An Engineer Dad’s Side Project: Finding Toys for My Daughters Turned into a Warm, 79,000-User Entrepreneur Journey

1. Where It All Began: I Just Wanted to Help My Daughters Find the Toys They Loved

Last Tuesday, McDonald’s officially launched the Hello Kitty & Friends × Godzilla Happy Meal collaboration. On day one of the campaign, as a dad, I immediately took the whole family to eat at McDonald’s without hesitation, determined to help my daughters collect their favorite designs.

However, I quickly realized that collecting this series was far more difficult than expected: every location had different toys available at any given moment. From Tuesday through Friday, finding a specific number meant constantly asking around in Facebook groups, Reddit threads, or various Messenger chats.

Every day, everyone was asking: "Does anyone know where #3 is?" "Which location has this style today?" "Does anyone know where to find it nearby?"

There was plenty of information, but it was scattered and messy, making it hard to find the actual answers needed quickly. This pain point fermented in my mind for several days. By Friday night after getting off work, I decided not to rest and thought: why not use the skills I have to build a simple, clean tool—first to help myself, my family, and friends around me who were also searching all over the place solve this problem!

I wrote code continuously from late Friday night through Saturday morning and completed the first version of core features:

• Pre-mapped over 13,000 McDonald’s locations across the United States
• Enabled one-click geolocation for users to quickly search nearby stores
• Real-time filtering based on toy numbers
• Built a lightweight, one-click reporting mechanism so everyone could effortlessly log the toys they saw on-site

Although I initially just wanted to share it with friends in the Bay Area, not knowing whether more people might need it in the future, I designed the architecture for a nationwide scale right from the start.

On Saturday afternoon, the first version of Happy Toy Scout officially went live.

2. From Manual Screenshots to a Warm, Self-Sustaining Community

When it first launched, the website only had a little over 200 initial data points contributed by friends.

To get this tool truly moving, I used the most direct and time-consuming method—Do things that don’t scale: Whenever I saw a parent on social media asking for help finding a specific number, I personally opened the website to check, took a screenshot of the map, and replied to them in the comments.

These actions seemed small, but gradually, reports began to increase. Users expanded from the Bay Area to Los Angeles, and then to other cities across the country.

More and more strangers took the initiative to repost and share. Some submitted the toys they spotted, some helped spread the word, and even more people, after getting a toy at a store, conveniently logged a report on the website—saving the next rushing parent a few wasted trips.

Watching the metrics climb entry by entry, I was truly moved. Because this was no longer just a small tool I built for my daughters; it had transformed into a warm community where everyone provided information and mutually helped one another with goodwill.

3. Burning Through the Free Tier in Under Two Days: A Truly Hands-On System Design Trial

Of course, along with the explosive traffic came architectural challenges I hadn't anticipated at all.

In less than two days after launch, the originally set free cloud service quota was completely exhausted and exceeded by far.

At that moment, beyond the excitement, what I felt was the cold sweat of an engineer—this was originally just a small side project, and I definitely did not want to receive an astronomical cloud bill at the end of the month. Thus, over the past few days, I began rapidly refactoring the system, figuring out how to keep the website operating stably under controlled costs.

This turned into an intensely practical System Design exercise:

• Precise Cache Trade-offs: Which static store data and historical reports were suitable for caching? Which real-time reports needed to be kept as fresh as possible?
• Reducing Ineffective Load: How could unnecessary API calls and database reads be drastically reduced?
• Balancing Experience and Cost: How could the system scale elastically during traffic surges to keep server expenses low, while still ensuring that when users opened the map, it loaded instantly and filtered smoothly?

These questions might usually appear in big tech architecture documents or technical interviews, but in this project, they became real decisions I had to face personally every day. Many technical concepts only transform into profound architectural insights when real users flood in and the system begins to bear real pressure.

4. Unexpected Warmth: The $1, $2 Support and Genuine Messages

On the third day after launch, I added Buy Me a Coffee and Venmo support links to the bottom of the website.

Gradually, I began receiving small $1 and $2 contributions from users, accompanied by many warm messages thanking me for helping them find the toys they wanted.

Calculated purely by an engineer’s working hours and hourly rate, these amounts were obviously disproportionate. But this was the first time I conceived, developed, and promoted an independent product entirely on my own, receiving tangible feedback from complete strangers.

That feeling of validation went far beyond the meaning of the monetary amount—it let me know that I had genuinely solved a real, everyday pain point for everyone.

One-Week Data Review

• Cumulative Active Users: 79,000+
• Total Page Views: 360,000+
• Crowdsourced Community Reports: Nearly 19,000
• Store Coverage Scale: 13,000+ across the U.S.

The starting point of Happy Toy Scout was actually very pure.

I just wanted to help my daughters find the toys they loved, and prevent my family and friends from having to ask around and rush everywhere just to find a toy. Little did I expect that a small idea on a Friday night would evolve within a single week into an exceptionally comprehensive product and entrepreneurship learning journey: from identifying a problem, rapidly building an MVP, to community cold starts, finding users, handling high concurrency traffic, System Design, caching strategies, and cost control.

I sincerely thank every friend who submitted reports, reposted and shared, provided feedback, and left tips and encouragement over the past week. It is everyone’s enthusiasm and trust that gave this project life, and gave me the greatest motivation to continue optimizing it.

Moving forward, I will continue to invest in:

• Continuous Optimization & Bug Fixes: Refining current search, map experience, and data accuracy to be smoother based on everyone's valuable feedback.
• Preparing for the Next Big Campaign: Modularizing the system architecture so future collaborations or collection events can transition seamlessly.
• Exploring International Expansion: Evaluating the feasibility of expanding this crowdsourced map model to other countries to help parents and collectors in more regions.

This project helped me rediscover the purest joy of coding: using the technology I possess to solve a real problem for the people around me, making everyone's life a little easier and a little happier.

Happy Toy Scout is just getting started, and this is already an immensely valuable Entrepreneur Journey. Thank you all for walking with me!