About Knock

Knock is where Hosts open their doors and Neighbours gather around their table.

Personal homes only. Not studios. Not community centres. Not commercial kitchens. Someone’s actual home. Someone’s actual table. Someone’s actual kettle, already on.

A Host shares something she loves — sourdough, sign making, embroidery, tea biscuits, watercolour, fermentation, anything made with hands — and opens her door to a small group of neighbours. Six people. Maybe eight. Enough to feel intimate. Small enough that everyone’s name is remembered.

A Neighbour finds a Knock near her, books a spot, and shows up. She does not need to be skilled. She does not need to know anyone. She just needs to knock.

Because the research says the setting matters.

A community centre is neutral. A studio is professional. Someone’s home is an act of trust. It says: I am willing to let you in. I am willing to be known.

That vulnerability — on both sides — is the mechanism. It is what the science calls the precondition for closeness. You cannot manufacture it in a rented space.

The home is not incidental to what Knock is. The home is the whole point.

My name is Kim Desveaux. I have a BBA, an MBA, and a Full Stack Developer certificate from the University of Toronto that I earned in my 50s because I could not find anyone else to build this the way I knew it needed to be built.

I am not a tech founder who noticed a market opportunity. I am someone who looked around at the people I love — brilliant, warm, accomplished, lonely — and could not find a single platform designed to actually help them.

So I read everything. Thirteen peer-reviewed studies on loneliness, friendship formation, adult learning, and community building. I read the Surgeon General’s advisory. I read the WHO resolution. I read Jeffrey Hall’s research on how many hours it takes to make a friend — 40 to 60, if you were wondering. I read Arthur Aron’s Fast Friends procedure, which proves that closeness between strangers can be deliberately created in 45 minutes with the right kind of conversation.

And then I built Knock.

Kim Desveaux

Founder, Knock · New Victoria, Nova Scotia

hello@ujustknock.com

In 2023, the United States Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic. In May 2025, the World Health Organization passed its first global resolution on social connection. The science is unambiguous: chronic loneliness carries the same mortality risk as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. It is more dangerous than obesity. More dangerous than physical inactivity.

We have more ways to connect than any generation before us. We are lonelier than any generation before us.

There used to be a place between home and work where people gathered. The pub. The community hall. The church basement. The neighbourhood association. The knitting circle. These were the places where people knew your name, noticed when you were absent, celebrated when you returned.

One by one, those places have closed. The buildings are still there. The people are still there. But the gathering has stopped.

Nobody noticed it happening. And then one day everyone looked up and realised they did not know a single one of their neighbours.

Every platform that has tried to solve loneliness has built a better way to find people online. Better matching algorithms. Better interest graphs. Better recommendation engines.

None of them solved it. Because loneliness is not a discovery problem.

You do not need to be introduced to more people. You need to sit at someone’s table.

Thirteen peer-reviewed studies. Hundreds of hours of reading. A founder who went back to university in her 50s to learn to build what the research was describing.

Here is what the science says:

Friendships form through proximity and repeated exposure. Through shared activity — not shared demographics, not shared interests on a profile, but hands in the same bowl of dough, needles in the same fabric, paint on the same table.

It takes 40 to 60 hours of leisure time together to form a casual friendship. 200 hours to form a close one. Americans average 41 minutes of socialising per day. The math is brutal.

The interventions that work — the ones that actually reduce loneliness in clinical trials — are arts and creative activities in small groups. Every time. Across every age group. Across every country.

The pottery shop has Eventbrite. The needlepoint teacher has nothing.

We built what she needs.

We believe the loneliness epidemic is not inevitable.

We believe the infrastructure for human connection already exists — it is sitting in people’s kitchens, waiting to be used.

We believe that the most radical thing a platform can do right now is put six people around a real table in a real home and let something slow and irreversible happen.

We believe in the host who opens her door before she feels ready.

We believe in the neighbour who books a spot even though she is nervous.

We believe in the 40 hours it takes to make a friend, and the 200 hours it takes to make a close one, and the quiet accumulation of Saturday mornings that gets you there.

We are not solving loneliness.

We are building the conditions in which people can solve it themselves.

Knock is built on thirteen peer-reviewed studies. The three that shaped everything: