Sora Kalden — Messages

Sora Kalden

Solo founder · builder · maker of too many things

Today 9:41 AM

Hey — you found me 👋 I'm Sora. I'm a solo founder and builder — apps and businesses, worlds and games — and I learn hard things in 30-day sprints.

Short version: solo founder · builder · maker of too many things. I'm looking for talented, curious people to make the next ones with.

What I build. Flua is the lead — the fastest honest path to a new language: one expertly-ordered deck, real native audio, and spaced repetition that does the thinking for you. I taught myself Japanese to A1 in ~20 focused hours, then spent a year building the app that strips out the friction that makes people quit.

Weave — a minimalist weight-and-habit tracker built so the graph does the nagging. My mom lost 17 lbs with it. Super Zen — a focus/calm tool. Plus small tools: a metronome that actually feels good, and a tool to find the episode where a show finally gets good.

Behind it all: ~160 catalogued app, game, business, book and product ideas — each ranked, named and MVP-scoped. ~28 are games. ~160 ideas and counting — and the ones that ship. Grab one off the shelf and build it with me. tryflua.com · kalden.me

The eight sides. The domains change. The method doesn't.

Worlds & Stories. I've built worlds since I was 11 — a fantasy novel I faked my way into finishing and published at 14, a 150k-word dark epic in progress (The Swords of Darkness), a homebrew D&D world with its own playbook, and a manga I still want to make. "Because I had to fake progress, I accidentally built a real habit. It makes me wonder how many things we could actually finish if we just tricked ourselves into starting."

Learning & Teaching. How I learn anything fast, and why I'm building the courses I wish someone had taught me — math, statistical and computational thinking, built for real understanding instead of the exam. "Being called smart my whole childhood made it part of my identity — and I was more afraid to lose that title than I was to fail a class."

Games & the Table. Take a system apart, find the fun, build it back better — a Balatro-inspired dice roguelike in design, a board game in progress, and D&D run as systems. "Any time the best strategy isn't the most fun strategy is, I believe, a failure of the game's design."

The Modern Bard. Singing, standup, improv, voice acting, speaking — the half of myself I rebuilt on purpose, charisma treated as a built skill. "I could not sing. I could not dress well. I was not particularly fit or especially charismatic. I was a very well-compensated specialist with a B-minus in everything else."

Photography & the eye. One camera, a single 23mm prime, golden hour. Portraits, fits, and the cities I live in — the visual half of the same brain that obsesses over color grading and type. "You can't study the color wheel for two hours and understand it. You have to train your eye over a long time."

The Athlete. The same engine I point at apps, pointed at my own body — and the sports (soccer, badminton, volleyball) that are how I make friends in a new city. "Prioritize control and intention over speed."

The Mind. A reading life run like a syllabus — philosophy, history, business — all read through one lens: read to build, not to collect. "Everything is interconnected. Singing makes you a better speaker; games train you to perform under pressure. Each skill feeds the next. If you want to be truly unstoppable, learn everything."

The method. Pick a skill, go all-in for 30 days. Japanese to A1 in ~20 focused hours. Tone-deaf to singing from memory in a month. The trick isn't grinding harder — it's refusing to start until I've found where the common advice is wrong, then building the shortest honest path and letting sleep do the heavy lifting.

Things I haven't built yet. Write a TV show. Finish the manga — the "next Death Note or Game of Thrones." Make Westworld real, as a game you can actually live inside. Open a café that's a third place for serious makers. And find the talented, curious people I'd do all of it with.

Photography. Portraits, fits, and the cities I've lived in — Osaka, Tokyo, Kōyasan, Budapest, Lisbon, Nagpur. One camera, a single prime, natural light, graded by hand.

What I write about (ideas, not portfolio): How I Learn Anything in 30 Days · The year I walked away from $250k · What Actually Makes D&D Peak · Why the best schools taught me to forget · I Used My CS Degree to Debug My Weight Loss.

And some things I do purely for myself — painting like no one will ever see it, building and painting Gundam kits, singing in the mornings, the occasional cosplay. No goal. Just the doing.

Let's build something. I'm looking for people who are excellent at something and curious about everything. Collaborators, co-conspirators, friends. The best things in my life started as a five-hour first conversation with a stranger. Say hi: sora@sorakalden.com · See Flua · My apps.

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Sora Kalden — solo founder, builder, maker of too many things