9 ms·
> The t-shirts are weird and made me lose a lot of faith in their org. The way I look at it is instead of making their products better, they flushed a bunch of
by freediver 3y ago
> The t-shirts are weird and made me lose a lot of faith in their org. The way I look at it is instead of making their products better, they flushed a bunch of money down the drain for t-shirts and its offensive to paying customers who are paying because they enjoy the product and want it to become better, they don't want a t-shirt.
Kagi founder here and I want to clarify the train of thoughts around Kagi printing and giving away 20,000 t-shirts for its users.
- Kagi is not a typical VC funded startup.
- It is company I bootstrapped by going all in (meaning I put millions of dollars of my money into it).
- After all these years building it, we are lucky to have such incredibly passionate user community.
- That community is 100% responsible for Kagi's growth as a business through word of mouth (Kagi does no paid advertising).
- We are also famously taking a firm stance against ad-tech, so conventional advertising is not something I want to do.
- To do something as crazy as to start a company that builds a paid search engine and browser you obviously need to be thinking out of the box.
So combine all of this together and I thought that sending a t-shirt to all the people who supported us along the journey made a lot of sense.
The only thing I did not count on is how difficult will be to pull this off as I did not want to settle with less than premium quality for these t-shirts. As a result they will be delayed (my best guess is July/August) and I apologize for that to our users. In hindsight, we probably should have opted out for something easier to pull off (someone mentioned a billboard on 101, that would certainly be much easier).
This did not jeopardize Kagi's finances in any way at any point, nor I would do anything like that ever (as I said I am all in and have everything to lose, so I run a fiscally responsible business). In fact, Kagi has turned profitable recently.
This has also not impacted our ability to hire (we went from 10 people twelve months ago to 25+ now) and it did not impact our ability to ship a great product (check Kagi and Orion changelogs). I would venture to say that most Kagi users agree that Kagi is getting better and better every week with great speed.
So would I do it again? Well let's wait and see what we have in store for hitting 50,000 members mark :)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- recursivegirth 3y agoI work in CX, you should listen to your customers. Your gut got you this far, but to be a profitable company you are going to need to consider the advice and concerns of your stakeholders. Based on your current description, you have two stakeholders (yourself + customers). If the venture fails, you will ask yourself if you listened enough. Be proactive, address concerns, do not put yourself in a defensive position. Embrace change, be agile, and most importantly listen to your feedback. Wish Kagi nothing but success, I would very much like a disruptor in this space. Best of luck to you and your team.
- nottorp 3y agoThat reminds me of the faster horses quote I'm afraid. Or you know, that all cell phones had to have a physical keyboard. Until they suddenly didn't. [Never tried Kagi, but let the man do his thing.]
- skydhash 3y agoMaybe customers were wary of having 1 ton of steel barreling down the street. And there's no ergonomics in phones. Their prime quality is portability. Ergonomics has been sacrificed to convenience.
- nottorp 3y agoIirc it was said that speeds over 30 km/h will kill you too.
- Apocryphon 3y agoA ton of steel bearing down at those speeds will do so handily.
- croisillon 3y agoworldwide over 1 million deaths a year...
- mda 3y ago"Kagi does no paid advertising" I remember Daniel King's PowerPlayChess channel recently started promoting Kagi, doesn't this count as paid advertising or is this deal something else?
- freediver 3y agoYou are right, we started doing that last week so technically we are doing marketing now.
- MichaelZuo 3y agoIt really does seem like you’re being a bit too unfocused Vlad. Delivering high-quality search over the entire Internet, higher quality than Google, is something so complex that even if you were literally the worlds smartest person and all the other Kagi employees were number 2 to number 26, there would still likely be stumbles at least once a year on something. Because there’s like a million gotchas hidden along the path to just reliably matching Google search quality circa 2010 in the 2024 environment. Let alone delivering a high-quality browser, AI tools, etc., on top.
- kerkeslager 3y agoI'm not convinced it's actually that complicated. Google search has been bad for a long time. It's clear they serve their customers (advertisers) quite well, but as a user of their search, they're not particularly impressive. The biggest problem is a problem of scale: being the biggest search provider means Google are targeted by SEO, so it's harder for Google to sift out the AI-generated garbage--Kagi just isn't involved in the arms race that Google is. But as a user that's not my problem; I'm not going to tolerate bad search results out of some sense of "fairness" to a corporation. And Kagi is delivering real user-centered features which are, frankly, obvious, i.e. Google should be embarrassed that they don't let you filter/prioritize domains or search within lenses like Kagi does.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
- RhysU 3y ago> Kagi does no paid advertising Because of adverse selection? Users that are users because of marketing are somehow different?
- freediver 3y agoI meant digital advertising, like ads in search engines and websites - stuff that has gone out of control and we are actively fighting against. I would consider a billboard or sponsoring a podcast for example.
- RhysU 3y agoBillboards on inbound roads to major US tech hubs, beyond just SF/NYC targeting bedroom communities with families, seem worthwhile. As does some sponsorship a la the VPN ads my kids see constantly in content heavy educational videos.
- prmoustache 3y agoBillboards are ethically and morally disgusting. It is trying at all cost to make drivers lose focus of the road to see your advert, putting themselves and the people around them at risk of a road crash.
- WirelessGigabit 3y agoSounds like a cool place to work. I'll check back for an opening in TypeScript / Rust backend.
- shepherdjerred 3y agoKeep going! Kagi is great. Years ago nobody thought Google could be challenged and that nobody would pay for search, yet here you are.
- AuthError 3y agodo they have a decent subscriber base? i thought it was still very niche
- brewdad 3y agoSomewhere between 20,000 (number of t-shirts sent out) and 50,000 (their stated next target). Not too bad for a startup but a drop in the proverbial ocean of search.
- elektor 3y agoThey have a live tracker of subscribers, 25,785 at time of posting comment. https://kagi.com/stats https://kagi.com/stats
- riku_iki 3y agohow one can run search engine on 2-3M annual budget(with assumption avg subscription is $10/m)?..
- a_vanderbilt 3y agoHonestly I'm astonished there are only that many.
- Semaphor 3y agoHow? For the vast, vast majority of people, paying for search is insane. And that includes the people who pay for other services.
- 3y ago
- riversflow 3y agoI prefer internet ads to Billboards. Billboards are disgusting.
- me_smith 3y agoI agree there should be less billboards in this world.
- Semaphor 3y agoI prefer billboards, but I think that’s probably because they are exotic for me. We don’t really have them in Germany (or at least where I am), so when I see them in South Africa, they are always this cool and interesting thing.
- seanthemon 3y agoAs a south african, you get desensitized and I dislike them deeply. They always take my focus off the road or sometimes are lit up like the sun..
- kerkeslager 3y agoPlease please please take Hacker News' opinions with a very large grain of salt. Many of Hacker News' users work at garbage AdTech companies and there are often people posting here who say things like "I for one enjoy targeted ads" (that's an actual quote). This place is not representative of your customer base. I love what you're doing and will continue to support you at your Professional tier as long as you continue doing what you're doing.
- shaneoh 3y agoIf HN is not representative of the customer base for a paid search engine, then what is?
- kerkeslager 3y agoThat's a difficult question, but I think we can pretty clearly say that a user base with a high concentration of AdTech workers is probably a bit biased against a company that is pretty clearly anti-AdTech. The number of times I've heard people extol the virtues of targeted ads on this site is absurd. I've even heard folks here say that Google ads are more helpful than the search results as if that's a good thing. And these are far more common comments here than comments in favor of actually returning good search results or aligning your income with user interests.
- brewdad 3y agoI would think people in AdTech would be first in line to pay for a search engine that avoids AdTech. They understand how the sausage is made. They want the rest of us to use the AdTech products but they themselves are going to avoid them where possible. How often do you think the CEO pf Delta Airlines flies in first class versus on a private jet? My guess is only often enough to gin up a little PR.
- kerkeslager 3y agoSure, but that doesn't translate into people telling the truth online. And to be clear, I'm not even talking about being intentionally dishonest. AdTech workers likely believe the pro-ad propaganda they spout because they have to in order to live with themselves.
- eddyzh 3y agoThanks for your response! Honestly I get the T-shirt part this way. You got to Doo crazy stuff as a start-up. I also get that you try ai stuff. As long as you keep up de search. However what scares me is the apparent lack of knowledge about privacy, gdpr and what is PII in a product that, to me, is all about privacy. Have one person in the company be an expert in privacy and GDPR etc and use their insights, since it is critical for your right of existence.
- agos 3y agoI got the same impression - the lack of understanding of the basics of GDPR makes them look as amateurs, not professionals trying to raise the bar for privacy. I was considering using Kagi, but this is a massive turn off. They'll likely discover that GDPR is not that optional as soon as a customer (or a competitor with a grudge!) reports them to their relevant national privacy/personal data protection authority, after which they'll get to have a very uncomfortable conversation where they will not be able to use those arguments
- CamperBob2 3y agoKagi is a US company. GDPR is not a US law.
- budding2141 3y agoDoes not really matter as long as they offer it in EU countries.
- CamperBob2 3y agoEven so, it doesn't matter unless the CEO ever sets foot in the EU, I suppose. (Do you regularly check to make sure you're obeying laws in countries you don't ever intend to visit? No? Then why should Kagi?)
- FoeNyx 3y ago
- amelius 3y agoInstead of giving away t-shirts, can't you make the AI tools open source? They are clearly not up to the task yet so you might as well build a nice AI community first.
- freediver 3y agoWe are not developing LLM models. AI tools that Kagi uses like vector database search and LLM connectors are already open source. You can find these in our Github: https://github.com/kagisearch/ https://github.com/kagisearch/
- gentleman11 3y agoVery interesting! Quick (but difficult) question: do you foresee there arising a reasonably reliable way to filter out the coming wave of ai spam? I’m told that half of Twitter is bots talking to each other at this point, and I’m sure this is coming to other media as well. Eg, massive, massive waves of content marketing, sock puppets, etc. Is there reason to be optimistic that you or other actors will be able to sift through it?
- freediver 3y agoYes, significant part of our effort is to build technology that detects LLM spam. We have a working model that detects LLM generated text with 90% accuracy currently. The plan is to integrate in search results and make available as an API.
- oktoberpaard 3y agoAnd just out of interest: what is the rate for false positives? An accuracy of 90% sounds very decent, as long as it doesn’t also filter out 10% of legitimate content.
- lupire 3y ago10% of infinity is infinity. That's as good as 0% accuracy. And AI text will keep changing.
- infecto 3y agoAppreciate the response. I hope while some of it, including mine might come off as critical or uninformed, it truly comes from a place of love for the search product. I still don't agree with the shirts and I think the overarching point is the shirts seem like a common theme of trying to do too much. I hope my thinking is not true and I wish the best success because I love Kagi.
- cnasc 3y agoYesterday I realized I had 75 tabs open on my mobile web browser and decided to do some trimming. Anything I was confident would come up again and didn’t need to be held onto got closed, including a tab for Kagi. And now I find Kagi has come up again, and I really liked reading this message so now I’m opening the tab again and almost certainly subscribing
- akudha 3y agoThis is a very weird answer. People who are paying for your service want you to succeed, they want an alternative to Google search. Many of them (like the article above) explicitly say they don't want a t-shirt, they just want a better search product from you. After all this very valid, very sensible feedback, you're commenting here saying "you need to be thinking out of the box" and trying to justify all the time, money and energy you spent on those t-shirts. Your customers are complaining because they want you to succeed. If they didn't care about you, they'd just cancel the subscription and move on. And your response to it is "nah, what we did was right" and not "yeah, maybe we shouldn't have spent all that resources on a stupid t-shirt that nobody wanted"? I just don't get it. And what are you gonna do when you hit 50K members? Are you planning to send an entire wardrobe (from undies to a suit) to all your 50K customers (assuming IF you ever hit that many customers)?
- Capricorn2481 3y agoI don't think it's that weird at all. Nor did they say the "customer" needs to think outside the box (what a great misrepresentation). They were just explaining their thinking process.
- akudha 3y agoI never said they said the customer needs to think outside the box. They claimed that they had to think outside the box (as if no company had sent promotional t-shirts before and as if promotional t-shirts is some kind of groundbreaking idea). I did not misrepresent anything
- rrr_oh_man 3y agoYeah, I love that "free t-shirts" is classified outside the box thinking. Oh, and nitpick: It's outside the box, not out of the box...
- ksec 3y agoI am a little lost here. So correct me. The Founder of the company decided to pour in his own money worth of millions ( assuming that is true ) into the company. He bootstrapped it. They were on track to becoming profitable. And now, as the replies shows they are now profitable. He decided to spend some money to buy everyone a t-shirt as a gift. And all I see is not thank you but anger and frustrations. Pointing to waste of time as if the product is going downhill or not iterating fast enough. But in fact according to changelog they are doing pretty well. Spending my own money to say thank you in my own way and all I got was, all these negativity. I just don't get it.
- slim 3y agoI'm not a user, but you must have found a great market because your users are anxious about the company failing. The fact that they spinned the fact that you were able to create a company and a whole t -shirt operation on a marketing budget as a bad thing is telling. You're doing great. The t-shirt op is a great investment an will return a great value.
- sandspar 3y agoI really appreciate that the $200,000 free t-shirts are delayed. Icing on the cake in my opinion.
- just_testing 3y agoHi, Vlad. We've met before, I'm the person whose 70-year-old mother is using Kagi. I also have actively been trying to move people to Kagi for some time - even paying for their accounts. The biggest block I face is not brand recognition. It's a lack of An Android app. To move my mother to Kagi, I had to install Brave Browser on her android cell phone, make it the default browser on Android, change Brave's default search engine and create a desktop shortcut to it. Android is ubiquitous in Brazil. I won't be able to move much people to Kagi with a process this involved. Happy to chat further about this topic if you wish, privately or publicly.