Kin’s been live for a little over a month now. It’s been a busy time for us, but every minute has been gratifying and challenging. Here’s a little summary of how our fledgling company has been doing.
Our customers, 78 countries.
To date, close to 800 companies from 78 countries have kicked Kin’s tires. They range in size from 3 employees all the way up to 500 plus. The most active countries thus far have been the United States, England, and China, followed by India and Germany fighting for a close fourth place.
Companies from around the world using Kin.
Kin’s biggest competitor to date? Workload. Running a business and a workplace takes a lot of energy. Our biggest challenge is to get our customers up and running with Kin in the midst of everything else going on at their company. That takes time. A lot more than the 14-day trial, that’s for sure.
Don’t let software do all the talking.
Like a lot of SaaS companies, we spent a bunch of time automating processes for our customer support and subscription billing. What our first month has proven, though, is that while the technology is slick, it puts way too much space between us and our customers. Young companies like ours need explicit and authentic contact with users. That’s something that automation can’t provide.
A lesson to remember? Software doesn’t fill the digital void. People do. We’re making some adjustments on our end, opting for a more personalized approach which has proven a lot more successful than relying on software to do all the work. This is a great lesson to our customers as well, as they seek to automate certain HR processes at their companies: always remember the value of the human touch.
Coincidentally, Paul Graham recently wrote a great essay on the topic of intentionally doing things that don’t scale. Good medicine.
Life at Kin.
The Kin team has been around for a year now. In that time, we’ve tried out new development methodologies, learned great tech like Backbone, changed team members, designed, redesigned, and built and rebuilt features. Now that we’ve launched Kin, it’s cool to see how our fledgling team has grown in terms of culture, process, and productivity. We’ve become a company. Here’s a little look into our work patterns:
The Kin team (left to right): Alex, Sarah, Craig, Ben, Jason, Michael, Lindsay
We’ve been meeting everyday at 4pm for about 8 months now. Rain or shine. We discuss what everyone’s up to, who needs help with what, and what’s on the horizon. It’s a quick standup, a breather, and a chance for the entire team to reconnect before the day wraps up.
Our live, one-on-one demos with prospective customers have been critical in our learning the needs of other companies and the myriad ways they tackle HR. We have a huge deck of requests, improvements, and new features which we’re constantly juggling, prioritizing, and executing on. We use a great tool called Trello to help organize all of that information and review it as a team at least once a week.
During the week, we do several internal releases to our test environment to fix bugs and release new features for testing. As we gather steam towards the end of each week, we decide which updates will get released to production, which usually occurs on Friday and with little to no downtime.
A few great services, by way of integrations.
We’ve been on the hunt for like-minded services to integrate with Kin in the coming months. Here are a few standouts that provide an excellent product and customer experience which we hope to be working with in the coming months.
A fantastic and flexible tool for performance review and 360 review management. We’ve been using S-I for more than a year now.
> Workable
Workable is a fantastic, simple tool to manage job placement and candidates.
There’s no other companies out there making payroll as painless or accessible as ZenPayroll right now.
This crew has their heads on straight. They handle a company’s entire benefit portfolio > from enrollment, to concierge services, to wellness programs.
What’s new and what’s coming.
It’s been a busy first month for us. We’ve released Job Descriptions and Bios, Custom Fields, and some adjustments to make it easier to store non-US data formats. That all happened on top of a pile of bugs and other under-the-hood improvements like performance optimization.
We’re currently working to make Kin’s UI more accommodating for teams of 50 or more. Customers will soon be able to filter the team calendar and any employee listing by location, job description, or by name.
A sneak peek of Kin’s new Calendar design.
After that, we’re turning our attention toward calendar integrations with Basecamp and data exports which will help with payroll integration.
That’s all folks, and thanks.
It’s a rare opportunity to launch a new company, and we’re happy to experience it with the many awesome companies who are already supporting us. We owe a huge debt of gratitude to each of these trusting, collaborative, and interesting places who understand Kin’s vision, match it to their own aspirations, work with us to help make their company a more excellent place to work. It’s an honor.