‘Kinit’ Beta App and the Lean Startup Approach

A few weeks ago we shared the Kin standalone app vision. Since then, we’ve been busy nailing down our Kinit beta app, defining the user experience, and building the product.

Now, I’d like to go over the functionality. The Kinit beta app is going to be the first app built on top of Kin Stellar SDK, and includes on chain transactions (as Kin had already done before on Ethereum).

The app is designed to encourage users to complete tasks to earn Kin: Users can complete one simple questionnaire per day and be rewarded with a predetermined amount of Kin.

Within 3-5 days they should have enough Kin to spend on one of the following services: e-commerce gift cards (such as Amazon), food delivery credits (such as Grubhub), movie/sport/concert ticket codes (such as Ticketmaster) and more.

Very simple. Very lean.

The app is going to run as an invite-only beta for a few weeks, focusing on college students from the USA. Invitations will be sent to both Android and iOS users in late March.

A few screenshots from the beta

I’d like to share a little about the rationale behind the functionality described above.

Hypothesis Driven Experiments (aka Lean Startup)

One of the most common mistakes startups make is investing a lot of time in building a great product nobody really wants or needs.

To avoid that, we decided to follow the lean startup approach — i.e., shorten product development cycles by adopting a combination of business-hypothesis-driven experimentation, iterative product releases, and validated learning.

“The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else.” (Eric Reis)

So, what are we trying to learn? The beta app aims to prove two assumptions:

• People are looking for simple ways to become crypto holders
• People want crypto that is useful for daily life

We came up with two scenarios to validate these assumptions:

• Simple-to-complete tasks that will grant users with Kin
• Spending offers of services for daily life

However, the above scenarios are too general and can be taken in too many directions. What is considered a simple task? What is an attractive service for daily life? How can we find the sweet spot?

Therefore, we’ve decided to narrow the scope and refine the hypotheses.

Hypotheses

With the decision to limit the earn opportunity to one task per day (each requiring a different timeframe to complete) we’re hoping to understand the following concerns:

• Time per day
  When providing desired incentives, how much time per day are people willing to spend in order to earn Kin?
• Motivation over time
  When providing desired incentives (but limited earning opportunities per day), how many days/times will people use the app?
• Spending vs. saving (satisfaction of earning)
  What motivates people — interesting spending offers, or the satisfaction of earning Kin? When holding enough Kin to obtain an offer, how many people will spend it? What percentage will they use? How much will they keep?
• One time experience OR continuous relationship?
  After spending Kin on one offer, how many people will continue completing tasks to earn more KIN?

Early Adopters

While we can technically invite everyone to take part in the beta, we decided to limit it to college students only, from one country only. Focusing on one audience may not teach us all we need to know, but it will teach us enough to create the best product for students in the USA.

Once we’ll tackle that, we can expand to other countries/audiences.

Think Lean

Deciding we’re building a lean product to learn quickly helped us simplify a lot of technical aspects and business processes such as:

• Spending offers
  Kin is working to partner with different brands and automate the process for redeeming their ‘spend’ offers. But since we wanted to move very quickly, we decided not to wait for partner-specific spending offers to begin beta testing. We instead decided to manually pre-purchase spending offers in the form of digital gift cards or offer codes; this approach allows us to avoid wasting time automating an offer redemption process (using APIs) for non-partner offers during this beta phase. And if we run out of spending offers, we can just manually purchase more.
• Earning tasks
  In the future, most of the content for the app’s earning tasks will also come from our partners. However, in order to go live as early as possible we decided to start creating initial content for the beta. This simplifies business processes and removes external dependency during beta phase.

We will share many more insights after the launch and throughout the testing phases. Stay tuned :) Meanwhile, any feedback/questions/suggestions are greatly appreciated.