Kindred Business · Montreal
Kindred is a blind-first app for meeting people nearby. On day seven it stops being polite and asks the pair to name a day, a place and a time. Preferred Venues in Montreal are what it offers at that moment.
Montreal is unusually good at the part Kindred is bad at: people here already go out. What it is short of is a first place for two people who have never met and do not yet know which of them is picking.
A listing here has to earn its place against a city that already knows where to go, which is why the verification matters more than the badge.
Two people who have never met have been talking for a week. Photos unlocked on day three. On day seven the app asks them to settle what, where and when — and neither of them wants to be the one who suggests somewhere wrong.
That is the whole opportunity, and it is a narrow one on purpose. 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 in the product.
Somewhere two strangers could comfortably sit and talk for an hour. In practice that means cafés that will let two people sit for two hours, bring-your-own restaurants, bars with tables rather than a scrum, and studios — the sort of places you already find around Mile End, the Plateau, Saint-Henri, Verdun and Rosemont.
Loud rooms where nobody can hear each other are a bad fit, and we will say so rather than take the money.
Guaranteed traffic in Montreal or anywhere else. 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 is zero it says zero.
The honest size of it. Kindred is early, 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 Montreal venues on it costs very little.
Two minutes to apply, no card, and a person checks the business before the listing goes live.