The book I couldn't find

A few weeks ago I went looking for a children's book about skiing, and I couldn't find one.

My son is three, and I want to take him up the hill for the first time next winter. I had this idea that the best way to get him excited wasn't to keep telling him about it, but to read him a story — a kid his age learning to ski, nervous at the top, grinning by the bottom — until it felt familiar before we ever got there. It seemed like such an obvious book to want that I assumed it already existed.

It didn't. I checked Amazon, the library, a couple of bookstores. There's plenty for older kids, but nothing for a three-year-old, and nothing like the story I actually had in mind. Normally that's the kind of small thing you forget by morning. This one stuck.

I should say who I am. I'm Charles — a dad of two, soon to be three, and I've spent the last twenty years in tech. I started as a developer and somewhere along the way became a founder: a few years ago, three partners and I built a company and eventually sold it. I still work at the company that bought us. It's been good — but I've missed building something of my own, moving fast and getting obsessed with the details the way you only do when the thing is yours. I'd wanted to start something new for a long time. Between a full-time job and small kids at home, the timing never lined up.

The truth is I'd been carrying this idea for more than two years: books where your own child is the main character. It's not a new idea, and that was never the hard part. The hard part was that the technology couldn't really do it yet. If you tried to generate the same character with AI, you'd get a kid who looked like a completely different child from one page to the next — different face, different hair. And a book where the hero keeps changing isn't really a book.

That's the part that finally changed. The tools got good enough to keep the character actually consistent — the same child, recognizably themselves, from the first page to the last and from one book to the next. When I saw that working, the reason I'd kept putting this off was gone.

So I decided to actually do it. This time looks different from the last one, though. Back then there were four of us. This time it's just me — no co-founders, no investors, no outside money. It's a small, bootstrapped thing I work on at night, once the kids are asleep. There have been a lot of late nights, but honestly, I don't really mind them.

That's what Toupie is. You create your child's character once — along with your family, their friends, even the dog if you want — and from then on they get to be the hero of their own stories. The kid who isn't in any book on the shelf becomes the main character. And that skiing story I went looking for? I can just make it now, and read it to my son before his first day on the hill, more or less exactly the way I pictured it.

I'm building Toupie for the parent I was that night: sitting on the couch, looking for one specific story that would mean something to my kid, and not finding it. If you've ever been that parent too, I think you'll like what's coming.

— Charles