Kin Developer Program Q&A: Zool
Two years ago, a group of college students from a remote village in India realized just how difficult it can be to consult with a doctor when needed. They decided to create Visit, an app that lets people all over India consult with doctors online, no matter where they were in the country. They also added the ability to track activity levels and eating habits to let their users take a more proactive role in their overall health.
A few months ago, they entered the Kin Developer Program, and decided to create a new app, Zool, that focused on rewarding users for reaching their daily proactive health goals. The app is now available in India, as a closed beta on Android. We sat down with Aditya Raisinghani, one of the creators of Visit and Zool, to chat about the apps their team has created, and how they’ve integrated Kin to reward their users in a more valuable way.
How did you come up with the idea for your app?
Our team is made up of eight people who all attended the same college in a remote village in India. The village was so remote it didn’t even have a railway station, which is a very common thing to have in India. The only doctor available to us visited our college campus on a monthly basis, so it was difficult for people in the village to get the medical help or consultations they needed. We realized that this situation was not unique to us, and that with India’s doctor shortage, many people in remote areas were lacking adequate medical care. The app started as a consultation platform to let people talk to a doctor online from anywhere in the country, and as our user base expanded, we added more features to give people access to more tools to improve their health.
Tell me about Zool. How is it different from your original app, Visit?
Visit started as a doctor consultation app that let users talk to doctors online if they didn’t have access to a doctor in their time of need. Since consulting with a doctor isn’t a daily requirement for most, we focused on additional tools that would let users proactively improve their health by understanding their activity levels and eating habits. With Zool, we’re focusing only on these proactive elements. We’ve seen that people are interested in understanding how their daily activity and eating habits affect their overall health, so we created a separate app that would reward users with Kin for taking on these proactive efforts to improve their health.
Why did you decide to create a new app, after submitting Visit to the Kin Developer Program at first?
We wanted to integrate Kin in a way that was easy for users to understand. The main purpose of Visit is the doctor consultation platform, and while we could have gone ahead with a Kin integration in Visit, we decided to create a new app in order to make it clear that Kin was being used as a reward for daily engagement. By creating a new app, we were able to make the experience more fun, and to add challenges and other experiences that we could test with a smaller group of users. Zool is still in a closed beta, but we plan to make it public soon and will cross-promote the experience to Visit users to migrate them to Zool for their daily habit tracking.
What interested you in Kin?
When we first discovered Kin, we had recently implemented a points system to reward users for reaching certain goals and taking steps to live a healthy active lifestyle. We even partnered with a few brands to give users exciting offers to spend their points on. While the reward system definitely motivated people to walk more, our hypothesis is that Kin will be a greater motivator because it brings additional value to the users that our original points system didn’t.
Why is Kin a better reward for your users?
It’s a better incentive because it’s a cryptocurrency, so it has real-world value, and it’s unique because there is an ecosystem being developed that will allow us to harness the power of other developers and users. We feel that the ecosystem will help us build our user base and engage those users faster, since they will be earning something that’s more useful than a traditional points system. Unlike traditional point systems where you must stick to spending only on what’s available inside the app you earned the points in, Kin will allow users to spend on anything in the ecosystem, giving users more flexibility and more options.
How can users earn and spend Kin on Zool?
Right now, users can earn Kin for reaching their step goals. Users are assigned a daily step goal, and will get rewarded in Kin for reaching milestones up to that goal (ex., if you are assigned a goal of 10,000 steps per day, you get rewarded for everything 2,000 steps you take up to a maximum of 10,000 steps). We also encourage users to increase their total steps, so if a user consistently hits 10,000 steps per day, we increase their daily maximum to 15,000 so they walk more and earn even more Kin.
Users can also earn Kin for winning challenges against others. They can invite friends to the app, and pay a subscription fee to enter challenges together where they’re rewarded on a daily basis for the number of friends they out-walk. To keep competitions friendly and productive, we’ve also implemented a peer-to-peer tipping option that lets users send Kin to one another to motivate them to reach their own goals.
We also have an in-app shop to purchase gift cards, vouchers, and a few physical products like protein shakes, or even a FitBit. The shop is currently focused on retailers that are popular in India, since that’s where the majority of the user base is. We have a lot of different partnerships in India with various brands that are popular here, like Netmeds, Yatra, 1mg, Portea, Healthcare at Home, FitPass, MamaEarth. We intend to expand these further, once we open the app up to more users globally.
Why should other developers begin building with Kin?
I think anyone who is building an in-app points system, or any kind of method to reward their users for in-app experiences, should choose to implement Kin instead. Kin enhances the user experience by providing users something of value, making them more engaged, and it benefits developers by giving us a better way to reward our users, giving users more value and letting us receive more value in return.
