I also want to make some nip tuck adjustments to the welcome space that should hopefully also help w this
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100% agree with that - my thought process was more around a dark mode / light mode kind of switch, because I love the craziness of the colorful spaces and wouldn’t want to lose that as a user. And want the focus to stay on the artsy audience as well.
I don’t know if you are willing to share and I can nix this if you want, but I’m curious if you were to put a number to it, what % of the way are you towards a minimum revenue goal of being profitable and sustainable currently?
P.s. The blog is really short, just wanted to give it a shout out in case people on micro.blog hadn’t heard of Kinopio. (@bentsai shared above)
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I’m currently making about $400/mo MRR, so v far from sustainable currently
how big is micro.blog? Should I be posting kinopio stuff there you think?
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I keep my circle pretty small on micro.blog and don’t engage a ton, but the people there are generally very much of the indieweb sensibility, thoughtful, and engaging.
I don’t know if you were to just feed your tweets there you would get much of a benefit out of it.
Also, appreciate the transparency. Definitely thought // wished it’d be closer to sustainability for you.
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I found kinopio from your blog, forgot about it, then had to find it again. It was not an easy task.
I think you need to not have the app be the first thing you see when you go to kinopio.club. There needs to be information about it, maybe explainers and templates for various use cases, etc to make it easier to find and understand.
I think integrating with Gsuite (Esp. Drive) could make it easier to bring teams in if their workplace uses it, I don’t know if office 365 has similar integration points but I’d look in to it.
I love kinopio and there are certain tasks that work well in it (mapping things out, planning structure, etc) but I don’t need to do those often.
A big strength is the collaboration, I used kinopio with a ton of other people to map out a phone-based menu system as part of an ARG and it worked but had issues because so many people were using it. (lag, connector ends floating in space instead of touching the cards they were connected to, etc)
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I have the same instinct, and had similar experience when I first found it (May 2020). When I first found it, I was like “what is this??? this is so amazing and quirky and great.” but I had to do a lot of legwork to piece together where it came from, who made it, what people use it for.
I feel like the default Hello Kinopio space is interesting on a meta level for a landing page, but a separate landing page would give people some breathing room, some space to get acclimated, to understand what is going on before diving in. It can be a bit intimidating at first.
Most of the information is already in your blog (posts about Kinopio), so it would be a matter of reworking that into more of a marketing focus. Testimonials, quick blurbs of how people are using it, short videos, things like that to guide people into particular workflows/uses.
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the current welcome space has a link to the help site that’s intended to be a more explanatory text based thing (https://help.kinopio.club) , do you think making that callout more prominent and any specific changes to the help site would help in this respect?
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IMO, the help site is a different audience (someone who has already started using Kinopio and wants to learn about a specific feature, get help). The landing page I have in mind is for drawing in new users. (I’m sure there are marketing terms for all this). It should have something splashy initially, and clearly communicate popular workflows, and provide a call to action (Get Started). Some examples:
Definitely doesn’t need to follow this over-trodden format, but I think it would go a long way to help people understand what Kinopio is and what they could use it for. It is more welcoming and holding their hand a bit more than dropping them directly into the product UI. Guide them through a flow to get started. If they are here to make a roadmap, explain how they might do that and give them a link to the roadmap space template, e.g.
from this, I see two options,
- when you open kinopio.club for the first time, you’re in a welcome space (like now)
- when you open kinopio.club for the first time, you’re on a marketing page that acts and works like every other marketing page
is there a third option?
Quick counter-example:
- Excalidraw
- Their Plus/paid product has marketing: https://plus.excalidraw.com/
What if the marketing page has iframes of spaces you can interact with and then launch into fully?
As a newcomer, my main questions when landing would be:
- What is this and what can I use it for?
- How much does it cost/what are the terms?
The current default space does address those, but it’s a bit overwhelming to take in. Those items are not particularly emphasized. There is a lot of UI that I’m not sure what it does (and I don’t need to, but since it’s on the screen, I have to content with it).
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I appreciate your desire to eschew the traditional marketing page. maybe your marketing page doesn’t have to look and act like every other marketing page though 
so the third option is something new you create that’s unique, just like Kinopio ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 
re excalidraw,
does this only work because excalidraw kinda looks like regular drawing app (toolbars etc. like photoshop etc.). Or does excalidraw’s approach work because of the relatively small but prominently positioned ‘excalidraw plus/paid’ link that gets ppl to the marketing site?
easier said than done sadly 
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the excalidraw approach , but for kinopio would be to have a prominent, but dismissable ‘hey new user click here to learn about what this is’ button/notification. Clicking it would then take you to a regular marketing page…
I think this is part of it, I had this same thought. The excalidraw+ site is relatively new, they didn’t have that before.
this is probably personal preference, but I don’t like how excalidraw drops me into the app. The first thing I would do is to find a link to read more about this project, what the philosophy/vibe is, whether it costs anything, etc. and if you ignore the new excalidraw+ site, they don’t really have a marketing site. I guess this is my way of responding to
I think the marketing page being primary is better. what are your reservations to that?
totally acknowledged
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mostly the added friction, maybe putting something necessarily boring feels less like it takes away that live magic. but maybe it’s fine
A lot of what I think has already been captured by others, that said, in my own words…
I loved Kinopio when I first discovered it, but my initial love was definitely based on the joy I was experiencing when playing with the novel interface[1] rather than a pragmatic cost/benefit analysis of the impact it had on my productivity. However, as time has gone on the novelty has worn off but while I was here for the novelty I discovered lots of use-cases where Kinopio provides value to me and so I’m still using it every day, despite the novelty being long gone.
I think there’s a lot of value to be found in delighting people with the novelty of an interface and so perhaps there’s a way to retain that while getting people to long-term value quicker. Miro[2] is proving that there’s mainstream value in tools that enable visual thinking, and I think Kinopio is unique in that it’s a very enjoyable human experience… so I think there’s a place for Kinopio as Miro for people (or, Miro is Kinopio for employees).
If I woke up tomorrow as the owner of Kinopio, I’d focus on identifying tasks that many people do in their personal life that would benefit from spatial thinking, then I’d pick one task that I think Kinopio would be especially good for, then I’d build out a marketing strategy around that task which uses the task itself as onboarding into Kinopio. The challenge is less in getting Kinopio in front of people – easy, just raise and burn lots of investor cash – and more delivering value to people.
You’ve mentioned influencer outreach before: what was your approach? My instinct is that if you can identify a task that has an engaged community around it, that would benefit from spatial thinking, then there’s great opportunity to drive meaningful growth through getting in-front of the relevant audiences. Micro-influencer marketing is pretty hip at the moment, it’s cheap and effective: there’ll be a lot of people out there with a small audience that would absolutely love to learn about Kinopio as a tool for a task they’re doing. The key, I think, is in getting Kinopio in front of an audience in the context of a task they need to do rather than as a “neat fun tool”.
What that task could be though… I’m not sure. I use Kinopio for lots of things, from thinking about jobs and planning software projects to cataloguing design inspiration and triaging neat things I find on the internet before they go into Notion… but maybe there’s something more mainstream and human-like holiday planning or mood boards or outfit inspiration or capsule wardrobes or manifestation journaling or a virtual polaroid wall or… something. I have no idea.
[1] I think notion is another example of this: I was introduced to notion and loved it before I had a practical use for it, and I actively thought about ways to fit it into my life in a meaningful way. Eventually, I found more and more and now it’s as essential to me as Kinopio.
[2] I don’t like Miro because I think it does too much, it’s a tool without real structure, it’s like a spreadsheet that someone shook and cells ended up all over the place, but it seems everyone I work with loves it.
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hey sam! what a great post, good to hear from you. you inspired me to start brainstorming uses for kinopio.
regarding starting in kinopio and going into notion: I’m wondering what you use that for, and if any of that would benefit from being automated (using Kinopio and Notion APIs).
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leading with/prioritizing use cases totally makes sense. It’s really tough though to know what use cases most resonate with people (are you saying it should be constrained to personal life only?). Once we figure that out, I can probably do something compelling with that in the context of a marketing site
You’ve mentioned influencer outreach before: what was your approach?
I probably didn’t do this great, because I was focused on creators of productivity focused content (which in turn was because I received some pretty good early press through the ‘keepproductive’ channel on youtube).
Micro-influencer marketing is pretty hip at the moment
what’s the definition of a micro-influencer? is it something based on follower count?
there’ll be a lot of people out there with a small audience that would absolutely love to learn about Kinopio as a tool for a task they’re doing. The key, I think, is in getting Kinopio in front of an audience in the context of a task they need to do rather than as a “neat fun tool”.
I totally agree, contact suggestions super welcome
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here’s a product whose functionality overlaps quite a bit with kinopio: https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scapple/overview. I’ve come across it before, but thought I’d mention it in the context of targeting certain markets. (I considered starting a new topic, but didn’t want to give it that much weight or importance) This is clearly geared towards writers. They are the creators of Scrivener, which is more well-known. It’s desktop software. You make notes and connections on a canvas, and you can add certain adornments. it’s like an alternate universe version of kinopio, a universe where nintendo and teenage engineering don’t exist.
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