In the last couple of weeks, my colleagues Chase Barker and Yossi Segev shared our progress on building the Kin platforms’ suite of tools — read what it all means in their deep dive here and here. As they shared the progress on execution, I wanted to share a wider angle from a product perspective to outline how we envision the evolution of the powerful and intuitive Kin platform.
We perceive our product not just as a suite of tools to integrate Kin, we see it as a living mechanism that provides overarching solutions for each stage of the developer journey.
Why? Developers who build with Kin lend our solution to customers through their apps every day, and our goal is to ensure their success. Our responsibility is to give developers the best tools and to set them up for success while offering useful information and guidance in various fields: Tech, business, product, and brand. These are essential building blocks when it comes to creating magnetic Kin experiences and ensuring consistency while presenting Kin to end users.
Who are we building for?
When we say developers, we actually mean companies developing consumer apps. Our potential target audiences represent a broad spectrum of social products and range in company size from hobbyists, alpha geeks, and small startups to first-tier, well-established apps with millions of users.
However, it doesn’t matter what the size of their business is; we see them all as savvy business decision makers and customize the design of each developer’s journey with us according to their specific needs. When building a relationship with developers, we take who they are into account, their professional background and goals, and look beyond just tech-related personas. We take into account various business stakeholders, product leads, design leads, and C-level executives.
Finally, it is important to note that at this stage, we are looking for businesses that do not have a mainstream state of mind and are eager to challenge the status quo. Businesses driven by an entrepreneurial spirit tend to take more risks, are out-of-the-box thinkers, and more open to learning new technologies. Those are the traits we are looking for.
The End-to-End Journey: Get Inspired, Create and Operate
We are aiming to create meaningful value in each stage of the developer’s journey — all the way from the initial inspiration to routine operation. To meet our goals, we are planning to offer our platform as a modular structure where developers can adopt separate modules selected to fit their specific needs (more about modules below). In addition, we will provide essential information for each step of the developer’s journey for various stakeholders, including remote-friendly education materials.
The chart below describes the different touch points in the developer’s journey, its related product offerings, as well as its related stakeholders.
A lot has been said about the Kin Rewards Engine and Kin SDK. Here, I’d like to dive deeper into the other overarching components being developed for the Kin platform.
Kin Academy
The Kin Academy is a strategic initiative on the content side of things that is still in the process of being built. However, I can share here that this will become THE place for any developer to learn why, how, and what they will be able to achieve with Kin. Our goal is to leverage our vision and our experience to help potential partners open up their minds to new ideas and to help the existing partners along their journey to success.
The Kin Academy will be an integral part of Kin’s developer hub and will provide a self-serve arena to build magnetic experiences with Kin. It will become a place to educate developers about Kin and its potential from any aspect of business: From technical to product and business angles in various forms of media, text, video, and audio. For instance, developers will be able to find answers for what’s in it for them, what to build with Kin, how to explain Kin to their end-users, how to develop a Kin roadmap etc.
Kin Modules
Switching to Module Thinking helps Kin to be even more developer-centric. The Kin SDK contains only the core functionality of our platform. But on top of this core SDK each developer will be able to select and integrate additional separate modules that best suit their needs. Some of those modules will add individual capabilities to the app, and some of them will perform as ready-made Kin experiences complete with UIs. This arrangement makes integration easier and allows us to reach a wider spectrum of developers.
As an open-source platform, in the future, we are planning to incentivize and make it easy for any developer to build modules and share them as digital assets with Kin’s Ecosystem. This will enable more developers to contribute to our efforts to expand the Kin SDK’s capabilities, boost innovation, maximize the ease of integration and build a platform that developers love.
Kin Analytics
When a developer adopts a solution, he wants to make sure that he is doing well. He wants to be able to have a place to monitor the app’s performance in various fields that can affect his business. In the context of Kin, we think that the developers would also like to use these tools to balance their in-app economy and maximize their KRE rewards. We are currently working on an MVP version of the Kin Analytics tool. Stay tuned.
We have a bold vision with revolutionary solutions. Therefore, making our platform intuitive for businesses to adopt Kin is the key. This is also what leads our thinking when it comes to the evolution of Kin’s platform: Build capabilities to support various stakeholders in each stage of the developer’s journey.
We are in a constant loop of improvement, still learning, still exploring. We are just at the beginning, so as we go, I can see how our product offering will expand and cover additional needs for a wider range of stakeholders.
This is an exciting phase for all the professionals who are involved in the development of the Kin platform. We will adjust our execution as we go and prioritize depending on our own and our partners’ business needs. All your feedback, questions, and suggestions are welcome and much appreciated.
