How Blackbird launched a platform using Kinde authentication

Blackbird is Australia’s leading venture capital firm. And in addition to being financial investors, they also champion startups through initiatives like their Giants program, which connects early-stage founders with experienced mentors from across the startup ecosystem. These connections are a powerful and important way of turning great ideas into successful businesses.

When Blackbird decided to create a platform to make connecting mentors and founders easier, they knew they wanted a frictionless authentication experience for users. Lacking in-house development resources, they also wanted to avoid the complexity of building and maintaining a custom built authentication solution, making it more practical to adopt an existing solution.

“The goal for us was that auth just disappears into the background and users don't even think about it - a frictionless experience.”

That’s where Kinde comes in. Blackbird was already familiar with Kinde, but had not used us before. The team wanted to make sure we could match their requirements. Our solution had to be:

• Scalable on demand - to meet the peak traffic demands of the Giants program, which occurs twice a year during intake.
• Reliable and affordable - to meet the performance needs of the business, but still be affordable during low-peak times, when there are minimal users.

Ed Little, Head of IT & Security at Blackbird, chose us because we could meet these requirements, and because Kinde aligns with Blackbird’s values in supporting startup businesses. Ed also found us to be technically compatible, with fast implementation and minimal cost and effort for the Blackbird team.

“That is generally what we're going for when we think about technology for our teams here at Blackbird. You don't even notice it's there. It needs to work all the time and not get in the way.”

The Giants directory and scheduling platform was in its infancy when they first integrated Kinde authentication, and we were able to offer a robust authentication experience out of the box. One of the reasons we created Kinde was to help developers save time and cost implementing authentication, so teams could focus on building features. Ed was happy with the results, noting that “auth has been the easiest piece of the puzzle in the sense that we’ve had essentially no issues. We had other issues… but at no point has auth been a hiccup.“

Kinde’s usage-based pricing also means Blackbird only pays for usage during peak times, with minimal ongoing costs off-peak.

To give their platform users flexibility, Blackbird set up multiple sign-in options including LinkedIn, Google, Facebook and email. With Mentors and users coming from various sectors and using different tech, this ensured accessibility for everyone, and provided an easy user experience.

“A real value-add was knowing that it was an easy front door for our users to get straight in. The ease of set-up, of just being able to go “oh cool pick whatever SSO you want” and allow users to log in has been great”

For the sake of simplicity, Blackbird opted to use Kinde’s prebuilt libraries and modules, which allowed them to connect instantly with a range of languages, and turn on multiple SSO options within seconds. Ed appreciated the efficiency, saying “the libraries are so fleshed out and easy to work with and there’s a huge variety that you can plug into everything so you don’t have to build.”

When Blackbird opted to pre-populate users in their system, the Kinde team were there to support the migration and troubleshoot issues. Our legendary support brought the project across the line.

“The support from the Kinde team is best in class like I've never seen anything like it. I can tell it’s the the way the team looks after everybody which such a beautiful thing.”

For anyone considering Kinde auth, Ed’s recommendation is to “just try it because the biggest sales point is the developer experience - it’s just super super good.”

Looking ahead, Blackbird envisions using Kinde as the authentication provider for future platforms, and they are especially interested in upcoming features like workflows and billing.

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Disclaimer: Blackbird Ventures is an investor in Kinde