TinyJawns Turns Two

It started the way most Saturday mornings start in our house, with someone asking "what are we doing today?" and nobody having an answer.

Your mom friend texts the group chat about some cool art thing happening today, but there's no link and no real details. Just "I think it starts at 10?" So you Google it, click through a few websites that haven't been updated in months, and end up staring at an Instagram flyer from last year that may or may not still be relevant.

Forty-five minutes later, you give up and go to the park. The same park you always go to. And then Sunday morning, you see pictures of your friend's kids at a free easter egg hunt at the other park, the one ten minutes from your house. It looked amazing, and you had no idea it was even happening.

This happened to us more often than not.

The scrappy beginning

TinyJawns started as a simple idea to solve a problem we were living every day: a stay-at-home mom trying to keep a 4-year-old busy.

Charlotte wasn't in school yet, and Abby was home with her every day, always looking for ways to get her out of the house. A storytime here, a playground she hadn't tried there, maybe a free museum day if the timing worked out. Just trying to get her exploring the world outside our four walls.

The problem was always finding those things. Every morning felt like the same routine of scrolling through Instagram, checking Facebook groups, Googling around, and texting the group chat, just trying to figure out what was actually happening today.

So Brandon started writing scripts. Every Friday night, he'd run them against hyper-local event sites to pull listings, cross-reference dates, and filter out the stuff that wasn't actually for families. It was janky and completely manual, but it worked well enough to answer the morning question.

Then we started going to those events ourselves. And then we started running our own. We organized a firefighter event and partnered with local small businesses like our friends at Buddy Shop and the crew at South Philly Ice. We were building something, even if we didn't fully know what yet. We were building community.

Then life happened. Our second child arrived.

With our first, we were young parents figuring it out for the first time. This time around, we were older and we knew what mattered. We put the scripts down, stepped back from the events, and focused on being parents again. Being new parents to a newborn is its own kind of starting over.

TinyJawns went quiet, and honestly, it stung. This thing we'd been building, running events, connecting with businesses, pulling together weekend plans for families, it had become like a third child in a lot of ways. We'd poured ourselves into it. But everything was still manual, and manual doesn't survive a newborn. So we let it rest.

The big rebuild

On September 24, 2025, we came back, and the first thing we solved was the reason we had to stop in the first place.

If TinyJawns was going to survive real life, the newborns and the busy seasons and the weeks where you're just tired, it couldn't depend on Brandon running scripts by hand every Friday night. It needed to run itself.

So that's what we built. Brandon's background is in technology, and this time the ambition wasn't just a better-looking site. It was a system. We built an automated pipeline that monitors over 100 local event sites across Philly, pulls in listings, ranks them, and categorizes them, all without us having to touch it. TinyJawns could keep breathing even when we were busy being parents.

On top of that engine, we built the platform with powerful categorization, smart filtering, infinite scrolling, user accounts, and personalized recommendations.

We kept building. We added grid and list views. Popular search chips. Age filters. Time-of-day filters. We indexed hundreds, then nearly a thousand events across the city. On paper, it was impressive.

What we missed

Here's the thing about building cool features: sometimes you're solving your own engineering problem instead of your user's actual problem.

As we got to know more local businesses like our friends at Design Gym, and met other parents at events, we started noticing something. The people who knew us, who followed us, who actually engaged with what we were doing, most of them found us through Instagram. They were following Abby, who was curating events she genuinely thought were interesting. Not an algorithm or a filterable database, just a person saying "hey, this looks good, you should check it out."

That was our signal.

We looked at the data honestly. The site wasn't growing the way we thought it would. People weren't coming to scroll through thousands of events or logging in to get algorithmic recommendations. Friends told us straight up that it had gotten complicated to use. Despite all the cool technology we'd built, it just wasn't what parents needed.

And we knew this because we were those parents. We didn't need a database of a thousand events. We needed someone we trusted to tell us which five things were actually worth our Saturday.

Parents already hear about stuff from friends. They find things that are generally pretty good. The hard part isn't finding something to do. The hard part is missing the great stuff, the event you would have absolutely gone to but it already passed because you didn't hear about it in time.

The pivot

On January 21, 2026, we made the shift.

We moved away from the tech-forward platform and toward something more editorial and more personal. A calmer voice for parents navigating the chaos of raising kids in Philly.

Instead of an app with endless scrolling and a database you have to dig through, we built a curated, trusted selection delivered straight to your inbox. Something designed to fit into the lifestyle of a busy parent, not add to it.

The newsletter became our way of surfacing the things we find important as parents, things we can relate to, things we'd actually take our own kids to. We give it to you so you don't have to go out and find it yourself.

That was the biggest shift for us. We stopped trying to do so much and stopped trying to bring all of Brandon's tech-forward thinking to parents who didn't need it. We started listening to what parents, including ourselves, actually needed.

What TinyJawns is now

Every Thursday, we send one email with our top picks for the weekend. Events, classes, festivals, hidden gems, whatever caught our eye as parents, not as engineers.

You should be able to read it in two minutes and have a plan. No endless scrolling or decision fatigue. Just a trusted friend telling you what's good this weekend.

The newsletter is our foundation, and we're still perfecting it. But we're also slowly adding the things parents keep asking us for, like our Easter egg hunt guides that pull together everything happening across the city so you don't have to. More of that is coming. Curated, useful stuff that saves you time and is built around the moments that matter to your family.

Behind the scenes, we're still tracking thousands of activities across Philly. The technology didn't go away, it just moved to where it belongs, behind the curtain. What you see is the curated result. What we see is the system that makes it possible.

One thing we're proud of is that you won't find random Google ads plastered across our site. We've never collected a dollar in two years, and that's intentional. We're still figuring out the right formula that creates real value for both parents and local businesses. If you're a local business and you'd love to help sponsor what we're doing, we'd love to hear from you. We're just not going to rush into something that doesn't feel right for the people reading this.

That said, it's not free to run. The site costs money, the systems cost money, and even with the automation, putting together each newsletter still takes real time and energy. Most Wednesday nights, Abby and I are going back and forth about what makes the cut and what doesn't. Yesterday, I was up until 12:41 AM working on our pre-Easter weekend newsletter because I wanted it to be perfect.

This blog is where we'll share more of that journey, what we're building, what we're learning, and what we think about raising kids in this city. Some posts will be for parents, some will be for organizers, and all of it will be honest.

Why "TinyJawns"?

If you're not from Philly, a "jawn" is... everything. It's a thing. It's the thing. It's whatever you need it to be. It's the most versatile word in the English language and it's ours.

Tiny jawn = your kid. Your little jawn. The small human you're trying to entertain on a rainy Saturday.

We thought about a dozen other names. None of them felt like Philly. This one did.

Two years, two kids, over a hundred local sites monitored, and one email every Thursday.

We started TinyJawns because Abby needed something to do with a 4-year-old on a Tuesday. We kept going because it turns out a lot of Philly parents feel the same way.

Thanks for being here. If you know a parent who's tired of the Saturday morning scroll, send them our way.

Here's to year three.

— Brandon & Abby