Kin Developer Program Q&A: pop.in
Four years ago, Alex Kruglov and his team created Smiletime, an app popular with livestreamers and media companies including the CW Network, Warner Brothers, Sony, and TMZ. While the app was seeing major success, Kruglov felt that they had built a product that was serving its livestreamers and media partners well, but under-serving its end users.
Earlier this year, Kruglov launched pop.in, a new product that puts users first and focuses entirely on real human connections through a feature called Game Night. The app was the second in the Kin Developer Program to go live on both iOS and Android.
We sat down with Alex to talk about the pivot from advertiser-centric experiences to user-centric experiences, and how Kin helps facilitate this change.
How does the pop.in experience differ from experiences in most social apps in the marketplace today?
We’re in is the business of connecting people in a very human way. Today, most people connect on social media in ways that are asynchronous, without a face or a voice to the avatar on the other end. Today’s marketplace is short on the real, human experiences that people value, and that’s what we bring to the table with pop.in’s Game Night. In real life, game nights are about having pleasant interactions with people you trust, in places you feel safe. Traditional game nights could be at a friend’s house or at a local bar, for example, and that’s the type of environment that we are trying to create in pop.in. During Game Nights, we let multiple contestants compete on live video in front of an audience that plays along, too. All of our users in any given Game Night are playing and engaging, either on live video or in the audience, so everyone is involved in an environment where they can connect with others, have fun, and feel safe. When a Game Night isn’t happening, our users can play with each other and hone their skills in an area of the app we call The Parlor.
Who is your main audience?
We’ve gotten to know our users quite intimately, as we get the chance to chat with them live during Game Night every evening. Our users range from college age to early 40s, but the core user is somebody who is reasonably outgoing — they enjoy the company of others. This is somebody who probably used to go out two to three nights a week, whether to a friend’s house, or on dates, or a bar. Because they’re now in their late 20s or early 30s, they might have a job, or a family, so they don’t go out regularly. At 8:00, when dinner’s over and they have a break, they join pop.in — In many ways we’re kind of like the internet’s local bar.
Why did you decide to make Kin pop.in’s in-app currency?
We didn’t want pop.in to be an ad-supported environment where too often the advertiser takes priority over the end-user. It was crucial that we created an environment where anyone who contributes to the ecosystem could be rewarded, and could participate in a fair value exchange within the app. Doing so with a fiat currency felt exploitative, and we didn’t want to be like other gaming apps where we’d be taking money from users but not really rewarding them in a meaningful way. We felt that using a cryptocurrency was the right path to do that, so we researched the marketplace very thoroughly and spoke to a number of players in the space. Ultimately, Kin was the only one whose mission and vision aligned with our own.
What challenge does Kin help you solve?
Kin gives our users the ability to both earn and spend in an easy-to-understand and seamless way. When it comes to other players in the space, Kin is the only cryptocurrency that has really designed its ecosystem to be mobile-first and easy to use by the average human — people who don’t want to go through the extremely laborious process of setting up a wallet, doing tons of transfers, or remembering their 64-string keys.
How did you come up with your use case for Kin?
We want to ease users into the Kin experience, so right now earning Kin is mostly done through the Kin Marketplace, or through peer-to-peer tipping. All of our official game nights are hosted by professionals, and we’ve encouraged them to tip users in Kin in exchange for their contributions during game night. This way, they learn what it’s like to tip and be tipped, and we’re seeing users respond positively to these actions in the app.
You’ve chosen to use Kin for in-app rewards and spend opportunities, but game night prizes are still offered in fiat currency. Why is that?
In our official game nights, fiat prizes are given out because we want our users to understand these in terms they already know. Everything else in the app is supported by Kin, but the game night prizes are in a fiat currency so that people can win them and buy themselves a watch, or an Xbox, or something in their physical lives. We think it’s important that users are able to distinguish between the value Kin brings to them inside the digital world with pop.in, but still give them the ability to win something that’s of value to them in the physical world.
Any new features on the horizon?
Plenty! We launched pop.in before we were able to go live with Kin, so we developed progression mechanics throughout the app to test actions that would eventually be Kin-powered. One that we hope to power with Kin within days is a play-along streak. Right now, audience members who reach a certain play-along streak are rewarded with a Boost, which increases their odds of being selected to be a video contestant in the next Game Night. We are implementing Kin as the prize for play-along streaks, which users can then spend on Boosts or other types of in-game perks, giving them more agency in what they can do in the app because of Kin.
Moving forward, we want anything that encourages positive user behavior or that benefits the community to be rewarded with Kin. If the app benefits, the user should be getting rewarded, so we will start testing Kin with any action that the user takes to benefit the rest of the community. Over the next few weeks, we will let users earn Kin for hosting a Game Night with new players to reward them for involving and training newbies. We’ll also reward users for giving out a certain number of tips, to incentivize giving and expanding the conversation around Kin. We’ll also be adding new games to Game Night, that will each involve new ways to earn and spend Kin.
What was it like working with the Kin SDK, and with other developers in the Kin Developer Program?
Overall, the SDK was very easy to use. As with any new SDK that is essentially being used for the first time by an alpha set of external users, there were bugs, and the process of fixing those bugs was handled well. The communication process was being developed in real-time as we were doing this, so there were natural and expected growing pains, and we were excited to see our feedback being incorporated into new processes that helped improve support and communication. We’ve been very pleased by the vibe of the developer community as well. People are helpful to each other, discussions have been quite positive, and even when there are stressors they’ve been managed robustly.
How have your users been responding to the Kin integration?
When we first started talking to Kin, I thought this was going to be the only cryptocurrency that could be used by anyone, not just crypto insiders. It’s easily adopted by people who couldn’t care less about the word crypto or the intricacies of the technology — just people who want to have a good user experience and enjoy a social gaming experience with others. Because of that, it was really important to us that we first introduced Kin, not as a cryptocurrency, but as a regular in-app currency that could positively impact their experience. We’ve sequenced the use of Kin so that people can earn and spend it in a way that feels natural and expected, and that’s had positive results for us. It’s been interesting to hear people talking about Kin on video during game nights, showing each other how it can already be used in simple and interesting ways on pop.in. There’s a common refrain of “Thank You!”s each time someone receives Kin, a nice way to acknowledge and recognize each other.
Why should other developers begin building with Kin?
If you’re building an app where earning and spending reflect its core benefit, you should be building it with Kin. The developers who should be focused on Kin are ones who are interested in finding a very easy, light, and pre-built way to allow earning and spending amongst the community within their app. We also see unparalleled value in the Kin Ecosystem, and are excited for the functionality to earn and spend across the entire ecosystem, and I think that’s going to be very valuable to all developers who build with Kin. That’s what we’re really excited about. We’d love to have people earn on pop.in, and then be able to go spend in other apps within the Kin Ecosystem. That’s really exciting to us, because we see these experiences as complementary, not competitive, to one another.
