A Paisley events professional whose career began at St Mirren has launched his own technology company to help teams plan and run live events.

Ian Findlay founded CrowdKind after 18 years working on community projects, stadiums, festivals and international events. Its first product, called Dots, is available now.

What Dots does

Dots is built for security, stewarding and crowd management teams. It lets them plan where staff will be positioned using the site plans they already have. Teams can record roles, reporting lines, times, equipment and instructions, and spot staffing gaps before the event starts.

"CrowdKind started with things that should have been easier," Ian said. "I have spent years seeing good people lose time because information was spread across different spreadsheets, drawings, messages and versions of the same plan.

"The event changes, but the information does not always change with it. CrowdKind is about making those everyday parts of event work clearer."

The company says more tools for event operations are on the way, including staff briefing, event records and staff scheduling.

From Love Street to the Commonwealth Games

Ian studied computing for four years at Reid Kerr College, now part of West College Scotland. He started at St Mirren in 2008, during the club's final season at Love Street.

His early work took in community development, culture and creative projects, and in Paisley he was one of the founding trustees of Renfrewshire Witch Hunt 1697, later managing its large town centre event.

His career then moved into security, crowd management and major event operations. In Scotland that has included T in the Park, Hampden Park, the Royal Highland Centre and Murrayfield. Abroad, he has worked live music events in Qatar and major events in Saudi Arabia, including Formula 1 after-race concerts. Most recently, he worked on the Glasgow 2026 Commonwealth Games.

"Paisley is where I studied, where some of my earliest projects happened and where this part of the journey has come back to," he said. "The aim is simple: better tools, clearer information and better event days."

More information is at crowdkind.co.uk.