Read the inspiring story of Karolina Gudes, founder of Kidora
Find out how the problem of trying to sell perfectly good outgrown baby clothes and toys inspired Karolina Gudes to launch Kidora, the UK’s trusted marketplace for buying and selling preloved baby and kids items.
Motherhood didn’t reduce my ambition. It gave me a problem worth solving
Before I became a mum, I don’t think I ever wondered whether motherhood would make me less ambitious.
Then I had children, and I discovered something very different.
My ambition hadn’t disappeared. If anything, it had become more focused. I cared more about how I spent my time, what I was building and whether the work I was doing actually meant something to me.
Motherhood didn’t make me want less.
It made me much clearer about what was worth wanting.
And, unexpectedly, it gave me the problem that would eventually lead me to start Kidora.
The idea didn’t begin as a business
Like many parents, I suddenly found our home filling up with things our children had outgrown.
Clothes that had barely been worn. Toys that were no longer played with. Baby equipment we didn’t need anymore.
None of it was necessarily worth much individually, but together it represented a surprising amount of money. And much of it still had plenty of life left.
Selling those things should have been simple.
It wasn’t.
I tried the places parents naturally turn to, including Facebook Marketplace, but I became frustrated by the amount of time involved. People would arrange to collect something and not turn up. Messages would go unanswered. You could spend an evening dealing with enquiries about an inexpensive children’s item only for nothing to happen.
When you have young children, your time feels different.
Twenty minutes isn’t just twenty minutes anymore. It’s twenty minutes you could have spent making dinner, getting things ready for tomorrow, playing with your children or, occasionally, doing absolutely nothing after a long day.
I kept thinking there had to be a better way.
Not simply another enormous marketplace that happened to contain children’s things, but somewhere actually built around family life.
That thought stayed with me.
Eventually, it became Kidora.
I didn’t have the perfect circumstances to start a company
There is a version of entrepreneurship that looks wonderfully organised from the outside.
You have an idea. You write a business plan. You raise money. You leave your job. You assemble a team. Then you launch.
That isn’t our story.
When I decided to pursue Kidora, I was a mum of two young children and working full-time. My partner Martin was working full-time too.
We didn’t have investors waiting to fund us. We didn’t have a large team. We didn’t have the luxury of putting the rest of life on hold while we built a startup.
We had normal jobs, children, bills, bedtimes, washing, shopping and all the ordinary responsibilities that don’t disappear because you’ve had an idea.
So Kidora had to fit into the spaces around all of that.
Evenings. Weekends. Conversations after the children were settled. Notes on phones. Ideas discussed between everything else that needed doing.
There were plenty of moments when it would have been easier to say, “This isn’t the right time.”
But I’m beginning to wonder whether there ever really is a right time.
Sometimes you don’t need perfect circumstances.
You just need to care enough about the problem to keep going.
Our first version wasn’t perfect, and that was important
We originally launched Kidora in May 2025 as a WordPress-based marketplace.
It wasn’t the platform I ultimately imagined.
But it existed.
That mattered.
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that you can spend forever waiting until something is perfect enough to show people. Starting imperfectly teaches you things that planning never can.
Once Kidora was being used by real parents, we could see more clearly what worked, what didn’t and what we wanted the platform to become.
That eventually led to a much bigger decision.
Rather than continuing to patch and extend the original platform, we decided to rebuild Kidora properly.
Martin and our friend John, both Senior Software QA Engineers, spent around a year rebuilding the technology around a Laravel backend and native iOS and Android apps.
It was a huge amount of work.
And again, it happened around full-time jobs and family life.
We’ve put roughly £7,000 of our own money into Kidora so far. There are three of us behind it, and none of us takes a salary from the business.
I still have my job.
There is no glamorous startup office.
There wasn’t a dramatic moment when somebody handed us a cheque and told us to go and change the world.
There were simply three people who believed the idea deserved the chance to become something real.
Motherhood became an advantage I hadn’t expected
There is a narrative women hear surprisingly often that motherhood somehow makes us less serious about our careers.
I understand why the assumption exists.
Children absolutely change your priorities. They change your schedule. They place limits on your time that weren’t there before.
But I’ve found that having less time can make you much more deliberate about how you use it.
Motherhood also gave me something incredibly valuable as a founder: proximity to the problem.
I’m not trying to imagine what parents might need from behind a boardroom table.
I’m one of them.
I know what it feels like to discover that another pile of clothes no longer fits.
I know the frustration of trying to find somewhere to take the children at the weekend.
I know what it’s like to search for straightforward parenting information while you’re already tired and short of time.
And I know that parents don’t experience these things as separate problems.
That realisation changed Kidora too.
What began with buying and selling preloved children’s things has grown into a wider UK family platform.
There is still the Marketplace, where parents can buy and sell baby and children’s items without Kidora charging sellers commission.
But we have also built the Parent Hub, with practical information for families, and Family Places, which now brings together more than 6,500 places around the UK that parents can discover with their children.
Those weren’t features invented because they looked good on a pitch deck.
They came from living the problem.
Building something with your partner is another kind of adventure
Martin has been part of Kidora from the beginning, and building a company together while raising two children has certainly tested our ability to switch off.
There are evenings when a normal conversation can very quickly become a discussion about an app feature, a seller journey or something that needs fixing.
You have to learn when to be founders and when to just be a family.
We don’t always get that balance right.
I’m not sure many founders with young children genuinely do.
I also don’t particularly like the phrase “having it all” because it makes it sound as though there is some perfect state where work, children, relationships and your own needs all receive exactly the right amount of attention.
My experience is much messier than that.
Some days Kidora gets more of me.
Some days my children need more of me.
Sometimes the laundry wins.
The important thing for me isn’t achieving perfect balance every day. It’s knowing why I’m doing this in the first place.
I want my children to grow up seeing that an idea doesn’t have to remain an idea simply because pursuing it is difficult.
The hardest part isn’t necessarily building the technology
People sometimes assume the biggest challenge in creating a platform like Kidora must be the app itself.
Technology is difficult, certainly.
But I think one of the hardest things about building any business from nothing is continuing when there is no guarantee that it will work.
When you’re self-funded, every pound matters.
When your team is only three people, every person’s time matters.
And when you’re building around jobs and children, the hours you give the business have to come from somewhere.
You can work incredibly hard on something and still have no certainty about what happens next.
That requires a different kind of resilience.
There have been moments of doubt. Of course there have.
But then something small happens.
Someone registers.
A parent lists their children’s things.
Someone makes a sale.
You see people using something that previously existed only as an idea in your head.
Those moments are difficult to describe.
They make the late nights feel worthwhile.
Then I saw our story in a national newspaper
One of the strangest moments so far was seeing our story featured by The Sun on Sunday.
Kidora had been built so quietly.
For a long time, it was essentially our family, John, our computers and a huge amount of work happening behind the scenes.
Suddenly, something we’d created around our everyday lives was being read about nationally.
It didn’t mean we’d “made it”. We’re still at the beginning, and there is an enormous amount we want to achieve.
But it did make me stop for a moment.
When you’re constantly focused on the next problem, you don’t always notice how far you’ve already travelled.
I thought back to the frustration that started all of this: simply trying to sell children’s things that we no longer needed.
At the time, it was an annoyance.
I couldn’t have known it would become the starting point for a company.
Success looks different to me now
Before children, I probably would have measured ambition mostly by conventional milestones.
Today, success feels more personal.
I want Kidora to become the UK’s leading platform for preloved baby and children’s items. I’m not shy about that ambition.
But I also want to build something useful.
I want a parent clearing out a cupboard to be able to turn things their child has outgrown into money for the family.
I want another parent to be able to buy those things for less than buying new.
I want perfectly usable children’s belongings to have another life rather than sitting forgotten in homes or becoming waste.
That thinking has also led us to launch Outgrown, Not Wasted, a free seven-day clear-out challenge for UK families.
The idea is simple: take the children’s things that have accumulated in cupboards, wardrobes, lofts and garages and make a decision about what happens next. Keep it, pass it on, donate it, recycle it or sell it.
For me, the campaign goes back to the same problem that started Kidora. Children grow incredibly quickly, but the things they outgrow often still have plenty of life left in them. I want to encourage families to see those things not as clutter, but as something that can be useful again, whether that means helping another family, raising a little money or simply keeping something in use for longer.
And increasingly, I want Kidora to help with more of the small problems that consume parents’ time.
That’s a much bigger ambition than the one I started with.
But it grew naturally from being a mum.
I don’t think motherhood and ambition belong on opposite sides
If there is one thing I would tell another woman with young children who has an idea, it is this:
Don’t automatically assume this is the wrong chapter of your life to pursue it.
Your life may be busier than it has ever been.
You may have less uninterrupted time.
You may need to build more slowly than somebody without the same responsibilities.
You might have to work after bedtime instead of spending twelve uninterrupted hours at a desk.
That doesn’t make your ambition less valid.
And slow progress is still progress.
You also don’t need to know everything before you begin.
I certainly didn’t.
Our first platform wasn’t our final platform. We’ve made mistakes. We’ve changed direction. We’ve learned as we’ve gone.
We’re still learning.
Kidora isn’t a finished success story that I’m looking backwards on.
We’re still right in the middle of it.
And perhaps that’s the part I most want other women to see.
You don’t have to wait until the ending before your journey is worth talking about.
I’m a mum of two. I have a full-time job. I’m building a company with a tiny team and our own money. Some days are exciting. Some are exhausting. Some contain both within about ten minutes of each other.
But becoming a mother didn’t close the door on my ambition.
It gave that ambition a purpose.
And it gave me a problem I cared enough about to try to solve.
Find out more about Kidora.
