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When founder Dan McPhee realized frustration with managing kids activities was shared by other parents, he set out to fix it

On registration days, browser tabs multiply quickly on Dan McPhee’s laptop.

Several tabs for soccer, then adjacent tabs for swimming lesson options, comparing time slots, prices and locations. In another session, it might be hockey and jiu-jitsu. After that, boxing alongside CrossFit. Each sport brings its own website, its own login, its own enrolment window.

Dan is the founder of the kids’ activities startup GoPlay.ai. He and his partner Eva have two boys, ages eight and 13, who are active and curious. They are the kind of kids who are happiest when they are busy. The challenge is never finding something for them to do. It’s piecing it all together.

In their west Toronto home, those seasonal planning sessions became a familiar ritual. Whether it was an early morning with coffee percolating in the kitchen to catch a registration window, or an evening after bedtime, when the couple sat together comparing schedules and toggling tabs.

They juggled overlapping interests, school pickup times, work meetings, and the uncertainties of Toronto traffic. Which ones overlap? Which collide? Which leaves just enough time to navigate city streets before the next start time?

It was not for the faint of heart. “We would always figure it out, usually with some trade-offs,” Dan recalled, “but it was exhausting. You had to accept you’d never be fully optimized.” 

He saw opportunity in the chaos. That was when the idea for GoPlay, a centralized kids’ activities directory and toolkit, began to take shape.

By 2023, and for more than a decade before that, Dan had worked at Google building large-scale partnership programs across North and South America. He operated inside structured ecosystems, aligning incentives, defining shared metrics, and designing systems built to scale. There were frameworks and playbooks. Partners understood how integration worked and what growth required.

At home for his sons’ activities, it was different. Registering the boys for soccer, jiu-jitsu, or swimming meant navigating a patchwork of unrelated systems. Each provider had its own website, login, and process. One posted schedules in PDFs. Another buried them in dropdown menus. Pricing was presented one way here, another way there.

The rules shifted every time. A city-run swim program followed one path. A community soccer club used another. A private martial arts studio had its own system entirely. Payment policies varied. Registration windows opened at different times. Some programs still required paper forms. Others required creating an account before you could even see what was available.

“Every time you find a provider you’re interested in, you have to learn how their signup works,” he said. “There’s no consistency.”

When it was time to decide, the only reliable method was either opening multiple browser tabs and sorting through the details manually or being forced to contact the program provider. 

Sometimes there are FAQs available, but the information parents need is often buried and hard to find. “Who has time for that?” said Dan. 

Wasn’t the internet supposed to make this easier, less daunting? In theory, yes. In practice, it often did the opposite.

Discovery, Not Scarcity

Another realization struck him: there was no shortage of programs.

Within walking distance of the McPhee family home, the neighbourhoods surrounding High Park offer camps, leagues, arts programs, and specialty classes in abundance. The nearly 400-acre urban park anchors the west end of Toronto, with wooded trails, playgrounds, a small zoo, and expansive playing fields just beyond their door. In any given season, there were options in every direction.

“I don’t believe it’s a scarcity issue,” Dan said. “There’s enough capacity in the camps and activities for all of the kids to get in.”

The problem was not supply. It was discovery.

That shift reframed everything. Parents were not struggling because there were no spots or no quality programs. They were struggling because the information was fragmented, incomplete, and difficult to navigate, with no simple tools to help them compare and decide.

“The whole process required too much effort,” he said.

Listening Before Building

Once Dan saw it as a discovery issue, he went out into the community. He visited local fields, gyms and camps and spoke with parents whose children were enrolled in programs.

“I’d take a notepad and ask how they found the activity, how they signed up, what the experience was like,” he said. “Universally it came back that it wasn’t very good.”

The parents he spoke to described the same headaches he had felt at home. They told him they would bounce between websites and wrestle with schedules, just like he had been doing. And they would become even more frustrated when deciphering registration details that were sometimes stale, often incomplete or poorly written.

Then there was the ritual of hitting refresh again and again, waiting for enrolment windows to open. “It would be 6:45am and I knew the program would be opening any moment. So I would open every browser in the house, and hit refresh over and over and over again,” he recalled, shaking his head.

Passionate Kids’ Activities Providers

Next Dan approached local kids’ activity providers.

“They told me they didn’t know how they get clients in the door,” he said. “They believe it’s all through word of mouth.”

Many were coaches who had built their programs out of pure passion. Marketing was rarely their strength, and half or more were small or solo operators. They did not have the budget to invest in polished websites. Their sites were functional, designed simply to get the essentials online, shaped by tight margins and even tighter schedules. As one coach told him, the money had to go toward paying staff and buying nets.

“There was one lady who runs this really wholesome cooking and outdoor camp. She is so sweet and it’s great, but she has this quiet little website. You would never find it,” Dan said, recalling a provider he came across when searching for activities for his sons.

The best known programs were often the ones with the biggest marketing budgets. Smaller, high-quality ones did indeed rely on loyal families and referrals to stay in business. “The best programs aren’t always the loudest,” he said.

Building it in Toronto’s High Park

Dan began sketching a simpler experience. Instead of opening site after site, tab after tab, what if parents could compare programs in one place? What if days, times, age ranges, and pricing were visible side by side? What if a straightforward question could be answered without digging through pages of text?

“I wanted to make it so you can use natural language to help assist you with the search,” he said. “Instead of reading through FAQs, you just ask the question.”

He started where he lived: High Park. The plan was deliberate. Build it one neighbourhood at a time. Get it right. Then expand outward in concentric circles until all of Toronto is covered.

Families tend to look close to home. Children often enroll where their friends are, usually from the same schools and nearby streets. Parents prefer short drives or walking distance, especially in a city where traffic and winter weather can quickly complicate a weeknight schedule. If the experience worked in one dense, neighbourhood-focused area, it could grow naturally from there. The goal was not rapid scale, but practical usefulness, one community at a time.

Rebuilding Local Community

As he spoke with more parents and program operators, the project began to feel larger than a tool. It started to feel like a way to revive something that had quietly thinned out in many neighbourhoods.

“I came to see two things clearly,” he said. “First, that operators are not just service providers. They are anchors in their communities. And second, that GoPlay could do more than organize programs. It could help nurture the connections that make a neighbourhood feel alive.”

In High Park, he had noticed how fragile those connections had become. Families live side by side, but rarely cross the street to say hello. Calendars are full. Doors stay closed. Life is turned inward. It can feel isolating, especially if you remember a time when neighbours once naturally gathered and people knew who lived next door.

Some of that may be nostalgia. But some of it is real. Devices command attention. People drive instead of walk. Even in vibrant cities like Toronto, spontaneous human moments feel less common than they once did.

It became especially noticeable during the pandemic, when routines abruptly stopped. Kids’ activities had long been one of the few consistent points of connection for parents. When COVID forced isolation, the drop-offs, sideline conversations, and casual exchanges in rink lobbies and swim club waiting areas disappeared. The familiar faces from fields, studios, and arenas were suddenly absent from the weekly rhythm.

“I don’t know what we would do without providers,” he said. “Their programs are for our kids, but they are also community hubs and touch points for parents too.”

Coaches were not just teaching skills. They were creating spaces where children built confidence, and where parents met, talked, and formed easy acquaintances that sometimes grew into friendships.

From the beginning, Dan was thinking about how to “augment word of mouth.” Not replace it or automate it, but strengthen it. The goal was not simply to streamline registration, though that mattered. It was to help families discover the programs already shaping their neighbourhoods, and to help small, passionate operators be seen.

He is clear that GoPlay is a tool. It gathers schedules into one place. It makes comparisons simpler. It eases the friction that turns registration sessions into small family stress tests. But the real value is the network that forms around it.

Because beyond raising happy, confident kids, parents are often searching for something else too. The familiar faces at the rink. The easy conversations in folding chairs along the sidelines. The comfort of being part of something local and true. The small wave across the parking lot at the end of practice. The message that says, “We’re heading for pizza after, want to join?”

As GoPlay grows, there will be not only fewer frantic registration sessions and browser tabs, but more families who find programs that truly fit. Coaches will build groups where kids thrive. Local businesses will grow because the right families can finally find them. Parents will recognize one another season after season, until acquaintances become friendships.

For Dan, success is simple. “I’ll know we’ve succeeded when families can find what they need quickly,” he said. “The real story becomes the people they meet along the way.”

GoPlay may be built in software, but it shows up in real places: rinks, gyms, fields and community centres on busy weeknights.

When it works the way it is designed to, families find what they need faster, kids spend more time doing what they love, and parents connect with the people around them.

At the end of the day, it’s about helping kids find their thing.