Kindred is a small app with an unusual habit: it pushes people to stop texting and agree on a real place, in their first week. Preferred Venues are the places it puts in front of them at that moment.
Kindred is a blind first app for meeting people nearby. Photos stay hidden for three days, so people match on what they are into rather than a photograph. On day seven the app stops being polite about it and asks the pair to name a day, a place and a time, because a match that never becomes a plan is just texting.
That day seven moment is the whole of the opportunity here. Two people who have never met are looking at each other in a chat window trying to think of somewhere. Right now they think of a chain, or they give up. A Preferred Venue is what appears instead.
The honest size of it. Kindred is early. It is not a national platform and this page is not going to pretend otherwise. What it is: a product whose entire mechanic is getting people out of the app and into a room, in a defined week, in a defined city. If that describes customers you want, being one of the first venues on it costs very little and is worth having.
Guaranteed traffic. Nobody can promise that and anybody who does is selling you a number. Your dashboard shows how many people opened your listing and how many tickets sold, and if that number is zero it will say zero rather than something more flattering.
It is also not advertising. There are no banners in Kindred and there never will be. A venue appears at the moment somebody is choosing a place, and nowhere else.
Because the first twenty venues in a city matter more than the next two hundred, and we would rather build the thing with a handful of businesses who told us what they needed than launch it and hope.
Leaving your details is not a commitment and there is no card involved. You get one email when it opens, and a phone call if you would rather hear it from a person.
The venue side of Kindred. A café, bar, restaurant or activity space pays a monthly subscription to become a verified Preferred Venue, which puts it in front of people at the moment they are agreeing where to meet for the first time.
Three tiers, from 79 to 349 Canadian dollars a month, tax included. Nothing is charged until a business picks one, and verification is free either way. There is no contract and cancelling takes two clicks.
No. It is built and it is not switched on. This page collects the businesses who want to be told when it opens, which is why it asks for a phone number as well as an email.
No, and there is nothing to sell. Kindred never tells a venue who visited a listing. The table behind the venue dashboard holds a date, a category and a number, and it is not capable of holding a person.
No. A verified venue appears when two people are choosing where to meet, and nowhere else in the product. Kindred has no advertising and does not sell data; the subscription is how the venue side pays for itself.
Somewhere two people who have never met could comfortably sit and talk for an hour. Quiet cafés, board game bars, bakeries, small restaurants, activity spaces, galleries. Loud rooms where nobody can hear each other are a bad fit and we will say so.
Leave your name, email and a number. When the venue side opens you get one email and, if you want it, a phone call to talk it through before you decide anything.
Kindred does not run background checks and does not verify that anyone is who they say they are. No app does, whatever it implies. Meet somewhere public the first few times, tell someone where you are going, sort out your own way home, and never send anyone money. The safety section is honest about exactly what we do and what we cannot do.