I visited the Rave office in Kitchener, Ontario to chat with Michael (CEO at Rave) about working with Kin. Joining us were Garrett (CTO) and Colin (Frontend Dev). By the end of our meeting we had listened to a Britney Spears & Fifth Harmony mashup, compared Rave to crack cocaine, and found my DJ name. Here is that conversation.

What is Rave?

Rave is a Kitchener-based company focused on making media better using technology.

How is Rave making media better?

In two major ways. Rave is a social streaming platform that enables people to come together and watch YouTube and Netflix and Google Drive videos in perfect sync with people around the world on iOS and Android. The idea being that it’s more fun to watch with other people, whether it’s with friends or family or strangers from Brazil. The second way we are applying technology to make media better is with RaveDJ. It is the first full artificial intelligence DJ. The user picks music and RaveDJ will mix and mash it up to create brand new music, just like a human DJ. Now anybody can mix and match music like a professional.

What are the demographics of Rave users?

The demographics are pretty broad, from tweens, teens, and beyond. Our top countries are the United States, Brazil, and Saudi Arabia. The UK is up there as well, and this is across both of our products.

Why do you think Rave has acquired such a broad audience?

Our platform is for anyone that likes music, movies, Netflix, and watching with other people. This really isn’t niche. It is quite broad and so we’ve had users in every age range and every country. It is pretty amazing because music crosses borders. You could have 50 people from 50 different countries enjoying the same song on Rave together. This was the inspiration for RaveDJ.

When we launched the Rave app, we saw an overwhelming trend that users were engaging around music. It crossed cultural lines and we wanted to let people do more with music. We started looking into how to enable people to engage with music without requiring users to have training or special musical talents. We wanted it to be easy to engage and create something new, with all the hard work done by us. That’s how we came up with the AI DJ. The AI is doing 99% of the work and the user does the 1% that’s fun: picking the songs and hitting play.

What would you attribute your growth to?

We’ve taken a very product-first approach. Playing to our strengths as a team, we put all our resources into making the best product we can. We believe that we should build a product that we personally would want to use. That is something that people going back 100 years have done to make products and is similar to the ‘If you build it, they will come’ mindset. Which is true but just takes a while, and we have seen it take flight in the last couple of months.

Word is spreading, more and more people are coming, and so we are seeing completely organic growth, which is a great way to validate the product.

What is retention and engagement like on Rave?

We have very good retention because we are combining the 2 stickiest app categories: messengers and media players. Just look at the amount of time people spend on apps like Messenger, SnapChat, WhatsApp on one side and on the other, YouTube, Netflix, Spotify. We are combining both of these experiences into one, and that’s kind of like crack cocaine. We’re combining 2 addictive substances into one completely new addictive substance. But unlike crack cocaine, no one has overdosed on Rave…that we are aware of.

This is also why we have such good engagement. Our average session time is above 20 minutes and sometimes above 30 minutes. In this industry, 5 is considered extraordinary. We are very proud of that because we wanted to make an app that people want to use and they are using it for the better part of an hour.

What got you interested in Kin?

First, you guys are right in our backyard with us being in Kitchener.

Second, Kin was an interesting concept because cryptocurrencies are so esoteric and unapproachable by the majority of people due to where they came from and how they grew. The kind of communities that created cryptocurrencies were not necessarily interested in it being used by 15 year olds. Most were happy with that high skill-level wall and they were just making the wall continuously higher with auto trading, and hot swapping wallets, and everything else. I would say that the idea of creating a cryptocurrency that can be used for real everyday things by real everyday people is very interesting and was something that we wanted to be a part of.

Third, our vision for Rave is practically limitless. We want to continue to grow until it is the go-to app where people come together to socialize around entertainment. We always knew that would mean integrating more and more entertainment options and payment options for premium. As much as we’ve integrated from YouTube and Netflix etc., at the end of the day, there are going to be other entertainment options people might want to buy and we think Kin would be really interesting in that respect. Giving us the ability to reward users and then have users take those rewards and buy premium features was something we were really interested in trying out.

How is Kin used in Rave?

Kin is given out to reward the behaviour of watching videos with lots of people. We allow you to give Kin to other people in the rave as well as making it rain, which actually showers the other user’s screen with Kin. People really like making it rain Kin. They call it the best Kin spend today.

We also have Rave premium where users can unlock additional features where Kin is used as an alternative to fiat currency. This is big because a lot of our users are from countries or age ranges where the idea of going premium by paying Rave in dollars is just not realistic. With Kin, we are giving everyone an opportunity to go premium. It is kind of a roundabout way to earn revenue for Rave, but it doesn’t depend on taking money from the user. Kin allows us to open up the platform’s full potential for each user.

Try out the Rave app today on Android to see their Kin experience.

How has your Kin implementation improved user engagement or retention?

Since integrating Kin we’ve had a 3- to 4-fold increase in usership in terms of total daily and monthly active users. This is amazing growth and we attribute a lot of this to Kin. There was a lot of excitement around Kin and even just the Kin community was showing a lot of engagement. If you check out the Kin Reddit, everytime we change something, someone posts it there within 9 minutes. They are definitely engaged.

Why do you think other developers should build with Kin?

Kin is a fantastic way to engage users and incentivize specific behaviours to create revenue.

In terms of shaping user behaviour, all apps have their ideal user flow. However, when you roll out your app or game you will immediately find people not using it the way you hoped. To solve this, there are two ways to try to influence people — a carrot or a stick. One can either restrict bad behaviour or reward good behaviour. I think Kin is a fantastic way of being able to reward positive behaviour.

There is also a strong community built into Kin. You are going to gain a tremendous amount of new users instantly by coming on board because people are very hungry for Kin-enabled apps. As more developers add Kin as an option in their app, the validity of what Kin does as an in-app currency for developers get validated. It will grow stronger with every new partner, big or small.

What challenges did you face with implementing Kin and how did you solve them?

We’ve been with the Developer Program since September 2018. I think some of the problems we had were just growing pains of the SDK and with Kin as a whole. These challenges have been really smoothed out in the last couple of months with the migration to Kin3.

Current pains would be with the new Kin SDK. Reviewing it and what other developers are saying in the community, it seems like we will need to start from scratch with the integration. We are still working on this.

What is next for Rave?

Working with the new Kin SDK and focusing on RaveDJ. The current version of RaveDJ is not social at all. Eventually, it will be very social and users will be able to come in, make up a DJ name, and post sets. If Kin comes to web, we already have a lot of ideas on how to reward people for making popular mashups and mixes. For Rave the app, we are currently working on a big surprise new release which has more content, better content, and more provocative content. That is all we can say.