Developer Spotlight on Vent, the social app built on expressing feelings
As an early participant in the Kin Developer Program, I needed to chat with Vent and get their feedback. Last month, I had a chance to chat with Dean Serroni, Co-Founder of Vent to get some great insights about building Vent and integrating with Kin.
What is Vent?
Vent is a mobile social app, designed for people to share their feelings with like minded peers who provide support to cheer them up.
How did you come up with the idea for Vent?
Vent started as an app with a very different purpose. Vent was initially for people to vent or express their frustrations. We started off with only 5 emotions: calm, irritated, annoyed, angry and furious. Over time our users wanted to express a much broader range of emotions and feelings and interact with each other in more meaningful ways. Vent essentially evolved over time to be more of a social platform for people to share their feelings and support one another.
How do you come up with new emotions?
We have a set of emotions that are run-of-the-mill emotions and then as part of our monetization strategy, we launch fun themed emotion sets. For example, on Halloween or Valentine’s Day we will run emotions sets that have new colours and emojis available for free. After the event is over, the theme is locked and users can spend money or Kin to unlock them.
All the ideas for the new themes are driven by the community. Within the app we have community leaders that have taken on creating new themes and collecting feedback from community members. They come up with ideas and we implement them.
How does Vent differ from other social apps out there today?
Our primary purpose is to allow people to express how they are feeling. That’s #1. We have some core features and functionalities that are similar to many other social apps, but we focus on experiences around sharing your feelings and connecting with other people in more meaningful ways. For example, if you’re angry, you would choose that emotion set and your profile will actually turn red to match how you feel. Your profile will only change to another colour like Pink, if you are feeling affectionate and update your profile with that new emotion. We try to carry this theme throughout the application.
What is the main demographic of the Vent community?
Our audience is a younger demographic, mostly in the 13–24 range and mostly a western audience. The main user base is in the States, Canada, UK and Australia.
What got you interested in Kin and why integrate?
After identifying our audience and starting to tailor our app to them, we began to understand why our community was using our product and how they were interacting with each other, we also learned that that Kik was a really common place for them. They meet on Vent from their social posts and if they want to have a deeper more private conversation they jump over to Kik and chat there. We naturally took an interest in that behaviour and started following what Kik was doing.
In parallel to that, we always considered introducing some kind of points system or virtual currency into Vent to gamify and influencing certain positive behaviours. We never had the resources to take on that task ourselves as we are a really small team. So when we saw in late 2017, Kik was doing an ICO with Kin, the penny dropped for us and knew it was something we would love to be involved with. At the time I reached out to Matt Hibberd and we built up a good relationship, one thing led to another and we joined the first developer program.
How is Kin used in Vent?
Users can earn Kin by completing streaks, which we implemented to reward users for posting Vents on several consecutive days. Our primary spend opportunity is giving users the ability to unlock the special emotion sets with specific emojis and funky colours. Users can pay using IAP to unlock them indefinitely or with Kin they can unlock them for a day or week and it has been really popular.
More recently we’ve implemented a tipping feature so users can tip other users in groups or across the app in general.
What was it like working with the Kin SDK, and with other developers in the Kin Developer Program?
I didn’t personally work with the SDK, but I am active in the Slack channels. Our Android developer was one of the first to get really stuck into it. We naturally experiences a lot of bumps in the early stages. What we have noticed over time is that the SDK and the documentation has improved a lot and the developer community and support from the Kin team has improved out of sight. It has come a long way from when we first started. It feels like we are a lot more collaborative and have a lot more access to people.
What challenges did you face with implementing Kin and how did you solve it?
One of the challenges that we had and still have to a certain extent was that we have multiple users that log into Vent on a single device or a user that logs into Vent across multiple devices. There is a lot of confusion about how wallets are managed, how Kin balances and transaction history is being viewed and what the experience should be for users switching between devices. This has been a bit confusing for us to work with from an SDK point of view and from our users who are not sure about what that experience in going to be when they are earning Kin on different devices and different accounts. That has been challenging. We’ve got some really clever developers on our side that put some smarts in place to improve the experience for our users, but I think there is a lot more that can be done to make the overall experience around managing user identity and wallets more seamless and clear.
Why do you think other developers should build with Kin?
For us, as a small social app its really difficult to monetize and we were fed up with trying to build ads into our product. We did it on android and on iOS, but to make ads work you’ve got to maximize for clicks and to be able to drive any meaningful revenue you need to really smother your product in ads and butcher your app at the expense of the user experience. It all just feels wrong. Particularly when retaining users on mobile apps is already difficult, it just feels counter intuitive to smother crap all over your product to try to make a little bit of money. The value proposition of Kin made sense around rewarding users for positive contributions to your product or community. This is why I think it makes a lot of sense for other app developers to get on board.
There is also a blockchain ready to go, a coin that sits on that blockchain, and sdks ready to be integrated. It is all there, a full package ready to go.
With the KRE going live there is definitely an incentive along with the developer programs to really get in early and take advantage of the KRE while there are limited developers in the ecosystem.
What’s next for Vent?
We are looking at a couple things. We want to add a bit of polish to some of the Kin experiences that we have already and looking to add another spend opportunity to the product soon.
We are not currently live on iOS with the Kin integration and I think that for P2P tipping to not be a broken solution it really needs to be available across your entire product so your whole community can access it. We want to get development of an iOS version of Vent underway to include probably just tipping in the initial stages.
Any stats that you would like to share?
MAS numbers are pretty visible on https://www.kin.org/stats.
When we first implemented Kin we saw a big surge of users come in and spend Kin, create wallets and that sort of stuff, most likely out of curiosity. We then saw a natural decline in MAS shortly after however we have focused on continuous improvements to our implementation and UX. What has been really great in the last couple of months is that our MAS is on the rise in a consistent and sustainable trend. We are really pleased about that and look forward to further growth in MAS as we continue to enhance our spend opportunities as well as launch Kin in our iOS app.
Download Vent today on Android and follow their progress on Twitter or Facebook.
Want to join Vent and other like minded developers? Apply for the Kin Developer Program and join our developer community.
