More about Me

Who am I? –

I’m a small-town Missouri girl making my big dreams come true 😁 My husband and I got married in 2007, he opened a concrete construction business in 2009. I left my position as an at-risk educator and became a stay-at-home-mama when our son was born in 2010. Our girls arrived in 2014 and 2015 😰 I constantly found myself drowning in paperwork and laundry, with no identity outside of wife and mom, mom, MOM! The Facebook stars aligned ✨ and in 2017 I was introduced to Abigail Gazda. Hell bent on dodging a mid-life crisis, I hired her to help me find myself again. After a whole lot of self-reflection, I realized random acts of kindness really lit me up! But then Abigail asked, “ok, now how can you monetize that?” 😬gross 😅 and so the daydream began!

Just a daydream –

The daydream lived in my head for another 3 years! It was safe there and I was perfectly happy just mentally escaping my chaos, thinking about what tinyacts.co could be. It wasn’t until covid 😷 happened and everyone was trapped at home with me, that I realized tinyacts.co needed to become a reality and we all needed more kindness!

Deeper into the daydream.

What’s in a name –

I spent a large amount of time trying to decide which was littler, Small or Tiny. I felt like Tiny was the littlest, but it really came down to the initials SAK vs TAK. SAK was too close to my last name, and I wanted this new business to have an identity separate from me. TAK reminded me of a road trip with my Grandma where we sang 🎶If the devil doesn’t like it he can sit on a tack, OUCH! sit on a tack to stay 🎶 which gave me all the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart 🥰 tiny acts of kindness is a mouth full defeating the whole tiny theme I was going for and dot coms are hard to come by so I simplified everything down to tinyacts.co (at some point I realized I could have gone a step further and went with ta.co but was pleasantly surprised to find out Taco Bell already scooped that one up 🌮😘🤌 marketing genius!)

The Ladybug 🐞 –

I chose a ladybug for several reasons. My dad has called me Gina Bug for longer than I can remember, so ladybugs just became my favorite. They are also the perfect representation of “tiny” and separate tinyacts.co from all the “BEE” Kind 🐝brands. I made sure my ladybug had 3 dots, one representing each of my kiddos. Like I mentioned before tinyacts.co was born out of covid, between that chaos and the amount of time it took to design the perfect ladybug I completely gave up all dreams of having any more children😅 Even though my ladybug remains nameless she is my fourth child and probably gave me just as many labor pains as the other three 🤣

Fun fact – in high school I got GNA BUG license plates for my little white pickup truck. I also got a ladybug lower back tattoo, it was 2003 🤣 and lets just say my dad, who had always fondly called me Gina Bug, was not very fond of it when my little brother ratted me out 😬😅

Getting out of my own way –

More than the name or the ladybug, my real hold up was myself. How was I going to become the face of kindness when I had this filthy mouth front and center? I didn’t feel qualified to tell people to get out there and do kind things when I often found myself struggling not to tell unkind people to fuck off (in the nicest way possible of course 😅) I finally realized that there are more people like me than not and we all have the ability to be kind. I accepted the fact that I would never be a shepherd of people, but I was perfectly capable of following behind the flock, kicking rocks, rounding up the stragglers and telling them to get their asses out into the world and be really fucking kind! That’s the kind of motivator I can be!

Finally, the Cards 🎴 –

The thing I loved most about kindness is the feeling it gave me to give or receive. The problem was I couldn’t capture that feeling and keep it for very long. I wanted to create a piece of kindness that you could keep in your pocket as a reminder or could pass on when the time was right. These cards could become IOUs or I owe the “U”niverse an act of kindness in the future. I wanted each card to feel like a special gift specifically picked out for the recipient. More than anything I wanted them to feel like a light-hearted, fun, game that everyone would want to participate in! I gathered up all my daydreams and used my Masters in Microsoft® Word and PhD in Paint® to format enough cards to create four separate themed decks;  Keep it Going, Free & Easy, Compliments and Womankind. I found a design-your-own-board-game company and maxed out my credit card right before Thanksgiving 2020. The entire time I was afraid I had made a huge mistake. They finally arrived at the end of March 2021. I was holding what had once been a daydream in my hands and they were everything I had imagined!

Expanding the Brand –

Like everything else that is supposed to be just mine, it didn’t long for my kiddos to take over. My daughter’s teacher texted me a picture of all the kindness cards her and her friends had made and started sharing around the classroom. This whole time I had been thinking about how much my cards could impact the lives of grown-ups and hadn’t considered how much fun they would be for kiddos too! After re-working through all the doubts, I had had about my filthy mouth and marketing to adults I had to wonder if I was cut out to create kindness for children?! I decided my target audience was still mamas doing their best not to lose their shit and raise kind kids. I also figured if the worst thing a kid stumbled upon on the internet was a middle-aged woman reminding them to not be an asshole and to be kind to others it would be a win for the interwebs 😅 so I went for it! I created a Kiddos kindness deck and wrote  children’s book to go along with them! I had also gotten better about not sitting on big ideas for too long. I did a quick hashtag search on Instagram and found an incredible kid’s lit artist, named Sara who also happens to be a Missouri mama who started chasing her passion of art during covid! She helped me bring Ellie & Hip to life! Never in a million years would I have imagined I would be a children’s author 🎉

The Future –

I have several more kindness card deck ideas in the works and bought enough USBN’s to write at least 9 more books 📚 Stay tuned as I keep conquering my self-doubt and sharing my gifts with the world!