Demo Day Roundup

The first participants in the Kin Developer Program participated in Demo Day yesterday, where each team had five minutes to showcase a live Kin experience in their app. Teams were required to demonstrate at least one earn and one spend or peer-to-peer opportunity. While every app was showing us their Kin integrations for the first time, it was also our first time seeing many of the app interfaces.

We’re excited to report that 32 apps have received either a green light to proceed to production, or a request to make a few changes before submitting their integrations to the App Store and Google Play. We are very impressed with the creativity and hard work demonstrated by all teams in the Kin Developer Program, and we look forward to seeing these experiences grow and transform once they are live.

While we won’t give specific details about any of the apps who received the go-ahead or request for changes yet, we have gathered exciting trends from yesterday’s successful demos. Read on to find out what types of use cases and earn and spend experiences you can expect to see in app stores in the coming weeks. The information presented below applies to all 32 apps that are continuing toward milestone one (those given the go-ahead and those requiring changes).

Use cases

Apps continuing toward the first milestone fall into the following seven categories (note that some apps have moved categories since our last update):

• Communications & social (31%)
• Gaming (16%)
• Health & fitness (16%)
• Tools (13%)
• News & entertainment (9%)
• Travel and local (9%)
• Education (6%)

We saw plenty of apps that facilitate connections with others in the digital world, as well as those that incentivize users to reach their goals through Kin-powered challenges and competitions. Half of the apps demonstrated some form of a Kin-enabled peer-to-peer transaction to enable users to reward each other with Kin.

Eighty-four percent of apps plan to launch on Android first, and 16 percent will lead with iOS launches.

Earning Kin

Participants in the Kin Developer Program were given the opportunity to use the out-of-the-box earn experiences provided in the Kin Marketplace, and 25 percent indicated that they intend to do so. Ninety-seven percent of apps will also be integrating their own earn experiences that will allow users to earn Kin natively in each app. Here are the most popular use cases for earn:

• Engagements: 41 percent of apps are planning to offer native earn experiences that reward users for engaging with their platform or directly with other users. These actions include contributing content, liking or engaging with content, or chatting with others.
• Winning challenges, games, or contests: 41 percent of apps will let users earn Kin for beating their opponent, completing a challenge, or winning a contest.
• Completing specific actions: 32 percent of apps will offer earn opportunities for performing in-app actions like completing a profile or logging in multiple days in a row.

Spending Kin

Teams were required to create at least one native spend opportunity, or a peer-to-peer spending experience. As mentioned previously, half of the apps created some kind of peer-to-peer experience, and each app will provide users with new and exciting ways to spend Kin. Here are some of the most popular use cases for spend:

• Premium features or content: 50 percent of apps will allow users to spend Kin to unlock features like exclusive content, personalization options, or benefits (e.g. getting a hint in a game).
• Challenge entry fees: 19 percent of apps will require Kin to participate in challenges, contests, games, or livestreams that can be managed or viewed through the app.
• Tipping: 19 percent of apps have created mechanisms for peer-to-peer tipping.

What’s next?

Apps that received the green light have been given instructions on how to proceed to our production environment. Once they’ve done that, they will be able to submit to Google Play or the App Store. Apps that received a request for changes will need to implement the requested changes and re-submit their demos for review by our selection committee. The committee will then approve their experience or request further changes. Once these apps receive approval, they can move to production and submit to an app store.

In order to meet the first milestone in the Kin Developer Program, apps must be live in at least one app store by Nov. 14. Teams will notify us when they have gone live on an app store, and we will complete an internal review to ensure that the experience is live and working as expected. Once the app has been internally verified, the team will receive the first milestone payout.

We will update our community channels (Reddit and Telegram) as apps get internal verification, and will post weekly updates here on the Kin Blog.

We want to thank everyone who applied and participated in the inaugural Kin Developer Program for their hard work and dedication so far. Your enthusiasm and support for the project have been inspiring. We’re looking forward to the month ahead, and are excited to see these Kin integrations go live to real users.

Good luck to all remaining participants!