In the previous two posts in this series, we’ve been primarily focused on the strategy the Kik team has around Kin and Kinit. But, we’ve not yet talked about something far more important — you!

One of the most important aspects of any startup or product is the community, the investors, the customers — the people who make a piece of code something more.

In his July 18th article, John Biggs of TechCrunch addressed the launch of Kinit and closed his article with the following line:

“While the KinIt app is probably not what most Kin holders wanted to see, it’s at least an interim solution while the team builds out sturdier systems.”

I’m not sure how many Kin holders John spoke with to reach his conclusion, but, being the data driven man that I am, I decided to do my own research.

Methodology

The following survey results are comprised of answers from a sample of 179 Kin users and community members.

The users were sourced from Reddit, the Kin Telegram, my blog followers, and other direct outreach.

Various demographics questions were added in to ensure there was no biasing towards one group (i.e. Android users, or US users, etc.)

Statistical Accuracy

While 179 users may not seem representative, statistical significance depends on the rate of answers in each individual question. 179 users is not enough to confidently say “A is better than B” if the votes are 51% vs 49%, but it is enough to confidently say “A is better than B” if the votes are 99% vs 1%.

For sake of transparency though, let’s do our high level sample size and confidence interval validations.

The general confidence interval calculation is that for 50,000 people (rough number of Kin wallets in existence), and an 80% confidence will produce a margin of error of ±5% with a sample size >164 users.

The formula is below for anyone who feels the need to double check the math.

Sample size equation where N = population. e = Margin of error (decimal notation) and z = z-score.

What this means is, if we had asked a Yes/No question to our 179 users and the answer “Yes” had 10% of the votes, we could expect that if we polled all 50,000 people then we’re predicting there is an 80% chance “Yes” would get somewhere between 5% — 15% of the vote, and “No” would get somewhere between 85% — 95% of the vote.

Since the variance is so great, we can be confident that “No” was an overwhelmingly more popular choice even though we only polled a few individuals because the results were so strongly in favor of one of the options.