About Kinship
Kinship is a personal relationship assistant, designed to enable you to remember and act on the things that connect you to the people you care about.
More simply put: Kinship is the place you keep all your important people stuff.
People who are really good at building relationships — whether personal or professional — keep track of the things they learn about other people, the conversations they have with them, and the stuff they want to remember to follow up on with those folks. That way, when it comes to their next meeting, or the next time they want to reach out to them, they can show that they listen to them, know them, and care about them. Perhaps a few of them have remarkable memories that enable them to do this, but our research suggests that the vast majority build systems to take notes and trigger follow ups.
What do they keep notes about? Well that entirely depends on who they are and what matters in their world. Some people keep potential gift lists; some just want to track conversations so they keep moving forward rather than retreading old ground; some just want to make sure they remember the important things — that exam, that medical procedure, the kids’ names! Others keep notes specific to their profession: Realtors track taste and family stages; hairdressers care about cut, color and the last conversation; serial entrepreneurs want to remember investors’ priorities and pet peeves.
Prior to the creation of Kinship, however, there hasn’t been a digital tool that was custom built to support all these thoughtful relationship cultivators — and certainly there’s been nothing to help the rest of us get as good as they are at making connections and strengthening them over time.
Some relationship builders use spreadsheets, others keep notes in calendars, contact managers, notebooks, or word processing docs. But all of the above can be difficult to supplement, organize, or extract information from in a timely manner, especially on a mobile device.
Kinship aims to replace them with a single tool that does all those things flawlessly.
Kinship enables you to create profiles of all the people that matter to you. (You can add them one at a time or import them from one of your existing tools.)
It also allows you to add notes about anyone at anytime, with such ease that you’ll wonder why it used to seem like hard work to keep track of all this info.
Kinship makes fast — and satisfying — work of organizing your people stuff too. Using a combination of machine learning, and one-click prompts, it neatly sorts all your info — the facts about folks, the way you want to group them, and all your other notes — into easily visualized, easily recalled and retrieved nuggets of networking and friend-building gold.
Finally, Kinship users find that it provides invaluable connective tissue between their other tools — the calendars, contact databases, CRM systems, and so on — because it synchs with all of the above so that all your people information is always current and easily actionable.
Of course, if you’re reading this you are probably aware that the folks at Kinship also share some of what they learn about building relationships via our website and publishing platforms like Medium.
That does not, and never will, involve sharing any user data. We’re firm believers that this stuff is private and should remain so, which is why we charge for the app rather than trying to monetize it by selling user data.
But as we’ve worked to understand more about relationships, we’ve learned that they are the leading factor in determining our happiness, our professional success and even our health. So when a new study that’s relevant to relationship building comes to our attention, or we speak to an expert who helps us see what it takes to create a career-catalyzing network, we pay it forward by sharing.
That, after all, is what kinship is all about.
So, yes, as far as a useful ‘About’ page is concerned, Kinship is an app. Yet it’s also a caring-for-people-first way of looking at life that anyone can adopt and everyone benefits from. We hope people use and benefit from the app, but what really matters is that we all work on caring about each other.
