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More importantly you can tell investors you have even more accounts than you do and your churn rate is very low.
by fnord123 2y ago
More importantly you can tell investors you have even more accounts than you do and your churn rate is very low.
- thih9 2y agoPlus, you get to stay in touch and advertise via a monthly email: “You didn’t do any searches so we’re giving you next month for free, here are all the cool things you could do:…”.
- JimDabell 2y agoYou can do that, but if they don’t interact with your email either, you may be better off not doing so. You get worse delivery rates if you constantly send email that gets ignored.
- freehorse 2y agoThey send by default an email every month when the payment time is approaching, so I assume they may just send the same email and state that the payment amount is covered by the previous month. They have really good practices at that.
- fl0id 2y agotbh, these e-mails can also prompt unsubscribing. because then I actually remember that I am still subscribed to that thing.
- ldoughty 2y agoYet Kagi is one of the very very few services I've seen that sends a monthly reminder that they are ABOUT to charge you... And you have time to stop it. Typically I only ever see something like that with shipped goods where they might have to deal with a return + cancellation
- 7thaccount 2y agoThat's really nice sounding and comforting. I've been a little on the fence, but Google has become such absolute garbage lately that I've had to frequently use Bing in order to find something that should be one of the first results. This may just be a better model.
- thesuitonym 2y agoKagi is so much better. You should just try one of the lower tier subscriptions for a while and see what it's like. Just for warning, you'll still want to use Google as a backup for hyper local results, but generally the experience with Kagi is much better.
- pbronez 2y ago> you'll still want to use Google as a backup for hyper local results And can do so by adding !g to a Kagi query, just like on DDG. You know, I once ordered takeout from the other side of the country because I had too much privacy on my search engine...
- magnusmundus 2y agoThat's funny. I'm curious now, do you live in a microstate, or an island? Or was it a case of an overly eager delivery platform?
- FireBeyond 2y agoMy favorite is that I've now had multiple services that don't warn you prior to renewing an annual subscription.
- scarface_74 2y agoBen Thompson’s Stratechery subscription reminds you when there are about to charge you.
- ghaff 2y agoPeople also forget that they're subscribed to something (or that they signed up for emails either explicitly or implicitly), so they just report to Google (or whoever) as spam. I'm sure that's why I get a lot of email (mostly in my Gmail Promotions or Updates tabs that are from companies that scanned me at some event or whatever or I ordered something from.
- eviks 2y agonot unless said investors demand better metrics like active user count...
- lostlogin 2y agoOnce you are navigating these waters, it might pay to ask for a definition of ‘active’.
- mathw 2y agoThis is the point where you realise the investors were, like most times, a mistake. I don't know if Kagi have any investors or not, but I am kind of hoping the subscription model means they don't need them.
- ffsm8 2y agoTechnically, they do https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36517149 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36517149 But as the comments pointed out, the invested money is "only" ~700k, so they're likely not such a mistake as you're imagining
- dgacmu 2y agoNo need to really - users + revenue is enough to figure it out. And you want to see revenue anyway. (I'm one of those small investors in Kagi.)
- comprev 2y agoI've seen the opposite of this at a startup once in the streaming music industry. We _knew_ our "free trial for a month" was being abused by 500k+ users because the sign-up flow neither required a valid payment on file or email validation. In fact there was an entire industry built around generating false throw-away accounts. The company used stats including non-paying users to demonstrate demand for our service was high, even though we knew they would highly likely never spend a cent with us.
- scott_w 2y ago> More importantly you can tell investors you have even more accounts than you do and your churn rate is very low. I know you're being a little facetious but it is actually a benefit. Many companies have implemented subscription pausing to reduce churn. The reason is pretty straightforward good business: it's easier to reactivate customers who lay dormant for 1 or 2 months than it is to let them churn and have to re-sell the product to them from scratch.
- jgalt212 2y agoFair enough, but as far as your investors are concerned you're changing the definition of churn. I'm sure if they ask, they'll be provided with "pause" metrics, but such data will never see the light of day in any marketing materials.
- AdamN 2y agoA thoughtful investor will be more interested in paid active users and cohort analysis of retention (in terms of actual usage) rather than subscription numbers/revenue in absolute terms. Engagement can always be monetized better in the future.
- dumbfounder 2y agoAnd they don’t usually ask for number of subscribers, but number of paid subscribers. Startups have played enough games with this that investors should be able to hone in on the right numbers.
- scott_w 2y agoCorrect, your churn would be artificially lowered, so you'd probably want to define a point where a "paused" subscription is effectively inactive and count that against churn. It would still show in other metrics, however, as you'd have monthly active users (or accounts), which would take a hit. You'd also see a drop in MRR when an account is paused. Bear in mind I'm assuming a business that wants clear, accurate metrics so the executive team know what actions to take; not simply a business looking to scam investors out of money ;-)
- OskarS 2y agoA huge benefit to companies with subscription services is that people forget they have them and keep paying for Ancestry.com or whatever for months (what? no, of course that never happened to me...) after they've stopped using it. Kagi is voluntarily giving up that benefit. This just seems like a consumer-friendly move to me, not sinister at all.
- andai 2y agoI somehow ended up with two simultaneous Audible subscriptions in different regions. It seemed like a coin toss which one the website would send me to. I only found out because I canceled one of them, and then still got billed. Support was very understanding and refunded the double-sub period.
- boringg 2y agoAns any difference in pricing is made up for it by increasing rates to cover the lost revenue that wasn't automatic. And people are happy they don't pay in non use months but the company still makes the same momey.
- Jentifgq 2y agoguess we'll have to switch back to ARPU now...
- Seb-C 2y agoAFAIK, Kagi is 100% bootstrapped and do not owe anything to any investor.
- abound 2y agoKagi has taken some investment, mostly from its users: https://blog.kagi.com/safe-round https://blog.kagi.com/safe-round Disclosure: I work at Kagi
- tigroferoce 2y agoThen thank you for the service. I'm using Kagi since a few months and I love you guys!
- ajkjk 2y agomore importantly it's kind to the users (historically not so important to companies in practice, but it sure ought to be)
- simonebrunozzi 2y ago> We have implemented this for the simple reason of being kind to our users. Sometimes the simplest explanation is also the correct one.
- mercwear 2y agoThis will come out in due diligence if the investor is not just throwing money at whatever moves.