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Note that despite the small number, Kagi is profitable (or at least they were as of a year ago): > We are also thrilled to report that we have achieved profita
by demosthanos 1y ago
Note that despite the small number, Kagi is profitable (or at least they were as of a year ago):
> We are also thrilled to report that we have achieved profitability. This significant milestone is a testament to our sustainable growth and fiscal responsibility. It demonstrates that our approach of offering a premium, ad-free search experience resonates with users who support a service aligning with their values. Becoming profitable allows us to reinvest in the business, further enhancing our offerings and ensuring that we can continue to provide a top-notch search experience.
As long as they're profitable I don't mind at all if they stay small. They're extremely useful to me as it is, and their small size means they aren't targeted for SEO nonsense, so their methods to cut through all that still actually work in my experience.
Not every business needs to become a unicorn. Some businesses are better at small scales serving a specific niche, and by their report Kagi seems to have found their niche.
https://blog.kagi.com/what-is-next-for-kagi https://blog.kagi.com/what-is-next-for-kagi
- eviks 1y agoSearch isn't that business since staying small means you won't be able to create a good index of the world. And you won't have enough resources for your browser.
- 0_gravitas 1y agoAnd yet, somehow, they've managed quite well :^)
- eviks 1y agoThey haven't, but also that wasn't the argument
- decimalenough 1y agoHuh? Kagi is objectively superior to Google/Bing at this point, to the point that 50k people are willingly paying $10/mo extra for it. Obviously they don't have the ancillary services (Maps etc), but for just searching, Kagi is far more likely to surface useful results instead of just the highest bidder. Compare a search like "us esta" for a clear demonstration.
- eviks 1y agoHuh indeed, you're talking about yet another argument, but just as wrong as the previous pivot: First search result for "us esta" in Google is "https://esta.cbp.dhs.gov/esta https://esta.cbp.dhs.gov/esta", same as in kagi, is that your objectivite fail at coming up with a simple metric?
- decimalenough 1y agoAre you using an ad blocker or something? For me it's the 11th (!) link on mobile, far below the fold.
- lolc 1y agoCan confirm, official page is first result in Kagi and below the fold in Google for me.
- robertlagrant 1y agoFor me on desktop it was 3 giant ads but then the first real link was that one.
- lostlogin 1y agoAny adverts and the competition is over as far as I’m concerned. I happily pay not to see them.
- ulrikrasmussen 1y agoWhy? I think that's an extraordinary claim.
- eviks 1y agoBecause it's expensive, and kagi still doesn't have one? And the browser is very incomplete? This is all pretty basic, how many global Web indices do you think exist?
- tigroferoce 1y agoI agree for the index, much less for the browser. I'm using Orion since a few months and beside some occasiona bugs I wouldn't ask anything more. If it was open source it would be perfect. On the index side I agree, I think they are using other people indexes so far, I don't know if they are thinking about building one themselves. Same for LLM, but I think that there the problem is even worse.
- r721 1y ago>how many global Web indices do you think exist? Here's a list for the curious: >A look at search engines with their own indexes https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes/ https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-...
- patchymcnoodles 1y agoFor me it is a great index, much better than all the alternatives. Especially against Google that is now filled with AI and Ads. Sometimes so bad, you really have to scroll down, to get to the first non-Ad link.
- maelito 1y agoBut it's not their index. Without Google or bing, they fall.
- greazy 1y agoKagi has its own index https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm... It also uses other indices along Google.
- m-schuetz 1y agoExcept Kagi often delivers better results than the modern, Ad, SEO and AI generated stuff that google delivers nowadays. And the most important selling point: You can block certain domains which vastly improves the results.
- jaggederest 1y agoI'm assuming they're somewhere north of $5m ARR and that's not a tiny number, even at a thoroughly sane P/E value you're looking at $50m+ of company value.
- esseph 1y agoWould you mind explaining how you came to that number? I'm intrigued. Genuinely.
- frabcus 1y agoLooks like the assumption is $100 / year for each user, which with 50k users makes the $5 million ARR. Then you have to pick a finger in the air multiplier for the value of the business. A stockmarket listed SaaS company that isn't over-inflated might be 10x the revenue, so that would be $50 million valuation. Kagi is small, but it must still have good margins. So maybe really it is 5x revenue in value, depends on lots of things! Who selling to, and predictions for long term growth.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jaggederest 1y agoI assume that their weighted revenue per user is around $10 a month, with a discount for annual subscriptions, and they have 50k users. Edit: And the insane values these days are P/E of 90+, bad businesses are less than 5, so I took a conservative estimate of 10 P/E, but I think a more reasonable number might actually be 40, putting them in the centimillion category for sure.
- pjerem 1y agoI somehow doubt the usual approximations are working here. Kagi probably have a user base of users who are highly attached to the product’s quality. Kagi could lose most of their paying customers should they ever fall into the wrong hands. But I’m glad it’s like this. A good old company that just sell good products to their happy customers.
- ls-a 1y agoThe small team is going to burnout soon. I checked there hiring description and it says something around the lines of expect a lot of work with little rest.
- obtusifolia 1y agoCould you share a source for that? I checked a couple of their openings (e.g. [1]) and they didn't say anything like that. [1]: https://kagi.peopleforce.io/careers/v/125936-core-back-end-team https://kagi.peopleforce.io/careers/v/125936-core-back-end-t...
- deng 1y ago"ruthless communication habits" tells you all you need to know, and this is exactly why you'd put something like this into your job ad.
- dewey 1y agoThis could mean many different things. Like communicating well, documenting things to what you are probably assuming: answering your messages 24 hours a day instantly. I doubt you can get a feeling for the work / life balance from this half sentence.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ls-a 1y agoThey changed the wording on their hiring page at https://help.kagi.com/kagi/company/hiring-kagi.html https://help.kagi.com/kagi/company/hiring-kagi.html. Quick look at older snapshots I found it > Our ambition is enormous, going against industry giants with a very small team. You will work a lot. We are completely user funded. Kagi is currently used by one town worth of people. Do not expect VC backed/big-tech salary. Do expect equity as a part of compensation
- jonplackett 1y agoI would love for more companies to get profitable and remain small-ish. Most startups just go through the cycle of cheap and great - hit the profitability button and turn into a flaming pile of crap.
- PartiallyTyped 1y agoThat's a very common approach to building tech companies, and you will find it in many business books, I think Thiel's 0 to 1 recommends this as well, and uses Meta and Twitter as examples.
- jonplackett 1y agoI was trying to use Twilio the other day and just gave up because it’s so awful now. It used to be such a good service. Beautiful docs. An interface that made sense. Great support. Now it’s the very definition of flaming pile of crap.
- sshine 1y agoI think Jira used to be okay, too. Before it became the example of how to invoke hatred in a software team.
- christophilus 1y agoIt always sucked. Or, at least , it did 15 years or so ago when I first (and last) used it.
- bombcar 1y agoJira kicked ass. But it’s enterprise. Which means it is customizable beyond all rational thought. If you retrain yourself to work the way Jira does, and use all the defaults, it’s not bad at all at what it does. Quite good. But if you use it as a bug tracker only, or customize it to all the business processes you’ve evolved over twenty years, it becomes a frightening morass.
- spacechild1 1y ago> Not every business needs to become a unicorn. Honestly, I find this whole startup mentality, where you only build a company so that you might later sell it off to some megacorp, very strange and off-putting. It essentially means you didn't care about your product and your users in the first place.
- aembleton 1y agoWhy would investors care about your product or users? They care about returns. If you can bootstrap it yourself then there's no need to do this, but those that bring in investors will need an exit.
- reaperducer 1y agoWhy would investors care about your product or users? They care about returns. You can do two, or even all three of those things. Human beings are not boolean greed machines. The HN bubble likes to reduce everything to a numbers game. Real life isn't like that, as demonstrated by the many tens of thousands of companies that aren't run like a dystopian Silicon Valley comic book.
- g0db1t 1y ago[dead]
- layer8 1y agoThe conclusion still stands: “It essentially means you didn't care about your product and your users in the first place.”
- andrew_lettuce 1y agoI don't disagree with your overall sentiment, but the last line feels off. Investment profile needs to be matched with returns, but they don't all need to be 5 year mega exits, and they don't need the same companies to be racheted up in round after round of fund-led growth. This is why we don't build companies that will last 100+ years anymore
- aestetix 1y agoI would prefer that they either stay small, or if they try to grow, do so without sacrificing their customer support system. American companies, startups in particular, have terrible support. It's really nice to have actual contact with someone when an issue arises.
- zombiwoof 1y agocould be that they pay minimum wage