The product company Keiki has Ukrainian roots and creates some of the world's most popular apps for child development. We talked to Inna Maksymenko, CEO and founder of Keiki, about how it works, develops and tests its products.
What is the main mission of Keiki? Why did you decide to create an app for young children?
Keiki is a product company at the intersection of EdTech and GameDev that creates edutainment applications for children aged 2 to 8. Our mission is to make the process of children's development interactive, interesting, and exciting by combining learning with play. Our app is, in fact, a little person's first introduction to the digital world, and it should be exciting, informative and safe.
When I was at school, I often helped my mother, who worked in a kindergarten. Even then, I realized that help in the upbringing and education of children is never superfluous. Why did we decide to create an app for the little ones? When we came up with the idea for the project, we took the process seriously. Of course, we analyzed the market, and this segment showed good dynamics. We also knew that it would be very interesting for us to create such a product, because, on the one hand, it is an app for parents, and on the other hand, it is an app for children. And it will be the first app that a little person interacts with. We can say that we are helping to educate future generations.
What are Keiki's core values and how do they influence product development and user experience?
We have recently updated our company values. The world is changing, we are changing, and our product is changing too. If you compare the first version of the app that we released in 2019 with what we have now, the difference is enormous. We have achieved significant qualitative growth during this time. As for the team, when we started the project, it was a team of genies with burning eyes and unbridled energy, united by one idea and product, and they did everything to make it take off. But there were only 7 of us. In five years, we grew to a team of 40 people and transformed so much that we realized that in order to make the next qualitative leap, we needed to change our focus and shift the emphasis in our values.
Now we have five core values: emotional awareness, continuous motion, ownership, courage, value-driven mindset.
I would like to emphasize a few of them. At this stage, emotional awareness is extremely important for us. Often, people continue to act the way they did before, without changing their approaches, and therefore without getting new results. Sometimes you need to take a leap of faith or make a radical decision. Another important value is continuous motion. We need to change to stay relevant in this world. And it's normal when we recognize that something worked for us yesterday, but today this process or format of work is no longer acceptable. We are constantly changing and want to keep up with this world, not catch up.
How does Keiki stand out among other educational apps on the market? What are your competitive advantages?
We started later than many of our competitors, and this gave us an advantage in creating a product aimed at modern children. Our task is to be constantly flexible, update the content, make it better and more useful. Our goal is not to create a game for the sake of creating a game, but to keep the content interesting for children and for parents to see the benefits of it. Therefore, if you compare us to other apps, we are modern, colorful, and adaptive.
How big is your team? Do you have an office and employees in Ukraine? How is your work organized?
Keiki now employs more than 40 people, most of them in Kyiv, but there are employees in other cities of Ukraine and in Europe. "Before the pandemic, we were office-oriented and did not know how to work remotely. However, covid showed us that we can be effective when working remotely. When the war started, we did not work for a few days, but very quickly employees started to take the initiative, saying that they could help and volunteer, but still continue to fulfill their work duties. I am very grateful to the team for this. We have adapted to the remote format. In fact, we don't care whether a person works in the office or not - the main thing is that they do their job. Nevertheless, we have an office in Kyiv, which is the soul of our project. If people want to, they come here to work. We have a hybrid work format, and all meetings are organized in such a way that everyone, regardless of whether they are in the office or not, can connect to all calls.
As for the office, since the beginning of the full-scale war and given the difficult winter, problems with electricity, it has become a hub where people always have access to the Internet, electricity, water, and a bomb shelter. All the basic needs are covered here, and you don't have to worry that the power might suddenly go out. We have always tried to make our office as comfortable and cozy as possible - for example, we recently counted that we have 52 live plants. In addition, we try to make social life in the office interesting: we organize workshops and play board games. It often happens that someone who works remotely from Lviv or Lutsk comes to the office just to see their colleagues.
How do you assess the impact of Keiki on children's development? What studies or reviews confirm the effectiveness of your product?
We have a lot of sincere and joyful feedback from both parents and grandparents. For us, this is the most important confirmation of the effectiveness and importance of our product. We know that all these reviews are not bought, but written from the heart - and this is extremely important to us. For example, the rating of our flagship app in the US is 4.6 stars out of more than 30,000 reviews, and the global rating is 4.5 stars out of more than 110,000 reviews. These are very high ratings. We also have negative feedback, which we perceive as a growth area. We get feedback on what we could improve. The number of positive reviews far outweighs the number of negative ones, and this is taking into account the fact that in 99% of cases people write about what they didn't like and rarely share what they did like. So you have to try really hard to make something so good that parents want to share how much they liked it.
In terms of research, we have a well-established custdev process, meaning that we constantly communicate with users. And these are users from all over the world, to whom we ask various questions, study their problems, and see the needs and demands of very different parents and children.
Who is your main target audience? How do you segment your users?
There are many different games in our app, and it is aimed at helping to develop a child from an early age in various areas - reading, writing, social and emotional skills, creativity, and logical thinking. At the same time, you never know what a particular child will like. We work with children, and you can't logically convince them that it would be useful to learn numbers because it will help them in the future. But we can only do this by creating a very engaging, high-quality, and interesting game that the child will enjoy and be enthralled by.
We create a variety of content in which different children can find something interesting, and parents who are concerned about different issues can find content that will help them solve these problems. For example, some children may have a problem with not knowing their letters, or someone may have a poor speech. Or take our section on healthy habits, where we have content that teaches that brushing your teeth before bed is good, just like washing your face. Our audience is all parents of children aged 2 to 8 and children themselves, for whom our content can be useful and educational.
What feedback do you get from parents and children about Keiki? How do you use this feedback?
In addition to what I've already mentioned about feedback, we have a support team. We have several email accounts that users can contact for help. We receive approximately 2000 support requests every month. Users can also leave feedback in the App Store or Google Play under the app. We process all requests and try to do so within 24 hours. Our goal is not to miss a single request, because they can point to patterns that we do not notice ourselves. We take all feedback very seriously.
How do you plan to attract new users and increase the loyalty of existing ones?
Custdev helps us retain our users. We work in three directions with our custdev:
Active users: We always survey those who actively use our app, pay and play regularly. We are interested in finding out why they stay with us, what unmet needs they have, and what we can do for them. We understand that children grow up, and the things that fascinated them recently may become irrelevant. Although children will not stay with us forever, we can extend this time.
Former users: We conduct research among those who have used our app and unsubscribed. We ask them what they didn't like and why they unsubscribed to understand what we can improve or change.
Not our users: These are the ones who are not our users at all, perhaps they are competitors. We ask them what they like about competitors, what is better than ours, what we should pay attention to.
Since we communicate not only with satisfied payers but also with other categories of users, we strive to assess the overall picture as objectively as possible and are constantly improving.
In short, our content attracts new users and retains old ones. We also actively advertise on social media. We have Facebook and Instagram pages with over 380 thousand followers.
What geographical markets are your priorities?
Keiki is available worldwide (except Russia and Belarus) and is popular in more than 140 countries. As of July 2024, the distribution of users is as follows: United States (47.8%), Mexico (4.8%), United Kingdom, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Canada (3.2% each), Australia (3.1%) and other countries. Over the years of Keiki's development, it has historically been the case that we have achieved the best results in English-speaking markets. As the war is currently ongoing, Ukraine is not our priority market, and we have made the app free for users in our country.
It is worth noting that we work with completely different markets and are not limited to the United States. Our app has been adapted into 14 languages and is among the top App Stores not only in the US, Canada, Australia, and France, but also in the Middle East markets such as the UAE, Qatar, and others. Our goal is to develop a global product and provide access to Keiki for children in different parts of the world.
How do you see cooperation with educational institutions and teachers?
Despite the fact that we work in the B2C segment, we sometimes receive requests from kindergartens and other educational institutions. We plan to develop in this direction in the future, but we haven't done so yet because we are a very small team and are focused on maximizing the usefulness of our product for parents.
How do you assess the potential for partnerships with other companies or brands?
We have created a wonderful world inside our app with authentic characters that children love. Each of them has their own story. When we created the characters, we interviewed children and found out what they liked. In the future, it would be cool to develop this universe - to create toys with our characters, cartoons with them, but for now, it's a matter of resources. However, there is a lot of potential here, and we are ready to do this over time.