Built in Kosovo, growing through trust

There is a moment each day for every parent when they pick up their child from daycare, curious to hear more about the day they spent away from home. Usually, the educators who are with kids can’t share everything—there are still other kids to take care of, a few parents are coming at the same time, and they can’t always remember it all at that very moment. Instead of becoming a meaningful conversation about a child's day, those few minutes are often rushed and fragmented.

The creation of that moment (without distractions) is what Bardh Kadiu set out to achieve when he founded kidsday, together with co-founders Brikene Morina Krasniqi and Getoar Kastrati, a platform for managing daycare centers.

What began in Pristina now supports childcare providers across Kosovo, Albania, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, Brazil and Abu Dhabi, with expansion into South Africa underway. More than 20,000 active users rely on the platform to support close to 5,000 children.

Trust, not features

Getting there was not easy. Building the technology turned out to be easier than changing behavior. Bardh shares:

The hardest part wasn’t building the product; it was getting childcare centers to change habits they’d had for decades. Early childhood centers are cautious by nature, and rightly so.

Changing the routines of daycare centers was not an easy task, so the kidsday team had to find a way to work with teachers and build relationships with them. As a result, features were developed with teachers, onboarding was designed to get daycare centers up and running in days rather than weeks, and recommendations between center directors became the company’s strongest sales channel.

Bardh recollects: "We overcame it by working alongside educators rather than selling to them. Trust, not features, was the bottleneck."

That lesson stayed with the company as it started working with investors and international partners.

The value of timely support

As kidsday grew, Kadiu realized that building a strong product was only part of the challenge. To attract partners and investors beyond Kosovo, the company needed a compelling story to tell.

This is where Swiss EP experts became increasingly valuable. On various occasions, kidsday worked with Ethan Mayers, Jamie Reynolds, and Keo Sar. They worked with the team on positioning, storytelling and investor communication.

Bardh says that learning how to tell the company's story changed the way investors and partners responded to kidsday.

The mentors helped us refine our pitch and sharpen our positioning, so we could more clearly present the value kidsday brings to early childhood education. Storytelling turned out to be just as important as the product itself. Knowing how to communicate what we do and why it matters made a real difference in how investors, partners, and centers respond to us.

The stronger positioning soon opened new doors. Improved pitching skills were especially handy when kidsday joined the Plug and Play accelerator program in Albania.

"We joined Plug and Play to plug into a global ecosystem and put kidsday to the test on an international stage,” Bardh shares.

The investment that followed participation in the program was important, but Bardh points to something else as equally valuable:

Beyond the investment, the two most valuable things we got here were validation and the network. Being selected gave us credibility that opened doors, and the connections we made (to mentors, partners and other founders) have been just as valuable as the capital itself.

Building locally, connecting globally

Notably, kidsday’s journey is not about leaving Kosovo behind. The company continues to build in Kosovo while connecting with expertise, investors, and opportunities outside the country.

kidsday's experience highlights a challenge many startups from emerging ecosystems face. Building a product locally is possible. Scaling it often requires access to experienced mentors, international investors and global networks—resources that are still very limited in smaller markets.

Luckily, for kidsday, that journey began close to home, in neighboring Albania. By participating in the first cohort of the Plug and Play accelerator, they acquired international connections and gained valuable experience.

On top of that, the investment secured through Plug and Play is helping kidsday continue their scaling journey:

We’re using the investment to expand our reach and bring kidsday to more childcare centers across our markets. That means onboarding new centers, growing our team to support them, and continuing to strengthen the product so every center that joins gets real value from day one.

Looking ahead

The problem that inspired kidsday has remained the same: helping parents better understand their children's day. Today, that benefit reaches thousands of families across the world through a platform still being built in Kosovo.

Along the way, the company learned that while technology can solve a problem, growth depends on something less tangible. First with educators, then with investors, mentors and international partners, trust proved to be the foundation for further growth.