I was reading Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point when something clicked. Gladwell describes a certain type of person he calls a Connector: someone who seems to know everyone, and more importantly, someone who treats each personal relationship as something to be collected and cherished. Connectors don't just accumulate acquaintances. They pay attention. They remember details. They genuinely invest in the people around them.
Reading that, I kept thinking: how do I teach my kids to be Connectors? How do you make the act of learning about friends feel exciting?
And then there's the bigger picture. We're heading into a world where AI handles more and more of our interactions. Kids growing up today are going to spend enormous amounts of time talking to computers. Real human relationships, the kind built on actual curiosity about another person, are only going to become more valuable and more rare. I wanted to build something that pointed my kids in that direction early.
My kids love printing things and collecting things. Stickers, cards, colourable sheets. If it comes out of the printer, they are interested. That gave me the format. Building real friendships for my kids gave me the purpose. The only additional requirement was that it had to have action to capture my two boys.
In Kin Bots, the robot character represents the bond between your child and their friend. The friend is the "engineer" of the bot, your child is the "controller". Together, they create something neither could make alone. Your child adds a friend by first name, answers a few questions about who that friend really is, and the app generates a one-of-a-kind battle bot that reflects that specific friendship. The more they know about their friends, the more points that character card has.
Kin Bots was designed so the cards can be printed and brought to school as trading cards. The incentive to collect and level up becomes an incentive to pay attention to their friends.
I did not design this alone. My son was my co-designer for a lot of it. The image concepts, the game rules, the power points, which card details matter. He had opinions on all of it, and most of his opinions were right. Building it together was a joy.
Eventually we will make it iOS compatible. The card sharing features are wired up and work, but we have turned sharing off until we are confident about the mechanics. We do not want to store any information in the cloud. We are taking it one step at a time and letting real kids tell us what matters.
Right now Kin Bots is in early testing on Android. If you want to try it with your kids before the full launch, you can join via the link below. I would genuinely love to hear what your kids think.
Android only for now. Email us and we will add you as a tester. Free to download, no ads, parent account required.
✉ Request early access