Kids In Town offers parents new resource for events, activities in Steamboat Springs

The idea for Kids In Town inspired Daniella Place to enter the 2023 Community Business Pitch Competition. As the mother of two young children, her mission was to fill a need in the mountain community she calls home.

The platform KidsInTown.co includes chat box, an event calendar and content that aims to make life easier for families in Routt County by guiding parents and caregivers to activities and events for children.

“I started working on Kids In Town in 2023, placing third in the 2023 Community Business Pitch Competition,” Place said. “I paused working on it for a bit, and in 2024, I was accepted into the High-Country Accelerator program, where I built out the product. Now, the platform is live and already supporting hundreds of parents in our community.”

The idea for the platform came to Place after her family made the decision to move from Boston to Steamboat Springs after the pandemic — a move that was fueled by a desire for a better work-life balance.

Place used the knowledge and experience from roles she held in the product information field, where she worked on platforms that kept the product managers she worked with moving in the same direction. Before arriving in Steamboat Springs, he spent 14 years with Google and has also worked for Oyster HR, and Remote human resources platforms.

“I am not an engineer,” Place said. “Product operations is basically understanding the different elements that go into helping the product managers build their products and then making sure everything is working smooth. (In my role I asked) can your product manager focus on doing their job, and we focus on the analytics we need and why is this system not working or this tool not integrating with the lighting tool?  It’s just understanding how to piece other things together.”

When she came up with the idea for her own platform, she wanted to use the skills and knowledge she had learned during her career to make the site all that it could be. She launched her site under a different name shortly after placing in the competition, but continued working in product operations for other platforms remotely to earn money. Recently, she stepped away from her regular job and turned her attention to Kids in Town full-time.  

“I saw this opportunity for making this information easier to access. I worked on it as a little bit of a side project when I was still employed. It was my own little hobby to see if I could get it to work,” Place said.

“There is a lot of information out there,” she added. “There is Facebook, community calendars, emails you get from your daycare and there’s things that you hear from other parents. For me, an organizer, it is an opportunity to bring it all into one place.”

Currently Kids In Town collects the data and creates event calendar to guide parents to age-appropriate events in Steamboat Springs iin an effort to make it easy for local and visiting families to discover the best activities Steamboat Springs.

There is also a chat bot that where users can type in what they are looking for and the site uses artificial intelligent to generate a short list of recommendations. Users will also find a blog section filled with topics of interest for parents. She also recently launched a camp section with hopes of guiding users to things to do when school gets out for the summer.

Currently Kids In Town is available in Steamboat Springs, but place is hoping to grow the site in ski towns across Colorado. She is also hoping to work with local businesses to showcase their offerings and help attract valuable customers.

“I want this to be a useful resource for especially if you’re new parents, and even those that have lived in Steamboat for decades, because they probably don’t know all these things I want to make it useful for locals, especially as their kids grow older and are doing different activities but also make it good for business,” said Place. “

“It’d be amazing if someone types into Google, ‘Great places to vacation with young kids for a ski vacation, and this site comes up and really helps drive them to Steamboat as a place that they want to come to visit,’” she added.