Like for most people, COVID lockdowns were hard.

At the time, I was in a senior corporate leadership role. On paper, a great job with lots of variety and opportunity. In reality, leading through that period of significant change was exhausting in ways I hadn't expected. I felt less effective, less empowered, and less able to make a difference to the people who actually mattered to me. It started to feel misaligned, and I no longer felt connected to the impact.

Around the same time, I had a significant birthday. All my big life decisions seem to arrive with those. It has a way of sharpening things. You start thinking less about what's next and more about what actually makes a difference, especially if time suddenly feels finite. I didn't just need a break. I wanted to do something that mattered.

If someone had told me then that I'd be running a research company, I would have believed them. That part makes sense looking back. What I didn't have was a clear idea of what that would look like, or how you leave corporate life and build something that doesn't exist yet.

The tipping point wasn't one big moment. It was a pile-up of small ones.

I'm someone who naturally assumes that everything should be easier than it is. Little niggling things across every single part of life felt like poor design choices. Processes that turned simple tasks into complicated ones. Systems and products that haven't taken humans into consideration. The people designing things often aren't seeing the full range of humans who have to use them.

Professionally, I kept running into a different problem. Business stakeholders wanted a single data point, or proof that they should fix things for people with disability. Like there's some sort of question mark around that. But to get insights from lived experience, you were pushed toward charities or advocacy organisations. They do important work, but advocacy and research are not the same thing. Most were focused on a single disability group and weren't set up to provide diverse, scalable insights. There was no one place to get good data from a broad mix of people with lived experience.

What surprised me when I left corporate life wasn't criticism. It was silence.

I've always been aware that I can be direct. Sometimes too direct. I worry about coming on too strong, so I use humour to soften the edges. It helps people stay engaged long enough to actually do something. It's why one of my favourite sayings is that inclusion is like cheese: you can never have too much, but some is always better than none.

Everyone told me I'd be snapped up. That organisations would love what I do. That opportunities would come. They didn't. I had to knock on doors myself, repeatedly, and put myself in situations where rejection was very real. That was when I started trusting myself more. Not because I suddenly felt confident, but because no one I spoke to thought the idea was bad. They just hadn't built it, or weren't willing to.

Knowable Me started with a simple belief: lived experience is a form of expertise.

Real insight doesn't come from hypotheticals or assumptions. It comes from people's everyday lives, from the friction they encounter and the workarounds they create. That's where the truth is. That's what gets missed when research is done at arm's length.

Today, Knowable Me connects a community of thousands of unique humans with organisations that want to design better systems, products, and services. We run surveys, interviews, and user experience research that goes beyond ticking boxes. The goal isn't compliance. It's understanding.

Behind the scenes, it's a delicate balance. Knowable Me is a two-audience business. If we don't have people willing to share their experiences, we don't have organisations who want to hear them. And if organisations are ready to listen but the community isn't there, everything stalls. Holding both sides at the same time is one of the hardest parts of scaling this work.

Disability inclusion remains central to who we are, but over time it became clear that exclusion doesn't exist in neat categories. Humans don't live in the middle of a bell curve, and nothing meaningful is built for "average". I'm blind, but I'm also left-handed. Some days, the scissors are more disabling than my vision.

That's why Knowable Me has expanded to focus on unique humans more broadly. Not to diminish disability, but to acknowledge that people are shaped by many intersecting experiences. Culture, language, age, gender, class, migration, body size. These things affect how people move through the world, and they're rarely explored properly in research. We don't dig deeply enough into why people are having the experiences they're having, or what specifically shapes those differences.

On a personal level, building Knowable Me has given me more confidence to stand in front of my own brand, though that's still a daily and sometimes hourly battle.

What it's also given me is enormous respect for people navigating a world that wasn't designed with them in mind. Listening to those stories is a privilege, and I don't take lightly the trust people place in us when they share them.

The name Knowable Me came later than most people expect. I've always loved Maya Angelou's idea of doing what you know until you know better, then doing better. I wrestled with different "know"-based names for a while. Then a friend pointed out that knowable.me was available as a domain. Technically it's Montenegro's country code. Practically, it just felt right.

The name didn't define the business. The work earned the name.

What I wish more people had is the bravery to hear things that are uncomfortable, not from a place of defensiveness or fear, but from curiosity.

We shut down curiosity far too quickly. That instinctive, childlike need to ask why. But curiosity is where change starts, especially when it's intentional and paired with a willingness to do something differently.

That's what Knowable Me exists to support. Not perfection. Not getting it right the first time. Just people and organisations willing to listen, learn, and do better.

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