On Kin, priorities, and the future..

Friday, May 3, 2019
Our primary goal with every action we're taking right now is to increase adoption and user retention. This takes a lot of experimenting. So far the journey has gone something like this: 

  • Hmmm... no one is signing up at our site, even if we advertise - we must fix this if we care about the future.  
  • Let's build a bunch of tools so we can really understand what visitors to our site and people who sign up are doing. 
  • Oh look, everyone new (seriously > 95%) who visits our site is on a mobile device..
  • Let's build a mobile friendly version and an app. 
  • Yes its working! People are signing up like crazy (thousands every month!) 
  • Uh oh, everyone who signs up quits immediately, they don't even get through the first turn.. (< 1% - ouch)
  • Let's simplify the first level to see if we can make the learning curve easier.. 
  • That seems to help.. now many people are making it through the first turn... and more through the end of the first level too.
  • Let's work hard on the tutorial system to see if we can make it more fun and friendly when you first land (try creating a level 1 game with the assistant turned on if you want to see this work)  
  • Wow! That works very good! By simplifying and adding the tutorial many people are making it through turn 1! ( > 30%!) And even more importantly, now over 10% are making it through level 1 and heading on to try level 2 and beyond! This is going great! 
  • Uh oh... after a couple of weeks almost everyone who tries us is still gone... 
  • Let's add notifications to the app to keep bringing people back. 
  • That works quite well - many more people are still here, but we're still losing too many.  
  • Let's try to get them into blitz games so they have a taste of real play in a small, fast format.  
  • Hmm.. that doesn't seem to be working so well yet.. it seems we have a long way to go... 
  • Let's try... 
  • Let's try...
  • Let's try Kin... 

One of the things we are trying is introducing a real incentive to players to get past turn 1, level 1 and beyond.. to become interested enough to stick with it and get into the game - ultimately we want to turn real people into real Planets enthusiasts who will be part of our community for years to come. Kin is one of these experiments.It's possible we will learn that it has very little, or no affect and we'll move on from Kin at some point. 

In the mean time, let's see what happens - and keep coming up with ideas to try, and try, and try until we find the path to enlightenment. To an inbound funnel that exceeds our churn rate and grows the Planets community to another level. Hopefully we can do this with our product... we believe it is a great game with a lot of unique things to offer. Hopefully we can find a way to make others realize this as well. 


Kin Details (some questions answered from the Kin discussion thread) 

Just for those interested parties (and @Seveiht) - Kin runs its own block chain. This block chain is a fork of the Stellar (xlm) blockchain which uses a different consensus model called the Stellar Consensus Protocol (https://www.stellar.org/stories/adventures-in-galactic-consensus-chapter-1/). Basically, services which are participating in the chain maintain it's security. This is instead of the Bitcoin/Ethereum "proof of work" model which requires "mining" to maintain security. 

The net result is that handling secure transactions on Kin does not require tons of electricity to secure. It does not have any of the negative environmental impacts of bitcoin - so you can rest easy there. It is just like a big distributed database which is owned by all its market participants. 

The Kin foundation is looking to create a currency shared between many different apps - with a focus at the moment on gaming and social applications. They are providing incentives to services which integrate with them. We are an early adopter in their program. (https://medium.com/kinblog/13-apps-accepted-into-the-second-kin-developer-program-aa52a4589cec) 

The economics are this: Kin gives Planets Nu free kin based on the number of users spending Kin on our site. Since we get free Kin from them, we give that Kin to you (the players) in the hope that it will increase interest, retention and simply be something fun. If you spend it back (to us) then you're helping promote that process and we'll get more Kin from the foundation to give away.  So spend your Kin and we'll give you more! :) 

Our net goal is to try to grow the site and make that growth sustainable so we can continue to offer a VGA Planets experience for generations to come. Simple as that. Kin is one of the grander experiments we are trying - it's fun, interesting, futuristic and just might lead us somewhere new...