I was a senior engineer at a startup that evolved into this space – basically, we started as a browser for kids and slowly started adding more "social" features. I thought I'd add a few notes in case you (or someone else) goes down this road:
- Monetization is hard. As much as parents vocally _desire_ a safe space for their kids online, it doesn't translate to their wallet. If you end up going for more indirect revenue (ads, branded experience, etc), you'll find yourself in ethical gray areas quickly.
- Read up heavily on COPPA. It is by no means insurmountable, but it adds more work and restricts what you can/can't do.
- Social interaction needs to either be severely limited or heavily moderated, both of which have serious problems. You can't just throw a kid into peer-to-peer chat rooms or private chat for obvious reasons. Likewise, a kid gets bored quickly with a pre-determined set of "emotes" or canned text. Finding a balance between the two is very difficult.
- Parents care less than they think they do. Every parent, from casual conversation to focus groups, will light up at the idea of a kid-safe internet/social network. However, we found parent engagement to severely drop after initial sign up, despite how active the kid might be. We did weekly reports on kid activity and interests, ways to share content and engage with your kid, etc – all of which was rarely used.
Granted, it's quite possible (probable) that we missed the mark, and that we just didn't have the right timing/vision/execution, but there was enough friction that I came out the other end with a strong bias against working in the kids' space again.