Kin Standalone App — Product Vision

Kin Product Vision For 2018 was recently shared explaining the product’s building blocks, goals and roadmap for Kin — a digital sharing economy of equal opportunities. Our focus in 2018 is going to be on 3 efforts:
Kin Ecosystem, Kin Standalone App and Kin Blockchain.
In this post I will try to shed light on the Kin Standalone App.

Our Goals

In building the Kin standalone app, the motivation is for this to be a home base for the Kin ecosystem, a place where all of Kin’s functionalities can be explored.
Remembering that we’re building a decentralised economy in which everyone can easily earn cryptocurrency and spend it on digital services for daily life, we are aiming to achieve the following goals during 2018:

1. A standalone Kin experience
   Easily earn and spend KIN and quickly learn how cryptocurrency can become useful for daily life. The app is open to all, anyone who wants to learn about Kin is welcome!
2. The simplest and most secure place to hold KIN
   Using crypto today is unbelievably complex. With Kin, this can be changed. However, simplifying the crypto experience is only one part of the equation. Since everyone can potentially become KIN holders, we should provide them with the best place to manage it. Things like sharing KIN balances from the digital services, tracking transactions, and easy to use backup tools are a must and will be very intuitive and clear.
3. A discovery point
   Educate KIN holders and newbies about Kin ecosystem by exposing them to new earning opportunities and spending offers both within the app and on other apps / digital services. This allows any brand or individual developer to add opportunities and offers and to gain exposure.

Guiding Principles

There are a few key principles that guide us when we strive to achieve our vision:

• Simplicity
  Simplifying everything we can. Users do not need a deep understanding in blockchain, which is hard enough to understand as it is.
• Learn from users
  User research, user testing, A/B testing and data in general are part of our DNA. Our insights will be published constantly and help us create a delightful product.
• Focus on the value, not the features
  The value for the users is continuously monitored by using well defined goals and KPIs. Our target is to bring actual value to users, rather than developing more and more features.
• Fast iterations and continuous feedback loops
  Release early, release often.
• Transparency
  Gaining trust by transparency. Everything we do is and will be public and visible, including the app source code.

The Product

So what exactly are we building?
Kin standalone app is a mobile app which allows everyone to easily earn and spend KIN on digital services for daily life, discover new opportunities, and manage KIN securely.

Initial wireframes for the MVP

Kin standalone app & Kin ecosystem
While the Kin ecosystem product is focused on digital services and relies on their Kin SDK adoption, this app is totally independent (aka Standalone). However, we support the Kin ecosystem in two ways:

• Secured wallet services
  The app is going to be a place where everyone can hold their KIN balances, enjoy things like tracking transactions and easy to use security features.
  This is useful for Kin users on top of digital services who reach certain amounts of KIN, or use KIN in more than one digital service.
• Entry point to the ecosystem
  Any user can start the Kin journey using the app, learn about the Kin experience, discover more opportunities on the different digital services and enjoy new experiences.

Dream big. Start small. But most of all, start.
We are at the very beginning of a long enjoyable journey, and building a new ecosystem is a big challenge we are happy to tackle. These are exciting times!

Our goal for Q1 is to release a MVP (minimum viable product) and start learning as fast as possible what is working and what requires rethinking.
We are going to focus on earn and spend experiences, starting very lean and mainly trying to confirm (or refute) the set of hypotheses we defined.
Here is a very initial mock:

More about our MVP, launch strategy, KPIs and insights on our coming posts.
Stay tuned :)

Any feedback/questions/suggestions are much appreciated.