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As a Kagi customer, I hope their choice to allocate nearly a third of their investor-raised funds to produce and freely distribute 20,000 t-shirts doesn’t lead
by Kerrick 3y ago
As a Kagi customer, I hope their choice to allocate nearly a third of their investor-raised funds to produce and freely distribute 20,000 t-shirts doesn’t lead to their demise.
- dinkleberg 3y agoYeah it’s definitely an interesting move
- blitz_skull 3y agoUh… what? Did I miss something important? That sounds like a profoundly terrible move.
- dmd 3y agoPerhaps you missed clicking on the link?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- blitz_skull 3y agoPerhaps I did click on the link and still find this to be a profoundly terrible business move?
- _benj 3y agohehe! I see it as great marketing, possibly decreasing churn (although Kagi subscribers seem among the most enthusiastic I've seen around!) and just generally continuing with the tred of goodwill towards users (the opposite of the usual treatment of users from big tech)
- fuddle 3y agoThe t-shirt doesn't have their name on it. I don't see how it will help spread their brand.
- lucasban 3y agoIt’s likely to lead to more real world discussions of the product, someone is bound to ask what the shirt is about, or you might feel more motivated to talk about it while wearing it.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lolc 3y agoMay be a sign that they don't need those funds badly.
- Waterluvian 3y agoI wonder if they were close with the manufacturer.
- carlosjobim 3y agoMaybe they are, would anything be wrong with that?
- Vegenoid 3y agoEspecially ones that do not have their name. As someone who has heard about Kagi, but not actually visited their site or used it, I had no idea they had a dog mascot. If I saw one of those shirts in the wild, and I hadn’t just read this post and seen the pictures of the shirts, I would have had no idea it was a Kagi shirt.
- outlore 3y agoHaving received many t shirts from companies and conferences, I mostly don't wear them if the branding is really over the top. As described, a Kagi shirt would be something I'd actually wear
- thfuran 3y agoBut would that make it effective advertising?
- diggan 3y agoBut isn't the goal of the t-shirt a gift for the first 20k paying users? The goal for them doesn't seem to be about what they get back from giving away the t-shirt.
- justinclift 3y agoThat sounds pretty silly. Shouldn't gifts and similar things come after the business is properly sustainable?
- diggan 3y agoBased on their public data, they have 20,000+ paying users, and 1500 users paying for the family plan, which if all of the users are on the cheapest $5/month plan (which, many probably are on the $10/month plan like myself, as that gives you unlimited searches) would give them $100K+ each month. Sounds pretty sustainable already to me, unless they have a really large team and/or really inefficient infrastructure, neither which seem true to me.
- duck 3y agoMy duckduckgo t-shirt has converted a lot of people over the last 13 years, but if it doesn't have the name that seems like a big miss!
- EasyMark 3y agoI'm no bean counter, but that would have been a huge no from me.
- throwaway0665 3y agoI didn't realize they'd even raised any money. I thought they were immune from all the VC enshittification.
- dharmab 3y agoThey raised from small investors and interested users, not VC
- NelsonMinar 3y agoFor anyone else wondering, they raised $670,000 from 42 small investors in June 2023. Non-traditional fundraise. I agree that spending that money on t-shirts is weird. As a new Kagi subscriber I don't want a t-shirt. I want a thriving search engine. https://blog.kagi.com/safe-round https://blog.kagi.com/safe-round
- paxcoder 3y agoSuggestion for Kagi: If you haven't made the t-shirts yet, offer users to request/reserve one first. That way you won't ship to those who don't want it (though you won't ship to some who do, so maybe save some t-shirts on the side for those willing to contact you to ask if there's any left after the deadline)
- al_borland 3y agoReading the blog post it sounds like users will get a credit toward a free shirt/stickers. They will still need to pay shipping, which should be enough to keep people from getting it just for the hell of it. After a period of time, if there are unclaimed shirts they will open them up to those users beyond the first 20k. While it sounds like they will print 20k no matter what, it doesn’t seem like they will randomly ship them out to users. They really can’t, as they don’t have the addresses of all their users.
- yellow_lead 3y agoIf they will print 20k no matter what, I'm curious how they'll determine what sizes to print.
- jks 3y ago"Sizes are first come first serve" so I suppose they estimate how many of each size they need and then let people get a shirt as long as their size is available.
- 3y ago
- malwrar 3y agoIs kagi’s financial status that dire? Call me stupid, but I’m excited to get the shirt and feel warmly about the fact that the leadership at Kagi might actually be thinking about their early users the way described in the blog post. The $200k probably will not pay itself back from the shirts themselves, but I’m definitely going to shill kagi much harder now.
- jackjeff 3y agoI don’t know. Might have been worth it just for the exposure on Hacker News.
- nickphx 3y agoI didn't see published costs on the link, but it did mention the shirts were produced in Serbia... I imagine at a substantially lower cost than your assumption of full retail per shirt..
- djha-skin 3y agoThey might think it's free advertising, but I only wear t-shirts to bed or on the weekends and vacations. Most of the time I wear button-ups or polos. Them sending me a free t-shirt isn't going to get them as much advertising as they hoped for.
- jcul 3y agoIt depends on the t-shirt though, how it looks, the quality. I've got to say those t-shirts look great.
- dgacmu 3y agoIt feels more to me like they're giving a month (and a bit?) free service in the form of a T-shirt. At this point, their 2023 raise was "only" about three months of gross revenue. Shipped, the tshirts are probably, eh, $13 USD? I don't really have an opinion about whether this is an effective advertising spend or not. I hope they follow up. I don't need another free T-shirt but I'll probably wear it, I like the doggo.
- viraptor 3y agoI feel like many people here missed: > When the merch store goes live in about 8 weeks It may be a part of a bigger commitment / batch. They'll sell more in the future with some extra income, so that should even out anyway.