Kik Bot StartChattingMessage Python not working

Question

So I recently made a bot for Kik Messenger and I would like to submit it to the bot shop for everybody to use but the only thing stopping me is that my bot doesn't properly respond to StartChattingMessages. I've played around with this for hours and I just cant get it to work. The kik api docs are super convoluted and don't help at all. My code is pretty lengthy so I wont post the whole thing but here is the part i'm having trouble with.

    if StartChattingMessage:
        kik.send_messages([TextMessage(
            to=user_from,
            chat_id=id_chat,
            body="Hi there my name is leobot!"
        )])

Any help would be immensly appreciated!