Kagi search reached 20k paying members • Hacker News Board

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#81

Post by paxcoder » Thu, Jan 25, 2024, 1:34 AM UTC

NelsonMinar wrote: post #46

Kerrick wrote: post #4

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.

For 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

Suggestion 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)

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#82

Post by sp332 » Thu, Jan 25, 2024, 1:34 AM UTC

fullshark wrote: post #70

BadHumans wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/company/logo.html

> Our designer insisted the Kagi logo is "anchored" in the letter "g," and we had to agree. Huh what am I missing? I have no idea what this link is trying to say.

If you look at the kagi logo, the g is much more attention-getting and memorable than the k.

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#83

Post by malwrar » Thu, Jan 25, 2024, 1:34 AM UTC

Kerrick wrote: post #4

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.

Is 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.

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#84

Post by jhardy54 » Thu, Jan 25, 2024, 1:35 AM UTC

cdata wrote: post #41

tremarley wrote: post #27

Freely distributing 20,000 t-shirts to your first 20,000 customers is a nice reward. But Kagi is missing an opportunity for a huge brand awareness campaign from this. People who are already really happy with Kagi would become brand ambassadors. Why isn’t the name ‘Kagi’ found anywhere on the t-shirt design? People who want to know where it’s from would have to go out of the way to ask the tee wearer.

FWIW I'm way more likely to wear a t-shirt that doesn't have the word "Kagi" on it.

Yep, honestly their black shirt with the dog on the back is kind of cool, but the corny “Humanize the web!” on the sternum ruined it for me.

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#85

Post by PKop » Thu, Jan 25, 2024, 1:36 AM UTC

>We would not be here without our early adopters (you!) and we deemed it important to pause, reflect and show gratitude.

Why would any customer care about a T-Shirt though? Probably best to put that money into the product, which the early adopters would appreciate more than some generic, likely ill-fitting T-Shirt.

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#86

Post by Terretta » Thu, Jan 25, 2024, 1:36 AM UTC

cdata wrote: post #41

tremarley wrote: post #27

Freely distributing 20,000 t-shirts to your first 20,000 customers is a nice reward. But Kagi is missing an opportunity for a huge brand awareness campaign from this. People who are already really happy with Kagi would become brand ambassadors. Why isn’t the name ‘Kagi’ found anywhere on the t-shirt design? People who want to know where it’s from would have to go out of the way to ask the tee wearer.

FWIW I'm way more likely to wear a t-shirt that doesn't have the word "Kagi" on it.

To what end?

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#87

Post by endisneigh » Thu, Jan 25, 2024, 1:36 AM UTC

38 wrote: post #74

Kagi needs a free tier. even if its only 10 searches a day, it needs something. I am never going to use it unless I can try it out for a while.

Kagi already has a free trial

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#88

Post by AH4oFVbPT4f8 » Thu, Jan 25, 2024, 1:37 AM UTC

I’ve been a very happy customer since early 2022. It’s rare I goto the old search engine with the ads as Kagi continues to improve with each update. Raise pin and block are great features.

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#89

Post by LargeTomato » Thu, Jan 25, 2024, 1:37 AM UTC

cwsx wrote: post #21

I switched to them a few months ago, I was previously using duckduckgo (and Google before that). As most of you have probably noticed Google search results have seriously dropped in quality the last few years, but especially in 2023. I'm no longer able to get meaningful results for almost any topic, especially if it's technical, the only results are AI generated (?) / obvious SEO spam websites. It takes me multiple d…

I just signed up. You get 100 searches for free to try it out.

Re: Kagi search reached 20k paying members

#90

Post by Lazare » Thu, Jan 25, 2024, 1:38 AM UTC

monk_the_dog wrote: post #79

I am a happy customer, and recently discovered their URL rewrite rules: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/redirects.html . This lets me automatically rewrite urls so reddit automatically opens in "old" reddit and boost docs open with the latest version of boost. Really feels like this search engine was built for people like me.

Also a happy customer, but I didn't know about that feature. That's quite useful; thanks for mentioning it.