Why Paldar exists, and why we are starting with a waitlist

I have spent most of my working life around leadership and development programs. Some of them changed people. Many of them did not, and the difference was rarely the quality of the content or the skill of the person in the room.

The difference was what happened in the weeks after.

A workshop is a few hours. A habit takes, on average, around two months of repetition to settle in, and often much longer. Research on transfer of training has been saying the same thing since the 1980s: what you do before and after a session matters at least as much as the session itself. Most programs have no structure for that time at all. People go back to their desks, the follow-up email arrives, and life takes over.

What we kept seeing

Talk to the people who run these programs and a familiar picture emerges.

The program itself lives in a slide deck and a spreadsheet. Participants are a list in a mail merge. Surveys go out from one tool, get analysed in another, and the results arrive as a PDF three weeks later. Scheduling happens over email. Quotes and invoices happen somewhere else again. The learning that was supposed to continue after the session mostly does not, because nobody has the time to hold each person to it.

None of this is anyone's fault. The tools that exist were built for other jobs. A learning management system is built to deliver courses at scale. A survey tool is built to ask questions. A calendar is built to book time. Nobody built the thing that sits underneath a behaviour-change program and holds it together.

What Paldar is

Paldar is a place to design, run and measure behaviour-change programs, for the people who run them and the people who go through them.

On the design side, you build a program out of the things that actually happen: workshops, coaching sessions, surveys and 360 feedback, short lessons, reminders and nudges. Each of those points at the capabilities you are trying to move, so from the first day the program knows what it is for.

On the running side, participants are invited, scheduled, surveyed and supported in one place. An AI coach is available to each learner between sessions, working from the program's own material and staying inside boundaries the practitioner sets. A second assistant, which we call Chief, works alongside the practitioner: noticing who has gone quiet, drafting the follow-up, preparing the progress report, and asking before it acts on anything that matters.

On the measuring side, every survey and 360 feeds back into the capabilities the program set out to change, so the question of whether it worked has an answer you can show someone.

Around all of that sits the Atlas: public profiles, teams, courses and lessons that practitioners choose to share, so good work can be found.

Why a waitlist

We are pre-launch. The product exists and we use it, but it is not ready for everyone yet, and I would rather be honest about that than open the doors to people who will hit rough edges on day one.

The waitlist lets us do a few things properly. We can bring people in at a pace we can support. We can talk to the first practitioners before they start, understand the programs they run, and make sure the product handles them. And we can learn who is interested, whether that is an independent practitioner, an internal learning team, or someone who has been a participant in a program and wants to see it done better.

If you join, you will get an email asking you to confirm. Once you have, you will see where you are in the queue and get a link you can share. Each person who joins through your link moves you up. That is the whole mechanism. There is no trick to it.

We will write here as we go: what we are building, what we have decided, and what we have got wrong. If that sounds like something you want to be part of, the waitlist is the way in.