Daycare Dash had a clear value proposition — connect Canadian parents who need childcare with daycares that have availability — but almost everything behind it was manual. Daycares managed waitlists in spreadsheets and communicated availability over email. Parents who joined received a confirmation and then heard nothing — no position updates, no visibility, no way to know what was happening.
The platform also needed to work the way Canadian childcare actually works: location-filtered matching within a realistic radius, full French and English support, admin oversight on payments to handle the licensed-versus-unlicensed compliance line, and a subscription system that let daycares pay for the software itself. None of that existed yet.
GoldenAxe rebuilt Daycare Dash around three roles — Parent, Daycare, and Admin — and the real operational flow between them. Parents search daycares within a 5km radius, select a class, and submit an application. Daycares see it land in their dashboard with statuses they can progress through: Admit, Waitlist, Reject, or Reorder. When a daycare admits a family, the parent is notified automatically and can accept or reject the offer — accepting enrols the child and auto-closes any other pending applications from the same family.
For daycares, we built a CSV bulk-import flow (with duplicate validation so existing applications can't be recreated and accounts that already exist get the right child attached), a classroom manager with age-group and capacity controls, subscription plans through Stripe, downloadable invoices, and a full transaction log. Admin controls let the core team enable or disable Stripe payment flows for individual daycares — the compliance lever the regulated market requires.
Access and security were hardened with a custom email-based 2FA layer — a random code per login with expiry and resend, stored against the user record. The interface was made fully bilingual: every UI string and every notification adapts to English or French based on the user's saved preference, with the translation layer managed through a Google Sheets workflow that lets the team ship new copy without a code change.
Over the top sits an admin console with system-wide visibility across parents, daycares, children, applications, and subscriptions — plus the enable/disable payment switches needed to manage compliance across licensed and unlicensed providers.
Nine months of reliable operation. The manual matching process is gone. Parents receive automatic status updates the moment an application moves. Daycares self-manage their classes, waitlists, and subscriptions without needing to contact the Daycare Dash team. The admin team has full visibility and the controls they need to keep compliance tight.
The engagement moved from build into ongoing maintenance as the product continued to grow — new daycares onboarding, bilingual content expanding, and operational patterns revealing themselves in real use. The infrastructure scales; the integrations hold; new features slot in without breaking what's already working.