We didn't set out to build software.
We built it because we got tired of the alternatives.
Sundae started inside Hey, Let's Play!, an indoor play cafe in Benton, Arkansas. We opened the cafe with what looked like the obvious stack: a booking tool from one company, a POS from another, a forms app for waivers, a membership platform, and a spreadsheet for the cleaning checklist that lived in the binder by the register.
Within six months we were paying close to $500/month for software that still didn't talk to itself. We were exporting CSVs every Sunday night to reconcile membership perks against POS sales. Our staff was checking three different apps to figure out which family was checked in.
So we started building. First it was little fixes — a daily dashboard, a better waiver flow. Then it was bigger pieces — POS, memberships, the party invite system. Eventually it replaced everything else.
Now we're sharing it. Sundae is what we wish existed when we opened — one tool that knows the parent booking the Saturday party is the same one who bought a membership last month and orders the same latte every Tuesday morning. Built by people who deal with sticky floors and birthday-cake meltdowns, not just spreadsheets.
Hi, Kyle here. 👋
I'm a husband to the cafe's actual owner, dad to three small humans, and the jack-of-everything for whatever Hey, Let's Play! needs that week — fixing the soft-play structure, running a Saturday party, restocking the cold case, and apparently writing the booking software too.
Before all this, I spent 15 years as a solutions engineer in healthcare and enterprise IT — designing telehealth workflows at UAMS during COVID, leading SaaS rollouts at AngelEye Health, and architecting the communication platform serving over a million users at the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. The job, every single time, came down to one thing: take something technical and make it feel obvious to the person on the other end. That's the lens I bring to Sundae.
I'm a customer-experience nerd. I'd rather we ship one feature that takes a parent five fewer seconds at check-in than ten new features that look good in a screenshot. The cafe is Sundae's full-time test lab — if something in the app feels clunky, I'm hitting it myself on the floor that same week. My kids are also the most ruthless QA team I've ever worked with; if a button is too small for a six-year-old to tap, my six-year-old will let me know.
I built Sundae for the version of me that opened our cafe and immediately felt overwhelmed by software bills and CSV exports. If that sounds familiar, let's talk.
What we believe
- Software shouldn't cost more than your rent. The big-name booking + POS combos add up to $500+/mo for a small cafe. That's absurd. We're aiming for a fraction of that.
- One tool, not five.Every integration is a place data goes wrong. We'd rather build a feature once well than glue together someone else's.
- Ship for the cafe, not the boardroom. We add features when staff or parents ask for them, not when a quarterly roadmap demands it.
- If you call, we answer. Direct Slack / text access to the team. No tier-2 support email queue.