From the Founders: Why Two Parents Built Storywish

Justin and Seth on why they built Storywish, how they think about kids and AI, and the rules they hold themselves to as parents building for other parents.

By Justin Ponczek and Seth Gold, Storywish cofounders · Last updated July 20, 2026

We are Justin and Seth, the two parents behind Storywish. Before this was a company it was a thing we did with our own kids: making up stories where they were the hero, and watching what that did to their faces.

Why we built it

We know the bedtime "one more story" negotiation. We know the couch crumbs, and those moments when your kid's imagination completely floors you. We wanted a way to encourage that imagination instead of just consuming someone else's: to let a kid dream up a character, change the plot halfway through, and hold real pages with their own wild ideas on them.

The technology finally made that possible. A story written for exactly one child, illustrated with that child on every page, ready in the time it takes to brush teeth, and printable as a real book grandparents can keep on a shelf. That felt worth building.

The uncomfortable part, addressed first

Building an AI product for children means asking families for real trust, starting with a photo of their kid. We felt that weight as parents before we felt it as founders, so we set rules before we wrote code:

The photo you upload creates your character and is then deleted. It is never used to train AI models.
We do not sell your family's data, and we do not share it for marketing.
You can read, edit, and delete everything your family makes, any time.
Every vendor we depend on is listed publicly, with a data processing agreement behind it.

These live in detail in our Parents Trust Center, in how we handle your child's photo, and in our answer to the bigger question, is AI safe for kids' storybooks. We also published the checklist we would use on any AI kids app, and we invite you to run it on ours.

What we hope you get out of it

Not screen time. The best Storywish moments end away from the screen: reading a page aloud in a silly voice, a printed book in a bedtime rotation, a kid explaining with great authority what their character should have done instead. If you have ever wished for more of those messy, magical moments together, we hope Storywish helps you find them.

If anything here does not hold up to your scrutiny, tell us directly: seth@storywish.ai. We read it.

Justin and Seth, Storywish cofounders