What building Kindly during the pandemic taught me

In early 2020 the world shut down, and everyone I knew wanted to help but had no idea how. So we built a thing.

It started as Crisis Heroes, a scrappy platform to connect people who needed help with people who could give it. Groceries left at a door, a phone call to someone alone, a lift to an appointment. It won a global Devpost competition for pandemic response, which we genuinely did not see coming, and it grew into Kindly, a free kindness marketplace that eventually connected more than 20,000 volunteers across Australia.

A few lessons stuck with me.

Urgency clarifies. When people need something right now, you stop arguing about features and ship the one that matters. We built more useful product in a few weeks of lockdown than in some entire quiet quarters. The constraint was a gift.

Trust is the whole product. A marketplace for kindness only works if people feel safe on both sides of it. Almost every hard decision we made came back to trust, not features. Get that wrong and nothing else counts.

Free is a strategy and a tax. Making it free got us reach we could never have bought. It also meant we carried the cost, and there's a limit to how long you can do that. Kindly ran its course and we wound it down in 2024. I'm at peace with that. Some things are meant to be a season, not forever.

Mostly, Kindly reminded me why I do this at all. The best feeling in software isn't a clever bit of architecture. It's someone you'll never meet getting help because of something you made.