Kalder

When you start a company, everyone talks about the wins. But the real breakthroughs come from the mistakes you make along the way. Here are five lessons I learned the hard way, but wouldn’t change for anything: 1) Start before you’re ready. If you wait for the perfect moment, you’re already too late. The only way to figure out what works is by launching, learning, and iterating in real time. 2) Sell before the product is “done.” Your product will never be truly "ready." The best way to build something people actually want is to put it in their hands early and shape it with their feedback. 3) Your customers aren’t just clients, they’re partners. The best insights don’t come from internal brainstorms. They come from sitting down with customers, understanding their pain points, and building with them. Because if you're not in constant conversation with them, you're missing out on your biggest growth lever. 4) Not being the top user of your product. If you wouldn’t use your own product daily, why should anyone else? The best salespeople are the ones who believe in and live the product themselves. 5) Not thinking like a founder. Founders don’t wait for permission. They sell vision before a product exists, turn feedback into features, and thrive in ambiguity. Everyone at an early-stage startup needs to think this way. These lessons shaped Kalder from day one. If you’re building, scaling, or just figuring things out, lean into the mistakes. They might just be your biggest advantage. What’s a risk you took that paid off?

Here is how you can create a WIN-WIN-WIN Offers Ecosystem as a brand: - Customers earn your brand's rewards seamlessly on everyday spending as they swipe their cards at offer partners. No extra steps. - Your brand unlocks a new revenue stream by earning commissions from partner offers. - Third-party offer brands acquire high-intent customers without pouring millions into untargeted ads. This isn’t theoretical, it’s happening every day. 1) Uber offers Sweetgreen cashback → Sweetgreen gets new customers → Uber earns from those transactions. 2) A grocery chain adds travel rewards → Customers stay engaged → The grocer profits from commissions. 3) A hotel integrates Shop and Earn partner offers → Guests earn rewards on everyday spending → The hotel builds deeper engagement. Customers aren’t just shopping at one store—they have a lifestyle. Brands that tap into that daily spending don’t just stay top of mind; they create a system that fuels itself.

Excited to be at?SportsPro NY?on March 20-21!?If you’re in NY or at the conference and thinking about?unlocking new revenue + fan engagement beyond the stadium + collecting first party fan data, let’s connect. Friends & friends of friends—say hi!?Coffee’s on us.??? We’ll be running live calculations—see exactly how much $$ your team can generate from adding third-party offers or a cashback program. We’re onboarding an NBA team set to make?$12.9M– Who’s next????

Marketing has become painfully boring and predictable. Another 10% discount, free shipping offer, and generic email nurtures aren't going to "wow" your customer. So we've completely reimagined Kalder as a marketer's toolkit. Instead of overwhelming potential clients with our 18 different integrations, we now start our sales calls with a simple question: "What are your brand's marketing, customer engagement, and retention needs?" Think of Kalder as a set of building block marketing solutions—we help you be prescriptive about which features you actually need after understanding your goals. Our toolkit approach means you can mix and match based on your specific needs to “build your own adventure,” if you will: ? A skincare brand creates a "know your skin" quiz to match customers with perfect supplements. ? A community uses our exclusive video components to build an inner-circle social feed. ? A retail brand adds our review engine directly to their Shopify to collect better data. Your brand has different needs per campaign, per week, per month. You don't need to throw all 20 activations into one program. Instead, Kalder gives you a flexible toolkit to drag and drop activations throughout the year as your needs change. Just like Klaviyo and Yotpo unbundled emails, reviews, and referrals into separate products—we're unbundling marketing activations. Marketing shouldn't be boring. And your tools shouldn't put you in the same box everyone else is in.

We're officially banning the word "loyalty" internally at Kalder. I didn't realize until now, but we've been limiting ourselves—and our customers—with a single label. The moment we say "loyalty platform," marketers immediately think of: a) Massive budgets b) Lengthy timelines c) Projects that never quite deliver ROI But Kalder is so much more than a loyalty program. Loyalty is one of our primary use cases, but what we do is far beyond it. Let me share a perfect example of what I mean: We recently onboarded a leading apparel brand who approached us saying they HATE the word loyalty but needed an online VIP client selling platform. If we'd pitched them as a "loyalty platform," they would have walked away immediately. Instead, we talked about solving their specific need: Giving their top 1,000 customers early access to products that typically sell out in 10 minutes. So we built it for them, gating the "add to cart" button, verifying VIP emails with 2FA, and limiting purchases to 2-3 items per customer. The strategy creates a formal experience where customers feel genuinely appreciated online—something surprisingly difficult to achieve in digital spaces. Before, we tried bundling VIP retention and nurture into our full loyalty offer. But this brand didn't need capabilities like QR code event check-ins or build-your-own-quiz, so why do we feel the need to force it? As a founder, I've realized that onboarding a high-value customer with a small, focused project beats trying to sell a bundled 10-product vision every time. The smaller the scope, the faster they say yes, and the quicker they see results. That's why we're repositioning. Because when we stop calling ourselves a "loyalty platform," we can actually help brands build deeper customer relationships—no matter what they want to call it.

I'm not making excuses, but building a company today is harder than it was 5-10 years ago. Back then, you could be tinkering around and bump into a problem that needed solving. Now all the easy problems are taken. We're not in the era where you can just growth hack social network or digitize your sales list and call it Salesforce. Every "surface level" idea has been done. As a founder in 2025, you have 2 paths: ? 1) Solve very hard problems 2) Solve very unsexy problems And the truth is, you're probably going to end up solving both. That's why I cringe when I hear founders say, "I thought of this idea in the shower!" No, you didn't. You probably lived with that problem for years and failed multiple times trying to solve it. And that's okay—that's exactly how it should be. You can't just build another CRM anymore. There are hundreds of them. You need to build a CRM specifically for hospitals with $2-20M ARR in the US. That's how specific you need to be. There are no accidental startups anymore. Building requires consistent intention because today's problems are either deep tech, incredibly complex problems, or highly unsexy problems nobody thinks about day-to-day. And you know what? That's exactly what makes building today so interesting. The problems are harder but the impact when you get it right is so worth it.