Estimated reading time: 9 minutes

And just like that 2022 is over!

Being an entrepreneur can be a demanding and stressful experience, but also extremely rewarding. It’s only when I look back that I realise how truly incredible a journey that I am on.

What does a year in Kindspace look like? This is not something I leave just to the end of the year to review. Ever since I started working with Thomas on our smart home business ideas I’ve prepared little summaries of our activities every two months at least, so that we are able to celebrate the little wins. It helps me to appreciate all the effort and hard work to see it written down and to feel less down about all the rejections along the way.

This end of year round up is in no way meant to glamourise entrepreneurship. If I wrote down all the things that haven’t gone right, like the failed funding and project applications, it would literally be pages and pages and pages, and it would also make me question why I keep putting myself out there. It is seriously hard.

Our little team at TL Tech has delivered some truly remarkable achievements and I like to share some of them here with you.

Kindspace

We launched our new Kindspace website and shop. Creating a space and an identity just for Kindspace has been a big focus for the year. It’s also made twice as much work! As we now have two lots of everything across the social media world to separate out Kindspace from the main TL Tech operations.

We’ve also had fun experimenting with other tech products such as Genial.ly, Trello and Notion. You can check out our Kindspace products on these platforms here:

Calendar on Genial.ly FREE!!!

Habit Builder on Trello  FREE!!!

Life Planner on Notion GET 25% discount with code: Kindspace25OFF

If you haven’t used any of these tools before, they are in my top four recommendations for creating beautiful and practical visuals, with Canva being my absolute favourite!!!

I have been tapping into my creative side developing the new wellness activities and graphics. We also launched stories on Kindspace in collaboration with an amazing writer called Neil Bebber. This is our first creative collaboration and we’re looking forward to growing our content further through collaboration.

One thing that I’m really proud of is how much Thomas has done this year with the code that sits in behind Kindspace on Alexa. We set ourselves the goal of giving our Kindspace users personalised tip recommendations based on their Kindspace check-in results, but didn’t want to overly complicate things with Artificial Intelligence (AI) at this stage. We’ve achieved this with funding support from Opportunity North East and the North East Economic Recovery and Skills Fund (NEERSF) and now have a clearer plan for how we can incorporate AI in the future.

Out and About

This year saw us out and about a bit more.

Nescol collaboration

We finally got to meet the team at North East Scotland College (Nescol) at the opening of their Future Skills Zone in Fraserburgh. We’re really passionate about supporting the younger generation so this collaboration was really important to us and we’re so proud to have created an interactive teaching resource where students can learn about smart homes, including the use cases, wiring, electronics and programming.

Events

Caroline presented at the Digit North Innovation Summit in Aberdeen about voice tech for business, and provided opening remarks and hosted a discussion table at the SCDI Forum on the topic of Creating an Enterprising Nation down in Edinburgh.

Kindspace sponsored the Aberdeen Health and Wellbeing Festival. It was great to see this event back in person and we even got to meet Dr Emma Hepburn, aka The Psychology Mum.

Thomas headed down to Glasgow for the CENSIS Technology Summit and Conference and met the founder of MQTT.

Caroline was fortunate to go on an Innovate UK Global Business Innovation Programme visit to Canada. The trip allowed us to find out more about the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Montreal, which is one of the biggest deep learning and AI research hubs in the world.

Awards

Caroline was a finalist in the FDM Everywoman in Technology Awards in the Tech for Good Category.

Kindspace won the IT4Anxiety UK Hackathon and Caroline and Phoebe were able to present at the programme mid-term conference in Lille.

And on the same day of the Hackathon announcement, we won the top prize at the Aberdeen Elevator Awards, a £10k advertising prize package from STV.

In case you missed it, here’s the advert which we ran for two weeks in November to align with Kindspace’s second birthday and World Kindness Day. Huge thanks to Neil Haston for helping us to make this as it turned out so amazing!!!!

https://youtu.be/ta0tqROkrng

I have so much to be grateful for and I’m really looking forward to 2023. Last year feels like a bit of turning point in our journey, where lots of things started to fall into place. I have many people to thank, but most of all I’m thanking my inner mentor, she has always been there for me guiding me and this year I feel like I’ve connected with myself at a much deeper level. This might all sound a bit woo woo, but it’s mainly due to two amazing things that have come into my life over the last few years. The first was meeting the amazing Frances McIntosh and then devouring all of Brene Brown’s books and the second was reading a book called Playing Big by Tara Mohr.

Frances helped me to put together a vision board during the Scottish Enterprise Principally Women programme in 2022. And now I’m going to a voice technology conference in Tennessee in April this year that just so happens to be only 2 hours drive from Nashville, which I’d put on my vision board. A true example of manifestation in action. I am also beyond excited to have been gifted a scholarship with Tara Mohr on her 8 month Playing Big training programme this year. I will of course share more on this and our other new exciting projects and activities as the year goes on!

So here's to an amazing 2023 and thank you for all your amazing support, Thomas and I are so blessed to have you!