Kindred - Your Life, Your Priorities, Your Intentions

Tired of digital noise? Kindred is your personal AI agent. It filters distractions and focuses on your true goals, giving you the power to reclaim your attention and live with intention.

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Inspiration

A person's life is the sum of what they pay attention to. Yet, in today's digital world, our attention has become the most exploited commodity. For decades, as a product leader in MediaTech at Roku and TravelTech at TripIt, my north star was to interrupt and maximize engagement. My job was to pull you in, keep you scrolling, and influence your decisions.

We succeeded. But in doing so, we helped create a world of digital noise and constant distraction. Our relationship with technology is fundamentally broken.

The visual and conceptual inspiration for Kindred is a synthesis of iconic fictional technologies that imagine a better way. From Iron Man's HUD, we see the power of a seamless, context-aware interface that provides critical information without being overwhelming. From the advanced simulations in Ender's Game, we understand the need for a system that helps us learn, strategize, and grow. And most importantly, from Samantha in Her, we recognize the profound necessity of an emotional intelligence interface—one that learns the user’s state and intent, providing gentle nudges and genuine support.

This led to a new mission: to build a tool that gives you back control, blending ambient information design with empathetic AI. I've spent my career building the tools that interrupt you; now, I'm building the tool to shield you. That's the genesis of Kindred.

What it does

Kindred is the universal remote for your digital life. It's a personalized, agentic AI layer that sits between you and the chaotic digital world, moving beyond simple task management to manage your most valuable resource: your attention.

Imagine a morning where, instead of a vortex of notifications, you receive a calm, simple briefing from Kindred: "Good morning. Here are your top 3 work priorities to move the needle on your promotion goal. Just a reminder, your son's picture day is this Friday. Also, your car insurance renews next month—I've already found two quotes that could save you over $400 annually."

How we built it

Kindred's powerful experience is built on a modern, scalable stack designed for rapid development and intelligent data management. We used Bolt.new as our primary tool to harness the power of AI and transform a complex idea into a functional application, drastically reducing the time from concept to reality.

To power the core backend and give Kindred its memory, we integrated Supabase. Here's how the stack works together:

Bolt.new: The engine for the application logic and front-end, allowing us to build and iterate on the user experience with incredible speed.

Supabase Auth: Handles all user authentication, ensuring that every user's data is secure and private from the moment they sign up.

Supabase Database: We use the Postgres database to securely store all message history, creating a log of interactions that helps personalize the user's experience.

Supabase Vector (pgvector): This is the key to Kindred's intelligence. We use it to store vectorized embeddings that create a persistent, semantic memory for the AI. This allows Kindred to understand context, remember user priorities, and learn preferences over time, making it a truly personalized agent.

The architecture is built around three core modules working in concert:

The Shield (Proactive Defense): This is your frontline defense against digital distraction.

The Curator (Intentional Consumption): Leveraging AI, The Curator bundles and summarizes information based on your defined goals. Instead of 100 emails, you get a 3-point summary. Instead of endless news feeds, you get a curated briefing on the topics you care about.

The Agent (Active Management): This is where Kindred truly works for you. The Agent identifies opportunities, handles administrative tasks, and pre-empts problems, automateing your low-value tasks.

Challenges we ran into

The primary challenge was not technical, but philosophical. Building a product whose key success metric is less user engagement is a paradigm shift. The entire tech industry is built on maximizing time-on-site and interaction. We had to constantly resist the pull to add more "features" that would create more noise, and instead stay true to our mission of creating calm and focus.

Translating the abstract concept of "attention management"—inspired by such ambitious sci-fi concepts—into a concrete, intuitive user experience was also a significant hurdle. We went through many iterations to simplify the onboarding process to our three core steps: Connect Your Life, Define Your Priorities, and Live with Intention.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are incredibly proud of creating a tool that serves the user's well-being above all else. Kindred represents a new category of software that re-aligns technology with humanity. Our goal is to help you use your devices less, but better. Success for us is an increase in your focus, well-being, and achievement of your stated goals, not your engagement time with our app.

We believe we have successfully laid the groundwork for the "Attention Management" market, a space for the tens of millions of knowledge workers who know their current relationship with technology is broken and are actively seeking a solution.

What we learned

We learned that by using powerful tools like Bolt.new, Supabase, Gemini and more everyday folks can tackle massive, industry-defining problems. You no longer need a giant team of developers to build something truly transformative.

What's next for Kindred

Our vision for Kindred extends far beyond its current form. While the B2B world is mature with traditional APIs allowing servers to communicate, the consumer world is a mess of fragmented data silos. There is no unified layer that allows a user to connect the disparate parts of their own life. Kindred will be that layer.

Our roadmap is focused on becoming the "API of you," by systematically integrating with the services you use every day. This creates a holistic view of your life, enabling our agent to serve you in truly powerful ways.

Our integration targets span every facet of modern life:

Professional & Productivity: We've started here, linking with Google Workspace, but we'll expand to give you a full view of your career, from LinkedIn to DocuSign.

Travel & Hospitality: Imagine Kindred knowing about your upcoming United flight, your Marriott Bonvoy booking, and your Uber ride to the airport, then proactively shielding your focus time before you travel.

Financial & Shopping: By connecting to your bank, credit cards, and Amazon, Kindred can track your goal to save money and flag when a recurring subscription you don't use is about to renew.

Health & Wellness: With integrations into MyChart, Peloton, and MyFitnessPal, Kindred can help you align your daily schedule with your health goals, ensuring you make time for workouts and meditation.

Family & Home: From tracking your child's progress on Khan Academy and messages from Brightwheel, to managing your Tesla's charging and your Nest thermostat, Kindred becomes a central hub for your home and family life.

Reclaim Your Attention. Amplify Your Life.

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