Case study 05 · Play & Pause · Personal project

Play & Pause

A pop-up play café for Seattle families. I found the gap, tested whether it was real, and launched it on my own.

Role: Product, design, engineering, and the door.
Time: 2026.
Team: Solo.
Scope: Booking product, venue, and the event itself.

01 · The insight

Both needs at once

Parents in Seattle needed somewhere their kids could play freely and they could actually relax. Not one or the other. Both, at the same time, in the same room.

Nothing available solved both sides. Play spaces are built for the kids and treat the adults as supervision. Cafes are built for the adults and treat a toddler as a problem. The gap is a room designed for the fact that the two people arrived together.

02 · Validation

Before writing a single line of code

I wanted to know whether the gap was real to anyone other than me, so I tested demand before building anything.

Survey responses

A 62-response survey and a waitlist of 25 families, collected before I wrote any code.

A waitlist is a stronger signal than a survey, because it costs the person something to join. Twenty-five families putting their name down was the point where building stopped being a guess.

03 · What I built

The product and the event

I designed and built the site and the booking flow, then sourced the venue, sorted the insurance and ran the door on the day. Stripe for payments, Supabase for the backend, Claude for the build.

The Play and Pause homepage, headed — The homepage. One promise, one action. A parent deciding on a phone at 9pm needs to know what it is and how to book, and nothing else.

The room on the day. Parents and toddlers sitting together on rugs in the middle, a climbing wall, slide and play house along one wall, and low tables with blocks around the edge. — The first event, Magnolia. The room is the product as much as the booking flow is: somewhere a toddler can be let loose and a parent can sit down with a coffee and talk to another adult.

Daljit behind the drinks table in the kitchen, holding a cup, with two urns of coffee, milk and sparkling water set out beside her. — Coffee, name tags, the door. The unglamorous half of running it yourself.

04 · Results

From idea to sold-out event

62

Survey responses before building.

25

Families on the waitlist.

Sold out

First event, in Magnolia.

105

Subscribers after the first event.

05 · Reflections

You do not need a perfect product to launch. You need a booking experience people trust.

What I learned

What I would do differently

I underestimated the insurance requirements for the venue. Next time I would scope liability coverage first and prioritize spaces that already carry their own.

What the validation was worth

A survey and a waitlist were enough to justify building. The thing I was afraid of, spending months on something nobody wanted, was answerable in a couple of weeks for free.

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