Gary here, welcome to the first edition of our weekly newsletter for Paladin Kids! Oh yeah, that's the name of this new project :)

This newsletter will be sent out and shared on paladinkids.com/blog every Friday with the purpose of sharing updates, asking questions, and in general keeping you in the loop.

🔮 What motivated this project?

I recently became a dad, my daughter is now 5 months old 👶. While she isn’t at Youtube watching age yet, when I came across Garry Tan’s tweet about a better Youtube client for kids, I started digging into it.

Turns out, a 2022 survey found that 85% of kids under 12 watch videos on Youtube, yet even the Youtube Kids product, purpose-built for children, does an awful job of curating safe content for kids. James Bridle wrote a popular piece about this in 2017, and if you just Reddit search “youtube kids”, you get walls of complaints.

That's why I decided to start Paladin Kids and solve a problem every parent of a young child in 2024 has:

"My children are too easily exposed to unwanted content on Youtube."

📱 Initial solution

The solution will initially come in the form of a paid iOS and Android mobile + tablet app. The private beta, which you all will get access to 😉, will include features such as: Plain text Youtube video searching and filtering Automatic age-appropriateness filtering Purpose filtering (ie: education vs exploration vs entertainment) Toggle auto-play Video lock Timer Watch history

During the beta period, we'll likely add things like: Advanced filters Channel lock Curate your own playlists "Time's up" reminders Analytics Biometric (FaceID, Thumbprint ID, etc) parental lock

Please reply with any missing features you'd love to see in the app!

👋 Founder intro

If you're on this newsletter, chances are we've spoken recently. But if we haven't, welcome! My name is Gary Lin, and I'm a technical startup founder from Y Combinator (W22 batch), a Forbes 30U30 Toronto recipient, and former software engineer at Facebook's Creator Studio team.

🙏 Ask: looking for referrals

If you have any family, friends, or colleagues that are also parents with young children, I'd love to get in contact with them. Feel free to directly connect us over email at gary@paladinkids.com. If it helps, here's a blurb you can forward:

Hey there, I'm Gary Lin, a startup founder from Toronto. My wife and I have a 5 month old baby girl, and while chatting with fellow parents, we keep hearing the same stories about how bad Youtube is for their kids. Parents put on something educational, then suddenly the kid's watching an inappropriate video from an unknown channel. Given how common this problem is, I've decided to build a Youtube app designed for parents to easily curate educational videos while filtering out unwanted content. If this applies to you, I'd love to hear your experiences: https://cal.com/gary-j-lin/paladin-kids-research.

Let me know any comments, feedback, or ideas by sending an email to gary@paladinkids.com!

Thanks,
Gary Lin
Paladin Kids
gary@paladinkids.com