Kindo.com is a “new take on the traditional family tree”. In this interview, we sit down with Gareth Knight to talk about Kindo and their user acquisition strategy. Gareth shares with us his experience of attracting users to the site and the effectiveness of strategies such as blogging, Google AdWords and PR.

If you’re building a webapp, could be useful

Kindo just launched in Danish! Our last name research pages for Denmark have been live for quite some time now, and finally we have launched Kindo in Danish! It should soon be available via http://kindo.dk as well.

Danish home pageThe new language was made possible by Aske and Brian who have translated the whole website voluntarily. Thanks a lot for your help guys! Especially Aske has worked incredibly hard on this; and amazingly fast as well.

The new Danish version takes our language toll to 15! The Kindo family is spreading the globe

_ Kindo one of UK’s Most Promising Internet Company 2008 – Kindo Family Blog

Kindo was one of three companies, who made it to the Finals at the Internetworld 2008 fair, that is going on at Earl’s Court at the moment.

Well done to the Zoopla! guys, I reckon they’re onto a winner

During “The Award Final” at the Keynote Theatre yesterday the three selected start-ups were pitching in front of the jury and this time to the internetworld as well. Though finally the property site Zoopla took home the prize, it was a great opportunity to present Kindo to a internet-savvy crowd, and all that only about 10 Minutes from our Kindo headquarters in Putney Bridge.

2 comments about internet world:
1. more people than last time overall…
2. … and, way more honeys than the last time I was there

Aprende más sobre tus apellidos. Descubre cuánta gente comparte alguno de tus apellidos, y cómo son de populares comparados con otros apellidos.

And you know what, it’s been one of the more satisfying days in a long while I think for two reasons:
1) we tried something new and got everyone involved in some way
2) we decided this morning we were gonna do it, and we’ve all stuck together today to do it – and I don’t think we would have done if we weren’t all tied to Kindo the way we are.

It really is a baby for us all. Bottom line – Being emotionally tied to your app makes for a good days work! In the days when doing client work was bread and butter, it was a hard ask to get this involved, ‘cos it was always something transitory – this is a totally different feeling.

So we’re done now, and it’s a satisfying feeling – I’m off for a curry with my brother!!

PS. stay tuned for the update!

Anyways, if you’re reading this and you like Kindo, give it a another look today – we’ve just added photo’s.

So, give it a whirl y’all and lemme know if you have any feedback – always appreciated!!

More soon.

Then in the space of a few minutes we’re on the front page of TechCrunch UK, US and France.

We’ve followed a deliberate and intentional strategy (which is obvious by us having 14 languages) of going local fast, which is also reflected in the many blog posts from Kindo friends around the world, so I guess I’m trying to say that whilst we’re not officially an English site (English is not the language with the most users for us), it sure feels good to get that kind of brute force exposure to tech people all over the world. You just have to look at the number of RSS readers that TechCrunch US has (659K), then add UK and FR, to wonder whether our servers will melt today…

On another note, Nils has written a really good post (IMHO) about where we are now, which I’m not going to try and re-produce in tone, but I will say that I’m going to do my best to make sure that when we’re a teenager we’re going to rock

Anyways, more soon – some factoids for you that might be relevant:

• Built with Segaull php framework, flash, jQuery and MySQL
• Been live for 15 weeks
• Languages include Arabic, Chinese (simplified and traditional) and Russian
• Users in around 150 countries

It’s the last thing in the world that I’d *like* to see happening, but then again it’s a problem that you want to have as a growing web service for families…. growth = load = site is slower…

From our blog:
_ Too much love…

We’re getting tons of new members to the Kindo family at the moment, which is great stuff. But it also creates some problems with speed – some people are experiencing a really slow Kindo, which makes tree building a quite painful experience. We’re working on speeding things up, so hang in there.

So, we’re working on this like mad now, trying to scale things so we’re back to the zippy speed we were at before Christmas… more soon

Pretty neat eh? Check it out and blow your mind…

Kindo lance la version française de son service de généalogie nouvelle génération
Le moins que l’on puisse dire c’est que Geni, un service nouvelle génération pour créer un arbre généalogique a inspiré pas mal d’autres startups et de clones. La semaine dernière même TechCrunch US nous apprenait que la société allemande Verwandt.de faisait mieux que Geni en traffic et audience (il s’agit d’un clone en tout point)

Nice and rewarding Shows the benefit of being in 11 languages…

_ Build a fancy looking family tree with Kindo | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone

Besides the very basic and simple implementation of the tree creation, there’s also an integrated social network for families who want to dig a little deeper. Each family member gets their own profile, which shows off any included personal information, along with a list of updates they or others have made on the service. There’s also a status update option a la Facebook and Twitter that lets you announce what you’re doing to your family members. More helpful, however, is the birthday and anniversary reminder tool, which will automatically let you know when there’s a family birthday coming up. While both these things can be had elsewhere, it’s a nice touch.

Thanks guys!!

Check it out, you should start to see the first signs of our social direction, which sets us apart from being “yet another genealogy application”… 11 Languages helps too…

_ Kindo – Some new features & improvements to kindo

The kindo team is very proud to announce that we have released a number of new features which we hope will improve our users’ experience.

Firstly, we have added 3 new languages, namely Russian, Turkish & Brazilian Portuguese, which now brings the tally to 11.

Our family

Secondly, we have added a brand new page called “Our family”, where you can view the latest updates from all of your active family members. It also has a section with family statistics, so you will be able to see some interesting facts about your tree – the more data the better, so start updating those profiles

_ Kindo – Profile in a kindo family tree dating back to 1702

We recently had a posting on our forum where one of our users, Rudolf Hager told us that he and his uncle had built a family tree dating back to 1702.

And we’ve got so much more coming!