Seeding the Ecosystem: Kin’s Partner Strategy

Today’s best community-driven applications facilitate positive, productive forms of digital conversation, content creation, and commerce among their users.

That’s exactly the behavior we intend to incentivize with Kin. To help Kin become the ideal compensation tool for a digital sharing economy of equal opportunity, we’re securing partners that can help us integrate Kin into as many high-engagement communities as possible.

That’s why we’ll be welcoming three kinds of partner entities into the ecosystem in this initial phase:

• Platform/channel partners that will expose Kin to large, captive markets of developers, apps, or consumers
• Digital services partners that will integrate the Kin SDK for native earn-and-spend opportunities for the user-members of their app-based communities
• Brand partners that will offer compelling marketplace opportunities for users of partner apps to earn or redeem Kin

So before we debut our initial partnerships to the Kin community — beginning with a major platform partner — we want to share with you how our partner strategy lays the ideal foundation for a successful economy.

Our relationships with all three kinds of partners will ultimately support developers by putting their users top of mind.

Integrating Kin into Communities

The ideal environments for Kin are those in which large segments of active users engage in peer-to-peer activities that benefit fellow users.

Within these communities, native integration of Kin can provide developers with a customized way to reward the value of productive in-app engagement. For us, integration into community-driven digital services applications can solidify our strategy and roadmap — providing us with clear insight into users’ adoption and usage patterns with Kin.

With some overlap, we see the most Kin-friendly communities spanning seven different categories:

• E-commerce communities, in which users facilitate the buying and selling of goods, services, or digital offerings
• Education communities, in which users take classes or coursework and/or share educational resources with one another
• Gaming communities where new virtual technologies are created, shared, or used by a games-focused audience
• Knowledge sharing communities, where individuals converse with one another on topics of interest and/or build reputational value for their personal expertise
• Messaging communities, in which users chat with each other and/or “unlock” opportunities to engage in new conversations
• Social networks, where users interact with fellow users and/or brands and engage with user- or brand-generated content
• Virtual goods/content communities, where users access digital products such as avatars, stickers, and so on

These seven different types of apps are built by developers from the ground up — with or without an existing community involved.

So as we secure partners to support our long-term success, we’re engaging two audiences in parallel: Community-driven app developers, as well as channels or platforms that serve app makers (or their community members) through their products or service offerings.

By working with platforms in addition to apps, we can help a greater variety of communities to be built and designed with Kin “transaction economies” at their core.

Transaction Economies With Kin

On the seven types of communities discussed above — which are all designed around high-touch user-user interactions — integration of the Kin SDK provides apps with a transaction layer atop their offering.

That transaction layer can help developers motivate their users to make their communities better. No matter how large or small, every effort the app would like to see users engage in — from reporting bugs or bad actors to creating great content — can be linked to an incentive: Why would I test that new feature? Or share my expertise with others? Because I can earn Kin.

Almost any digital community that facilitates peer-to-peer interactions can create a transaction economy around Kin to reward and motivate users. Kin can then support the community’s retention, engagement, and monetization goals — reducing any burden to rely on ads to earn revenue.

Yet within those individual app-based economies, participants will use a Kin “transaction layer” to differing degrees.

As users, our engagement varies across all the apps we use — even ones we love: In some communities, we actively create and contribute. In others, we participate more passively — we scroll, like, and check notifications.

With the right ecosystem of partners, Kin can balance that “asymmetrical” engagement for apps and their users. Securing all three types of partner entities in this initial phase — platform partners, digital services, and brands — will help us deliver a balanced ecosystem to all participants from the very beginning.

Balancing the Ecosystem

When we first conceptualized Kin, we envisioned every community-driven app as a symmetrical two-sided marketplace. Users would earn Kin inside an app they use — gaining valuable spending power based on their engagement level — and then spend it within the same app.

As we’ve evolved our ecosystem strategy based on learnings from our Kik integration (and talks with the makers of other top applications) we’ve recognized that’s not always the case. Some apps lend themselves more naturally to earning Kin; others to spending it.

On a knowledge-sharing app that will integrate the Kin SDK, for example, highly active users may find it easy to earn Kin by creating new content or unlocking higher participation levels over time. An active contributor to an online encyclopedia could receive Kin just as active Redditors rack up “karma” today.

Within the encyclopedia’s community, Kin will possess utility as a digital currency. It might be used to moderate content or “tip” fellow users for their help — serving as a tool for value exchange in the app’s unique transaction economy. Or, earning enough Kin might unlock valuable statuses or features.

But for the community’s power users, there will still be a need to redeem — making it crucial for us to seed the ecosystem with a balance of earn- and spend-friendly opportunities.

Virtual goods apps, for example, can enter the ecosystem to accept Kin as a form of payment. In doing so, they benefit from access to power users of other community-driven platforms in the ecosystem (and can find creative ways to attract them through Kin-specific offers).

The brand partners we bring into the Kin Marketplace will also support consumers and developers by accepting Kin, or offering new ways to earn Kin outside communities and spend it back inside them. By helping us seed the marketplace with opportunities, brands will help us spark a new network effect powered by cryptocurrency.

A New Network Effect

Especially in the earliest phases of the ecosystem, the inclusion of brands will support developers and help balance the earn and spend sides of the economy.

Custom “earn” experiences like polls and surveys will expose users to the simplicity and ease-of-use of Kin. That will help drive early adoption by creating the stickiness of a crypto balance, which users will want to apply in the communities they engage in.

As those digital services build with Kin to motivate meaningful value exchange among their users, Kin’s utility will integrate deeper into every community we partner with. Over time, that will spark new opportunities to compensate digital conversations, content creation, and commerce inside communities.

The network-effect benefits will generate unique advantages for all parties: Consumers will enjoy a new sense of value and transaction power for their contributions, and developers will gain a new tool for monetizing their offering — with Marketplace access broadening their exposure the users of other apps.

Each forthcoming partner in our lineup will help spark that network effect as we make our vision a success. And each partner also has unique motivations for working with us — ranging from increasing engagement or retention to facilitating transactions and rewarding contributions.

So as we welcome new partners into the Kin Ecosystem, we will be using our Medium channels to outline the “what” and “why” behind each business relationship.

Beginning with a platform partnership this week, we will share each deal with you one-by-one to explain how every partner will uniquely support, facilitate, or align with our vision and ecosystem strategy.

And as our initial partners begin to see the value of consumer-friendly, reward-driven monetization with Kin, we look forward to building relationships with many more community-driven apps interested in a fairer, more competitive digital economy. (By gaining ongoing learnings from our active Kik integration and ‘Kinit’ beta app, we’re already walking into every new-partner conversation with tangible insights on how our blockchains support us, and how Kin makes communities stronger.)

To plant the seeds for “productive participation” with Kin many diverse digital communities, we’re excited to be growing an ecosystem of balanced, complementary partnerships right from the ground up. Stay tuned ;-)