Why I Made Bedtime

Kenny · Founder, Bedtime

Bedtime is my favorite part of the day, and I don't think I'm unusual in that.

My wife and I had our first, Chase, in late 2025. Almost immediately, without anybody deciding it, the end of the day turned into a ritual. Lights low, one of us on the floor by the crib, a book. However the day went — and some of them go badly — it ends the same way, with the three of us and the next page. It's the part of the day we both look forward to most.

We love the classics. We already have the soft-cornered, taped-spine copies to prove it. The problem was never the books. It's that a baby's library is short and their appetite is not, so you end up reading the same five stories several hundred times, and you know them so completely that your mouth can say them while your mind is entirely elsewhere.

So I started improvising to keep myself in the room. A different voice for every character. A bear with a posh British accent. A wolf who sounds suspiciously like an uncle of mine. And sometimes I'd swap the hero's name out and put Chase's in instead.

The voices get a laugh. But the name gets something better — he looks up. Every time. He is nine months old and doesn't know what a story is, and he still knows that one word belongs to him.

I don't want Chase to just hear about adventures. I want him to grow up knowing adventures are for him.

That's what I'm actually hoping bedtime does, once he's old enough for it to stick. And a printed book can carry a lot of it. But the hero is always someone else's child, in someone else's world, and mine is always the audience.

So the thought was simple, and a little obvious once I'd had it: with everything technology can do now, why are we still reading someone else's tale? Why can't the story be a new one each time — and why can't the main character be the person I'm reading it to?

That's Bedtime. Your family becomes the cast. Your kids, you, the grandparents, the dog. They're illustrated as real characters, and they stay consistent from page to page and story to story, in a world that remembers what happened last time — so the next one is the next chapter, not a reset. Nobody is the audience. Everybody is in the book.

I want Chase to grow up in a world of wonder. Light, amazing, a little bit thrilling. I want him to see himself inside the fantastic tales instead of watching them from the outside, so that the world he falls asleep in is all sunshine — and so he grows up believing he could do absolutely anything.

One thing that won't change: Bedtime doesn't read the story to your child. You do. We make the book — you're the narrator, terrible accents included. That moment I started this with is the thing we're building around, not the thing we're replacing.

And yes, there's AI underneath all of this. That's what makes it possible for a family to get an original illustrated book for less than the cost of one hardcover. But the AI isn't the product any more than the printing press was the product. The product is a kid holding a book with their own name on the cover, asking you to read it one more time.

I'm at the very beginning of this with my own son. If you're somewhere further along with yours, I'd love for you to try it — and if you try it and it isn't right, I'd genuinely rather hear that from you than not. My inbox is on the contact page and I read all of it.

— Kenny and the Bedtime team