It has been a year of significant change at Kalda. This is a reflection on what’s actually happened, what we’ve learned from real Kaldans using the platform, and what’s coming next. Written with the specifics rather than the marketing.
The headlines
A few real milestones from the last year:
- June 2025: we launched the beta of the Kalda mobile app
- July 2025: we celebrated the launch on a rooftop with the team and community
- Throughout: we scaled to well over 15,000 Kaldans, with minimal marketing
The growth was the part that surprised us most. We didn’t run big campaigns. We just put ourselves out there and started showing up, and the community kept arriving. That, more than anything, highlighted the underlying need: queer-focused mental wellbeing support that takes queer life as the default isn’t a small niche, it’s a substantial gap in what’s available.
What the most popular courses tell us
The two most-used courses across the year have been:
Overcoming Loneliness. That this is the most popular course speaks to something the wider conversation about queer mental wellbeing often misses. Even with active community involvement, even with chosen family, even with full lives, loneliness is genuinely common in queer experience. The course speaks to that directly, and Kaldans have shown up for it.
Exploring Gender Identity. That this sits alongside loneliness in popularity reflects the volume of queer people actively working through gender questions, including people who don’t yet identify as trans or non-binary but want a structured, queer-affirming space to explore. The demand has been higher than we anticipated.
Both courses surfaced needs we knew were real but didn’t know were quite this central. Both will continue to shape what we make next.
What we’ve learned
A few patterns from the year:
Less marketing, more relevance. Growth has come from word-of-mouth, from people sharing the app with friends, from Kaldans telling others where they found support that finally fit. The lesson: when the product is genuinely useful to a community that has been under-served, scaling doesn’t need to be about big spends. It needs to be about being findable when people look.
The community holds itself. Our online group sessions (more on those here) and the wider community spaces have shown that Kaldans show up for each other. The platform provides structure and clinical scaffolding; the community provides the warmth.
Specific is better than broad. The courses that have resonated most are not the most general; they’re the most specific. Queer loneliness is more useful than loneliness. Queer-affirming gender exploration is more useful than gender exploration generally. The specificity is the point.
Mobile changed engagement. Since the beta app launched in June, daily engagement (reflections, affirmations, short meditations) has become the dominant pattern, alongside the longer course work people do on the web. Phones meet people where they are.
What we’ve heard from Kaldans
The most common feedback patterns this year:
“I wish I’d found this earlier.” Still the most-repeated sentence. The cost of not having queer-affirming mental wellbeing support during the years before you do is real.
“Please make a course on X.” A lot of these. Many topics from this list are now in production.
“Can it be cheaper?” Yes, sometimes, please see the pay-what-you-can option. We’re not trying to be precious about access.
“More on [specific community within LGBTQIA+].” Bi-specific, trans-masc-specific, ace-spectrum, intersex-affirming content. We’ve added some; more is coming.
“Where can I join the group sessions?” Yes, they still happen. Email us to be on the list when the next ones run.
What’s next
Several things in development:
- More courses based on what Kaldans have asked for and what we’ve learned the community needs
- Mobile app out of beta as feature parity with the web library is reached
- Deeper community features built on what worked in the group sessions
- Long-form editorial flagships on queer mental wellbeing territory (queer anxiety, coming out and identity, gender and dysphoria), designed to live alongside the courses as the most comprehensive resources on these topics on the queer internet
How to feed in
We’re actively gathering feedback and welcome any and all of it. Email us with what you’d love a Kalda course on, what’s missing, what would make the app more useful, or what just isn’t working for you. We read every email.
The community has shaped most of the meaningful decisions we’ve made. We’d like that to continue.
A small thank you
To everyone who has spent time on Kalda this year: thank you. Over 15,000 of you. The community is what makes this work, and we don’t take that for granted.
To everyone who has joined a session, completed a course, recommended us to a friend, or quietly used the app in ways we’ll never see: the work matters because you do it.
There is a lot still to build. Glad we get to build it together.
Where to next
- Why we started Kalda for the founding story
- Welcome to the new Kalda for what kicked off this year of the new site
- Browse the course library
- About Kalda for the current team
- Read more from Inside Kalda
If you have a thought, request, criticism, or idea, please drop us a line. We read every email.
Daniel and the Kalda team