I build apps and businesses, write worlds, run games, and learn hard things in 30-day sprints — looking for talented, curious people to make the next ones with.
Solo founder, builder, maker of too many things. I build apps and businesses, write worlds, run games, and learn hard things in 30-day sprints — and I'm looking for talented, curious people to make the next ones with. Here are a few of mine.
Apps, ~160 ideas, and the one move underneath all of them: find the right thing to build, then build the honest version. The domains change; the method doesn't.
~160 ideas and counting — and the ones that ship.
The domains change. The method doesn't.— from the notes
The fastest honest path to a new language: one expertly-ordered deck, real native audio, and spaced repetition that does the thinking for you. He taught himself Japanese to A1 in ~20 focused hours with the method, then spent a year building the app that strips out every ounce of the friction that makes people quit.
tryflua.com ↗
A minimalist weight-and-habit tracker built so the graph does the nagging. His mom lost 17 lbs with it.
A focus / calm tool — the small, well-made kind of app he likes to ship.
A metronome that actually feels good; a tool to find the episode where a show finally gets good. The small, well-made kind.
~160 catalogued app, game, business, book and product ideas — each ranked, named and MVP-scoped (roughly 28 are games) — and a habit of turning the best ones into real, shipped things. The invitation is open: grab one off the shelf and build it with me. More apps live at kalden.me ↗.
He's built worlds since he was 11 — a fantasy novel he faked his 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 he still wants to make.
The domains keep changing, but the impulse is the same: build a place big enough to get lost in, then make it hold together for someone else.
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.— on the teen novel
How he learns anything fast, and why he's building the courses he wishes someone had taught him — math, statistical and computational thinking, built for real understanding instead of the exam.
The teaching grew straight out of the learning: once you've found the shortest honest path to a hard thing, the next move is to hand someone else the map.
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.— About Me
See also The Method — the 30-day sprint underneath all of it.
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. Badminton, YouTube, shipping. The trick isn't grinding harder — it's refusing to start until he's found where the common advice is wrong, then building the shortest honest path and letting sleep do the heavy lifting.
The domains change. The method doesn't.— from the notes
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.
Roughly 28 of the ~160 ideas are games. The same lens applies to every one: what is the player actually optimizing for, and is that the fun thing?
Any time the best strategy isn't the most fun strategy is, I believe, a failure of the game's design.— from my consumables essay
A homebrew world with its own playbook, run as systems rather than scripted scenes.
A Balatro-inspired dice roguelike and a board game in progress.
Singing, standup, improv, voice acting, speaking — the half of himself he rebuilt on purpose, charisma treated as a built skill.
None of it came naturally. All of it came from the same method pointed at the messy, human, on-stage things most builders never touch.
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.— how I became superhuman in 2 years
One camera, a single 23mm prime, golden hour. He shoots portraits, fits, and the cities he lives in — and it's the visual half of the same brain that obsesses over color grading and type.
The eye isn't a gift; it's reps. See the contact sheet →
You can't study the color wheel for two hours and understand it. You have to train your eye over a long time.— on color
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.
The same engine he points at apps, pointed at his own body — and the sports (soccer, badminton, volleyball) that are how he makes friends in a new city.
Training is just another system with a feedback loop; the sports are how the system meets people.
Prioritize control and intention over speed.— his own soccer training notes
A reading life run like a syllabus — philosophy, history, business — all read through one lens: read to build, not to collect.
The point of the syllabus is never the shelf. It's the next thing it lets him make.
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.— from the notes
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.
Distinct from the work — ideas, not portfolio.
I'm looking for people who are excellent at something and curious about everything.
Collaborators, co-conspirators, friends. If any of these worlds is also yours — or you just want to scheme — say hi. The best things in my life started as a five-hour first conversation with a stranger.