Twelve Weeks: What Elevate Taught Me About Building Kinda.

Twelve weeks ago, I walked into the Enterprize Elevate accelerator with an idea I believed in and a plan I wasn't sure would hold up under scrutiny. I wanted to prove that sustainability could feel like community, not guilt. I just didn't know yet whether that idea could carry the weight of an actual business.

I'm writing this from the other side of those twelve weeks, and the honest answer is: it held up. But not in the way I expected when I started.

Why I applied

Kinda. began as a response to something I kept noticing, in my own life and in the people around me. Sustainability conversations so often come loaded with shame. Not doing enough. Not doing it right. Not doing it at all. I wanted to build something different, a way for people, families and organisations to take small, doable steps towards a more sustainable life, without the guilt or the jargon.

That idea felt clear to me. What wasn't clear was how to structure it, price it, and pitch it in a way that made sense to anyone outside my own head. That's what I hoped Elevate would give me. It did, but it also gave me things I hadn't asked for.

What the twelve weeks actually looked like

Elevate is not a gentle process. The mentoring I had access to meant getting direct, sometimes uncomfortable feedback on pricing, on pitch structure, on the gap between what I thought I was offering and what a founding rate client would actually pay for. Weekly sessions pushed me to think harder about go-to-market and digital strategy than I had at any point before.

I was doing all of this while completing a double degree, organising and delivering Kinda.forward and most importantly, being Mum to my daughter. There were weeks where the accelerator felt like the only thing keeping the business moving forward, and weeks where I wasn't sure I had the hours to give it what it needed. I didn't slow Kinda. down to make room for Elevate. I found out what Kinda. could actually become when I gave it real structure and real pressure at the same time.

None of that would have meant as much without the cohort I got to do it alongside. A room full of founders building genuinely different businesses, all wrestling with the same early-stage questions, pricing, positioning, how honest to be about what isn't working yet. Watching their ideas sharpen week on week pushed me to be more rigorous with my own. Some of the best feedback I had on Kinda. came from people who had no reason to be generous with their time except that we were all in it together.

The Graduation over Lunch

Inspiration at a dinner table.

The proof of concept

The biggest test of those twelve weeks was Kinda.forward, our pilot event, delivered on 27 June at UTAS Inveresk. Over 500 people came through the doors. Forty-six contributors gave their time, expertise and energy to make it happen. A hundred and thirty-five partners and contributors backed it in one form or another. WIN News, Seven News, The Examiner and ABC Northern Tasmania all covered it.

None of that happened because the idea was good on paper. It happened because enough people believed the same thing I did, that sustainability doesn't have to be heavy to be real. Kinda.forward was the proof of concept that everything else has been built on since.

What it launched

That pilot event became the launchpad for Kinda.futures and Kinda.evolve, our consulting and organisational programs for small businesses and community organisations. We opened a founding cohort, capped deliberately small, and we received our first signed paying client. Not a trial. Not a favour. A business relationship built on the same principles I'd been trying to prove all along.

That's the part of this journey I'm proudest of. Not the pitch, not the accelerator itself, but the fact that Kinda. now has real clients, real revenue, and a real model that holds up outside of a pitch deck.

What I'm taking with me

If I'm honest, the biggest shift over these twelve weeks wasn't strategic. It was personal. I came in treating Kinda. as something I was building around everything else in my life. I'm leaving treating it as something that deserves its own structure, its own boundaries, and its own director's fee, because my time on this is not free, and pretending otherwise was never going to be sustainable for me or for the business.

I also learned to trust sequencing over speed. Kinda. has five streams, together, sprouts, evolve, futures and forward, and the temptation to launch everything at once was real. What Elevate reinforced for me is that a business built slowly and deliberately, one proven stream at a time, is a business that lasts. That's the version of Kinda. I'm building.

Where this goes next

The next ninety days are already mapped out, and I'm saying this publicly because I want to be held to it. I'm filling our remaining founding cohort spots across Futures and Evolve. I'm onboarding that first wave of clients through The Kinda. Way, and becoming a Catalyst Organisation for Heywire Tamar Valley. And I'm confirming our venue dates for FutureFwd Tasmania 2027, the next chapter of the event that started all of this.

Twelve weeks ago I came into Elevate trying to prove an idea could work. What I actually walked away with was a business, a client, a community, and a much clearer sense of what I'm capable of building, even in a season of life that is already full.

My biggest thanks to Alex Howearth and Jo Jacobs, whose mentoring shaped the way I think about pricing, positioning and what this business is actually built to do. To the Enterprize team: Brian Collins, Nick Levett and Teresa O'Rourke, your support and wisdom means the world, and to the other five founders I was fortunate enough to share this journey with, thank you for the honesty, the challenge, and the generosity you brought to every session. Building something new is rarely a solo effort, even when you're the only one on the team, and this cohort proved that in the best possible way.

Kinda. is a purpose-led regenerative community organisation based in Launceston, lutruwita/Tasmania, making sustainability practical, accessible and shame-free for households, families and small businesses.