My Kindred Story

I still get a knot in my stomach every time I get a message from my kids' mum.

Not always a big one. Sometimes it's barely there. But it's been three years since our separation turned into a court case, and my nervous system hasn't fully caught up with the fact that it's over.

I'm sharing this because I think a lot of co-parents know exactly what I'm talking about. And because understanding where Kindred came from matters if you're going to trust it with something as important as your family.

The short version

My kids mum and I were together for 17 years. We have two kids. We managed a reasonably amicable separation. We had a verbal agreement for 50/50 care. We were even home schooling together. It was hard, but it was working.

Then it stopped working.

New people came into both our lives. We started disagreeing about what was in the "best interests" of our kids. And then, almost overnight, everything I thought we'd agreed on fell apart. My time with our kids went from 50/50 to 80/20. Unsubstantiated allegations were made. Legal action was threatened.

I'd already tried mediation. When that broke down, I hired a divorce coach. Then, reluctantly, lawyers.

What followed was nearly two years in the court system. I was fighting for two things: equal decision-making and equal shared care. I got the first. Not the second, though I increased my time to 5 nights a fortnight. I believe I had a case for equal care, but I ran out of money before we reached a final hearing, so I settled in mediation.

The whole process cost me over $80,000. Not to mention what it cost emotionally. To both of us, and to our kids.

What I wish I'd known

Looking back, there are things I wish I'd had in those first few months after we separated.

I wish I'd locked in formal agreements at the time of separation, not relied on verbal ones. We had 50/50 written into our divorce papers, but without consent orders, it wasn't enforceable when things broke down.

I wish I'd known the de-escalation techniques my divorce coach eventually taught me. That you don't always need to be right. That sometimes "thanks for letting me know" is the most powerful sentence in the English language.

I wish I'd had a tool that made communication feel less like walking through a minefield.

The app that started as self-defence

During the court case, we started using OurFamilyWizard. It's the app listed in our consent orders.

I'll be honest about my primary use case: I wanted to control when and how my kids mum could reach me. WhatsApp messages at all hours were destroying my peace of mind. I needed a boundary, and the app gave me one.

It worked. Sort of. The messages were contained. The records were there if we needed them. But the app itself felt like it had been designed by lawyers for lawyers and never really updated. Expensive, clunky, and built around the assumption that co-parents are adversaries who need surveillance, not people who need help communicating and helping their kids thrive across two homes.

We were still paying for it when my kids mum asked: "Can we find something cheaper?"

That question lit something up.

Could I actually build this?

I've spent over a decade working in tech. And I'd been watching AI reshape my industry in real time. I started wondering: what if I paired everything I know about building software with everything I've learned (the hard way) about co-parenting?

Could I build a real competitor to the apps on the market? How quickly? Would it actually be any good?

The goal was simple: test if I could hit feature parity with the existing apps, and then see what I could improve.

That experiment became Kindred.

Why it's called Kindred

Kindred means "the condition of being family." It comes from Old English: cynn (kin) and ræden (condition, state). You're still family even when you're not together. That felt right.

I've made some deliberate choices: you'll never see the word "custody" in this app. It's "care time." "Parenting schedule." "My time with the kids." This isn't about being politically correct. The language of co-parenting shapes how you think about your children. They're not assets to have custody of. They're people who live across two homes.

The wild part

Here's where people look at me sideways: I want to get my kids mum involved in building this app.

Not because we've become friends. We haven't. But because the best co-parenting tool should have both parents' perspectives baked into it. If Kindred only works for the parent who happens to be building it, then it doesn't really work.

My kids mum undoubtedly has her own lens on our story and I've considered asking her if she'd consider sharing it here. The invitation is genuine, because this app should be shaped by the reality of co-parenting. Not just one side of it.

What Kindred is becoming

Right now, Kindred has the basics: messaging, a shared calendar you can subscribe to from the calendar app you already use, and expense tracking. It uses AI to help you write messages that stay focused on the kids. Not to police you, but to give you a moment to pause before you send something you'll regret.

I don't want this to be my app. I want it to be shaped by the people who actually need it. Dads, mums, step-parents, grandparents. The whole village.

They say it takes a village to raise a child. Most of us just didn't expect the village to look like this.

But here we are. And it's worth building something that helps.