Kiota pilot report
Seven days after opening in Delft, 836 people had an account and 98% of them arrived through somebody else's referral link. 38 of them bought from a co-op merchant, and most collected their order within half an hour of paying.
Adoption
Onboarding runs entirely in a chat thread — no download, no form, no branch visit. The first day produced 143 accounts. Growth compounded rather than decayed: the peak came on day four, once the first cohort had links of their own to send.
Accounts opened per day
Day four is the referral loop turning over: the people who joined on days one to three doing the recruiting.
Referral engine
Every member can mint a referral link and name who it is for. 820 of the week's 836 accounts came in on one, and 114 different members sent at least one that was taken up. The top ten below account for 381 signups between them — 46% of the week.
| Member | Onboarded | Via own link | Share of week |
|---|---|---|---|
| Corneluis Johannes Engelbrecht | 100 | 100% | |
| Charles Edward George | 55 | 100% | |
| Ncediswa Ashanta Ndamane | 48 | 100% | |
| Gavin Lavin Petersen | 39 | 100% | |
| Simamkele Mqwamba | 30 | 100% | |
| Siphokazi Bonani | 25 | 100% | |
| Sinoxolo Ntshwaxu | 23 | 100% | |
| Levirne Absolon | 21 | 100% | |
| Bokamoso Felicity Maja | 20 | 100% | |
| Athenkosi Ngeniso | 20 | 100% | |
| All 114 onboarders | 820 | 100% |
The incentive structure is what produced that concentration. A member earns commission on what the people below them spend, so the link is worth sending — and the top onboarder sent 100 that were taken up in a single week.
Redemption
Money in the wallet only counts once it is spent locally. 38 members bought something in week one, placing 73 orders worth R1 589.43. 17 of those 38 came back for a second order inside the same seven days.
| Merchant | Buyers | Orders | Value |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zoe Bakery | 38 | 72 | R1 524.43 |
| Lana's Treats | 1 | 1 | R65.00 |
| Week one | 38 | 73 | R1 589.43 |
Time from payment to collection
56 of the 73 orders were collected. Median wait: 30 minutes.
Where the week's orders stand
Nothing was written off. The 17 uncollected orders are still packed and waiting at the merchant.
A 30-minute median between paying in chat and walking out with the goods is the strongest friction signal in the set: people treated the wallet as spendable money on the same trip, not as a balance to think about.
Read before quoting
Nothing in the database is tagged Delft. Communities did not exist as a concept until 23 July, and merchants carry no location field. These are platform-wide figures for a week in which the platform was only live in Delft — true, but the query cannot prove the location. Call it "the pilot", not "Delft only".
836 accounts were created. 436 of them are approved, meaning identity verification finished. If the reader takes "onboarded" to mean fully verified, the number is 436. Define which one is being quoted.
38 buyers is 4.5% of the 836 accounts, and R1 589 is a small number next to the signup figure. The honest framing is basket behaviour rather than penetration: 73 orders across 38 buyers is 1.9 orders each in seven days, with 45% of buyers returning inside the week.