before quitting, infrastructure spend of roughly PLN 700,000 a year now against PLN 1,000 early on, 100% year-on-year growth in 2021, and Inovo joining as the last fund in 2023. He states that one in three Polish parents with a child in private childcare is on the system. The 'Facebook crisis' he refers to is never explained in the transcript and we have not guessed at it. Region is Poland: he lives in a semi-detached house in Wrocław, worked at a Kraków software house, and the company's home market is Poland, with operations also in Spain and Mexico. The auto-captions render the company name variously as Live Kit, Life Kid and Livekid; the video title gives Livekid.
The subscription was around PLN 100 a month, and he is emphatic that the first visits were not about collecting it. They were not coming for the card, and if a nursery balked at 100 złoty the answer was to write that down and hand it over free.
What made it compound was an unglamorous reframe: they were less a technology company than a business of digitisation and changing human habits.
The first years were, in his words, pain, chaos and permanent operational crisis, with no recipe other than working from morning until night.
LiveKid started as an all-in-one system for running a nursery or preschool and has widened into software for the catering companies that supply those institutions too. Pawelski describes it as an ERP for the small business that a childcare centre actually is — and refuses to dress that up: "when I say we make software for preschools, I don't feel like Steve Jobs saying it." The product has to serve three groups simultaneously, and this is the structural insight of the whole business. Teachers and carers, who mark attendance and log naps and meals and fill in what used to be a paper daily journal. The director or owner, who is the buyer. And parents, who until now reported absences by phone, by SMS, or by shouting it in the cloakroom — "oh, and tomorrow no lunch please." The value proposition only exists if all three change behaviour at once. His summary is the sharpest thing in the transcript: "if any one of those groups breaks ranks, we deliver nothing. Not communication in one place, not automatic catering orders, not automatic invoices at the end of the month. Nothing works." A director's actual promised outcome is that in the evening she can forget her phone, because parents are no longer calling her; that the morning catering order consolidates automatically instead of being assembled from five places; and that money arrives from parents without chasing. Which means the company is not really a technology company. "We're a bit in the business of digitisation and changing human habits" — a realisation he says they did not have at the start and which explains why their first ten customers mostly churned even though the initial interest was fine.
Subscriptions paid by the institution. Around 90% of revenue comes from the nursery and preschool side, while around 90% of the users are parents — because there are somewhat over 4,000 institutions and 500,000 parents. He is candid that this asymmetry was genuinely difficult early on: for a long time the parent app was not treated as core, which makes roadmapping and prioritisation awkward when the overwhelming majority of your users are not your customers. The original price was about PLN 100. He is emphatic that in those first conversations they were not there to close: "we absolutely weren't coming for the card... if someone had a problem with it, it already costs 100 złoty or so — write it down — free, even." His stated principle is that the sale should be a side effect of someone being engaged and believing in the product, with pricing a formality afterwards. On top of subscriptions sits a payments layer. Parent fees flow through the platform, and the GMV is now enormous — he says over a billion złoty, and puts a recent month at roughly PLN 1.2-1.3 billion. He is unusually honest about how little that means: "billions of GMV, at the end of the day it's not your money. You take literally some tiny percentage, it's a few million a year, so you don't feel it day to day. You can put it on a nice slide, pull a report at year end and it looks great, but you don't feel it." The metric he says he actually feels is penetration: in Poland, one in three parents with a child in a private nursery or preschool is on their system. He calls it the most tangible and satisfying metric there is — you meet users at weddings, at parties, renting a flat.
Bicycles, then iPads, then an honest pitch — in that order. The first fifty customers were sold door to door. Mateusz Kulesz, his cofounder from the same high-school class, rode a bicycle from preschool to preschool. Their first sales hire, Przemek, came from the same network. This is unglamorous and it is the whole origin: "the first 50 customers we sold by driving around preschools." The hardware hack is the detail worth remembering. The app was iOS-only because that was all he could build, and Polish nurseries did not have iPads. So they bought used iPad minis on Allegro — he believes they were the platform's single biggest buyer of them — and resold them to nurseries at PLN 400 apiece so the app had something to run on. They sold about 80 that way: the first 80 customers. Years later one of those original customers called customer support about a warranty claim on an iPad; the agent, who had no idea the company had ever sold hardware, flatly denied it was possible, and it escalated to the founder, who bought the customer a new iPad — because these were the people who took the first bet. The pitch itself was the third piece, and it was radical honesty deployed as a sales asset. Two 19-year-olds walking into an institution that handles sensitive data about children have a credibility problem, so they leaned into it: we are two young guys from the area, one of us is a programmer, one of us does the commercial side, one of our mothers runs a nursery, we have seen these exact problems, we built an app that we think helps but we honestly do not know if it will — please try it and tell us what you think. He is clear this was not fake-it-till-you-make-it: "the whole story is true and we really were, and we weren't coming for money, only for feedback." He notes that competitors later copied the script, including the parts that were not true for them. And the hard-won lesson underneath it all: convincing someone is one thing, getting the deployment to stick is another. Of the first ten customers, he remembers only two — Karolina and Ola — staying.
The transcript is light on stack and heavy on capital structure, so that is where the substance is. They bootstrapped to roughly $1 million of ARR — about PLN 3.7 million at the time — entirely on customer money before taking any fund capital. Along the way they tried and failed to raise on the terms that were standard in Poland at the time, and he tells this against himself: the classic local deal was 51% of the company for PLN 200,000, and "we also wanted to be treated like that, but nobody wanted to treat us like that." There were several rounds of asking for PLN 200,000 for 40-50%, and one moment where they nearly gave away half the company for about PLN 100,000 plus support — the reasoning being that the other party had five salespeople, so five salespeople would sell five times as much. They walked out for five minutes to think, and changed their minds. They also tried 20% for PLN 50,000 with wealthy acquaintances and could not close that either. What made survival possible was a genuinely low burn — including personal. "We were very ascetic in life. I lived in an apartment that was quite big but I only had a mattress on the floor. I didn't even have furniture," a state of affairs his then-girlfriend commented on critically. They raised only once momentum was undeniable, at PLN 3-3.7-4 million of revenue and 100% year-on-year growth in the 2021 market. Inovo joined as the last fund in 2023. He has never run a formal fundraising process: no data room, no market sweep, and exactly one pitch deck ever made, out of politeness, so Inovo's investment committee had something to look at. "I never made a pitch deck, in the sense of slides and wow." Infrastructure costs get one mention: he estimates roughly PLN 700,000 a year for Google and servers now, against PLN 1,000 in the early days. COVID cost them almost nothing operationally — Polish nurseries and preschools were closed for literally one month, which they bridged by selling off old iPads and courses for teachers and carers, becoming an e-learning company for four weeks.
Copy the unfair-access starting point. He had a live nursery to build in, for free, run by someone who would tell him the truth. That is worth more than any market research, and most people have some equivalent — a parent's business, a partner's workplace, a former employer's back office. Start where you already have access to the operational reality. Copy the honest-underdog pitch, which is genuinely one of the best sales assets in this index and costs nothing: name your inexperience out loud, explain exactly why you built the thing, say you do not know if it works, and ask for feedback rather than a card. It converts because it is true, and it inoculates against the credibility objection that would otherwise sink you. Copy the hardware unblock. If your software cannot run on what the customer owns, sell them the hardware at cost. Eighty used iPad minis at PLN 400 each became their first eighty customers. Founders routinely abandon a market over a device or connectivity gap that could be solved with a shipping box. Copy the deployment obsession. Their first ten customers mostly churned even though the sales conversations went well, because the product required three different groups — carers, directors and parents — to change daily habits simultaneously. In any multi-sided operational tool, onboarding and habit change are the product, and the sale is the easy part. Copy the bootstrap-then-raise sequence: PLN 100 price points, ascetic personal burn, customer-funded to about $1M ARR, and only then a preempted round with no formal process and no real deck. What to change: his own strongest advice against himself is on international expansion. He is critical of the country-by-country replication model he chose — "global by default is fine, that's the preferred scenario" — and says he judges his own plan for foreign expansion quite critically in hindsight, warning that pointing to DocPlanner's success as a template is a poor guide because its founder does things he considers unreachable. If you are building a market-specific operational tool, decide global-by-default at the architecture stage or accept you are running three separate businesses.
Demographics are the existential risk and he names it as the thing investors ought to worry about but don't: birth rates in Poland. A business whose revenue scales with the number of children in private childcare has a shrinking denominator, and no amount of product work fixes that. It is the reason a single-market position is dangerous even at one-in-three penetration. Geographic replication is unproven and he is his own harshest critic on it. Poland, Spain and Mexico are three different regulatory environments, three sales motions, three languages and three catering ecosystems, and he explicitly regrets the classic country-by-country approach. Multi-sided habit dependency never goes away. If carers stop logging attendance, parents stop trusting the app, the catering order breaks, the invoices break, and the director's reason to pay disappears. Churn in this business is operational, not commercial. Roadmap distortion from the 90/90 asymmetry is chronic. Ninety percent of users generate ten percent of revenue, and he describes a specific case: for three consecutive years the customer-success lead proposed a Spotify-Wrapped-style annual summary for parents — how many messages sent, how many meals eaten, how much time at nursery — and it never got prioritised, because a maturing SaaS company has technical debt, compliance work and committed objectives, and the roadmap stops being dynamic. Payments exposure is real. Over a billion złoty of GMV flowing through the platform brings regulatory, fraud and reconciliation obligations wildly out of proportion to the few million złoty a year it earns them. Founder load is the risk he talks about most. He describes the founder as the only person in the system who carries both the macro view and the operational one — investors worrying about multiples and down rounds, management worrying about production bugs and a departed head of sales, and only him holding both — and calls it wykańczające, wearing him out. There is also a period he refers to as "the Facebook crisis," during which the team supported him personally, offering to wash his car or walk his dog and preparing anonymous notes of encouragement for his birthday; the transcript never explains what it was. On evidence: the headline figures are stated by the host in the intro and then confirmed and refined by the founder himself in conversation. No dashboard, financial statement or third-party data appears. Nothing here is audited.
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