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Kagi just passed 50k users: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=members https://kagi.com/stats?stat=members They claim to be profitable, but the TAM for services peopl

Kagi just passed 50k users: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=members https://kagi.com/stats?stat=members They claim to be profitable, but the TAM for services people are used to thinking of as "free" is small.

_Algernon_ 1y ago
Kagi doesn't have network effects stacked against them. If your friends don't use Kagi, you still benefit from it. The same is not true for social media.
smikhanov 1y ago
Kagi is cool (as a company), really. The whole idea of running your company while thinking about TAM and whatever is totally from a VC playbook. If you don’t take VC funding, you stop caring about TAM. Instead, you care about whether having the profit you have makes you — yes, you, personally — comfortable about your life. This is a much, much healthier line of thinking than trying to capture every bloody dollar in this world you can reach.
- fragmede 1y ago
  trying to capture every bloody dollar in this world you can reach is the VC part. Looking and making sure that there's a market for the widget your factory produces is just due diligence.
smikhanov 1y ago
Sorry to mumble, I'll add one more thing. Back in 2013, I was running a productivity startup, and we tried courting Evernote into acquiring us (unsuccessfully, though damn we were a good match). I remember those times vividly: Evernote raises a sizeable fraction of a billion in funding in several rounds, employs like 400 people, their CEO goes to places like Le Web or whatever and expatiates from stage about building a "100 year company". Fast forward to 2022: Evernote itself is acquired by a random app studio, and the whole service is now run by something like a dozen people. The CEO of what used to be a "100 year company" moved on. I thought about this a lot. They never needed those 400 employees, even in 2013, it was absolutely possible to run the same service with a tiny team, it's just that the people at the company's top would be completely different people with completely different aptitude towards building their businesses. It's only if you really, really want to be on stage at Le Web, then you go to investors over and over again and convince them and yourself that a note-taking app needs 400 employees, and you're building a company as a product, not a product as a product. Looks like the author of the original article here also didn't actually want to build a social network business but rather wants to be in the hothouse of Silicon Valley. Well, good luck to them.
- gyinshen 1y ago
  Maybe they needed the staff to build the software back then and now they could be leaner cos the product is already built. Maintaining is much easier than building.
  - trinix912 1y ago
    In all honesty, it doesn't seem like 400 people were really needed to build the software. If you just look at credits in Adobe Premiere, for example, there's not 400 people in there, and it's a way more complex product than what Evernote is/was.
whoisyc 1y ago
Given how many complaints about Google search you regularly see on this website and elsewhere, you would think there will be a lot more people willing to pay for non shitty search. And yet Kagi does not have enough paying users to fill a football stadium. To me, this validates GP’s point about how people love to talk about paying for services and then proceed to not pay for any services.

_Algernon_ 1y ago

Kagi doesn't have network effects stacked against them. If your friends don't use Kagi, you still benefit from it. The same is not true for social media.

smikhanov 1y ago

Kagi is cool (as a company), really. The whole idea of running your company while thinking about TAM and whatever is totally from a VC playbook. If you don’t take VC funding, you stop caring about TAM. Instead, you care about whether having the profit you have makes you — yes, you, personally — comfortable about your life. This is a much, much healthier line of thinking than trying to capture every bloody dollar in this world you can reach.

fragmede 1y ago
trying to capture every bloody dollar in this world you can reach is the VC part. Looking and making sure that there's a market for the widget your factory produces is just due diligence.

smikhanov 1y ago

Sorry to mumble, I'll add one more thing. Back in 2013, I was running a productivity startup, and we tried courting Evernote into acquiring us (unsuccessfully, though damn we were a good match). I remember those times vividly: Evernote raises a sizeable fraction of a billion in funding in several rounds, employs like 400 people, their CEO goes to places like Le Web or whatever and expatiates from stage about building a "100 year company". Fast forward to 2022: Evernote itself is acquired by a random app studio, and the whole service is now run by something like a dozen people. The CEO of what used to be a "100 year company" moved on. I thought about this a lot. They never needed those 400 employees, even in 2013, it was absolutely possible to run the same service with a tiny team, it's just that the people at the company's top would be completely different people with completely different aptitude towards building their businesses. It's only if you really, really want to be on stage at Le Web, then you go to investors over and over again and convince them and yourself that a note-taking app needs 400 employees, and you're building a company as a product, not a product as a product. Looks like the author of the original article here also didn't actually want to build a social network business but rather wants to be in the hothouse of Silicon Valley. Well, good luck to them.

gyinshen 1y ago
Maybe they needed the staff to build the software back then and now they could be leaner cos the product is already built. Maintaining is much easier than building.
- trinix912 1y ago
  In all honesty, it doesn't seem like 400 people were really needed to build the software. If you just look at credits in Adobe Premiere, for example, there's not 400 people in there, and it's a way more complex product than what Evernote is/was.

whoisyc 1y ago

Given how many complaints about Google search you regularly see on this website and elsewhere, you would think there will be a lot more people willing to pay for non shitty search. And yet Kagi does not have enough paying users to fill a football stadium. To me, this validates GP’s point about how people love to talk about paying for services and then proceed to not pay for any services.