The public business directory in KiddyCash started simple — a list, a search bar, and however many businesses had signed up in a given country. That works fine when there are a dozen of them. It stops working the moment there are hundreds, and hundreds is exactly where growing markets across many communities are headed as more families and kid-run shops join. So we spent some time on what sounds like a small problem — helping someone find the right business faster — because it turns out to be a bigger deal than it looks.
Two very different ways people search
Watch how families actually use a directory and you’ll notice two completely different habits. Some people know exactly what they want — “the bakery two blocks from us,” typed by name. Others are browsing with a fuzzier goal — “something food-related,” with no specific business in mind yet. A single search bar only really serves the first group. The second group ends up scrolling through everything, which in a directory of any real size just means giving up.
Category chips for the browsers
So alongside the search bar, the directory now shows a row of category chips — pulled live from whatever categories are actually registered in a given country, not a fixed hardcoded list. Tap “Food,” or “Services,” or whatever categories are active where you are, and the directory narrows to just that group instantly. It’s the browsing experience people expect from any modern marketplace, just scaled down to fit a directory that’s just as likely to contain a twelve-year-old’s dog-walking service as it is a real bakery.
Combined search for everyone else
The more interesting piece is what happens when someone uses both tools at once — picks a category, then types a name inside it. Under the hood, that’s a genuinely different query than either search or category browsing alone; it has to match on category and name together, not just filter one after finding the other. We built that as its own dedicated lookup rather than bolting it onto the existing endpoints, because “bakeries named Sunrise” is a different question than “everything named Sunrise” or “everything that’s a bakery” — and we wanted the answer to come back exactly as fast either way.
Why this is a financial-literacy feature too, not just UX polish
There’s a version of this story that’s purely about interface design, and that version is true but incomplete. The more interesting version is that discoverability is part of how a marketplace teaches fairness. A kid-run business that’s easy to find on equal footing with an established chain — searchable the same way, browsable in the same categories — gets a genuinely fair shot at being chosen on its own merits. That’s a small thing to engineer and a meaningful thing to have gotten right: the twelve-year-old’s lemonade stand and the neighborhood bakery show up in exactly the same list, under exactly the same categories, found by exactly the same search.
What’s next
Directories tend to get more useful the more people use them, and category data is no exception — the categories you see today reflect what businesses have actually registered, which means the directory itself grows more precise as the marketplace grows. We’ll keep tuning this as usage patterns tell us more about how people actually search versus how we assumed they would.