The Narrative Behind KaiOS’ Zero To Forty Million Users

By Tim Metz, Marketing Director at KaiOS

In this series, we take a behind the scenes look at the ongoing journey of building the KaiOS brand from scratch.

If you searched “KaiOS” on Google in July 2017, you wouldn’t get any relevant results. The social media accounts were non-existent, and the kaiostech.com website was a single page that looked like this:

One year later, this eerie void seems like a lifetime ago. As of this writing, you get 828,000 results when Googling “KaiOS.” We now have a website, a blog brimming with content, a strong brand strategy, and an established mission: help close the digital divide and bring advanced digital services to everyone.

To be clear, this increased exposure is not just the result of our marketing and PR efforts. It takes an innovative product, great partner ecosystem, and clever business strategy to drive the kind of growth KaiOS has seen over the past twelve months — from zero to 40 million users.

We, the Kai marketing team, count ourselves lucky getting to work with such an excellent product that fills a real need in the market and serves a meaningful purpose (this is not always the case!). We apply our skills to amplify such a story to the right audiences, but it’s only because of the efforts of the product team, and the strategic foresight from the executive and business development teams, that we get to tell this story at all.

Back to marketing KaiOS. Given the backdrop of no brand strategy and faced with a blank sheet to work from, there were many activities we could have pursued, but we focused on one initiative above everything else: the crafting, telling, and repeating of our story. We’re the emerging OS, a lite mobile operating system built to power affordable phones. These devices address the needs of billions of people who still don’t have an internet connection and lack access to advanced digital services.

Bringing this message to potential B2B partners — manufacturers, carriers, and app developers — and the telco industry at large has been our most important activity of the past year. Contrary to what you might expect, traditional public relations and content marketing (combined with a good dose of Twitter activity) have been at the heart of this approach.

Industry analysts also played an especially important role, amplifying our message to the mainstream media and broader industry in advance of important events like MWC. Also, while content marketing starts to feel like a cliché — who is not creating content these days? — our blog posts and Medium articles have been especially useful for potential and existing partners (posts like “How KaiOS Helps Carriers Transform Their Business Models” and our practical UX tips on Medium about how to design for KaiOS devices).

This part of marketing and branding — shaping the narrative — is much more subtle than obvious milestones like a flashy new website; you can’t spot it if you’re not aware of it. But equipping stakeholders and industry influencers with the right story about KaiOS, and then letting them carry that onwards to their networks, has been our most important work of the past twelve months.

You witness the fruits of these efforts in every article about KaiOS helping to close the digital divide, or outlining how we’re ushering in the revival of the next generation of feature phones. Most encouraging is to see the narrative in action:

• Stories we receive from real users — through our social media and customer support — about how getting online for the first time through a KaiOS-powered device has positively affected their lives.
• Developers who want to bring their apps to KaiOS to contribute to closing the digital divide.
• People who apply for jobs at Kai because our mission inspires them.

This narrative didn’t exist a year ago, yet now it’s thriving, spreading, and driving real change in the world!

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