Dear Nursery Owners, Managers and Teams,
For more than a decade, before any of this was software, we owned and ran nurseries of our own. Staffing and occupancy, funding and invoices, parents and inspections — we lived all of it, every single day.
Like most owners, we bought the systems everyone recommended. One for invoicing. One for registers. One for parents. Each did its own job well enough — but none of them talked toknew about the others.
The information was always there. It was just never in one place.
And running nurseries taught us something a software company can’t learn from the outside: a nursery doesn’t run in neat modules. The register feeds the funding. The funding feeds the invoice. The day itself becomes your evidence. When the systems don’t connect, the owner becomes the connection — every evening, by hand.
We didn’t start nurseries to spend our evenings stitching software together — we started them for the children.
So we stopped asking which system to buy next, and started asking a different question:
Why doesn’t somebody build one system that works the way a nursery actually works?
That question became Nursery in a Box. We built it because we needed one connected way to run our own nurseries — not to sell software, but to solve our own problem. Then other owners saw it, asked if they could use it too, and that’s how it began.
Every decision still starts with the same test:
Would this have made life easier when we were running our own nurseries?
If the answer is no, we don’t build it.
P.S. If you’ve ever glanced at the clock at 6.30pm — long after the last child has gone home — and wondered why you’re still buried in paperwork instead of heading out the door, we know that feeling. We’ve had those evenings too.
