How it works
Five things, and one hard problem solved.
KinGrid is deliberately small. It does a handful of things well at an event, and it does them whether or not there is a working network.
- 01
Pick a name for the weekend
You sign in once. Then, at each event, you choose the name your people will see — your rave name. It exists for that event only. Who you are at a three-day festival in July does not have to follow you around for the rest of the year, and it does not have to be your legal name on a profile that lives forever.
- 02
Connect with your kin
The people you connect with are your kin, and those connections persist from event to event. Add them by sharing an invite link, searching for them, or scanning a QR code face to face — which is how most connections actually happen when you meet someone at a stage.
- 03
Build the squad for the event
For a given event you pick a squad from your kin — the group you actually came with. Your squad is the default audience for your location, and it is the group the offline mesh keeps you connected to. Everyone else at the festival sees nothing.
- 04
Drop a totem
A totem is a pin on the map: the meetup spot, the camp, the left rail of the main stage. You have one active totem at a time, so there is never a graveyard of stale pins to sort through. Drop a new one and it cleanly replaces the old.
- 05
Plan the sets together
Build a set list of what you want to catch. When the group can see where everyone is headed next, moving from stage to stage stops being a negotiation conducted over four separate group chats.
The Grid
The part that works with no signal.
Every feature above depends on your group being able to see each other. At a big event, that is exactly what stops working. Tens of thousands of phones in one field saturate the towers; messages queue for twenty minutes or never arrive at all.
What the mesh does
Instead of routing everything through a cell tower, KinGrid is designed to let phones talk directly to one another over short-range radio. If your friend is out of range of you but within range of someone else in the squad, their position can hop across that person's phone to reach you. The group forms its own small network — the Grid — that belongs to nobody's carrier.
What it deliberately does not do
The mesh carries a deliberately narrow payload: location pings, totem drops, and presence. That's it. Offline messaging is not part of the first release.
That restraint is the point. Keeping the payload tiny is what makes the mesh viable on battery, keeps it private, and stops it from degrading as the crowd grows. A mesh that tried to carry everyone's chat traffic for an entire festival would drain your phone and collapse under its own weight — so we scoped it to the things that actually keep a group together.
Who is on your Grid
Only your squad. The mesh is not a festival-wide broadcast and it is not a way to see strangers. The people who can see your position are the people you deliberately added to your group for that event.
Where this stands: the offline mesh is the hardest part of KinGrid, and we are validating it in a dedicated engineering proof of concept before building the rest of the app around it. We would rather prove it works in a real crowd than promise it in a launch video.
Want it for your next one?
KinGrid is coming to iOS first. Join the waitlist and we'll tell you the moment it's ready.