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I Lost Faith in Kagi

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331–340 of 639 posts

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#331

The T-shirt thing is dumb and a waste of funds, but TFA describing it as "owning" a T-shirt factory is an exaggeration that makes me question most of the framing of the rest of the article. They partnered with an existing entity in Serbia, what they did set up was the means to distribute them. Still not a great look and definitely still a waste of funds, but if every criticism takes this same form—take a legitimate c…

It's so silly. Google/Bing are wasting money too but the difference is you don't see it. And yes, we're "paying" to use those services too, just not with our own money.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#332
post #230
post #73

Lori seems (from the blog post and the subsequent email chain with the CEO) to be unnecessarily combative and most definitely too emotionally invested in Kagi. You're paying, what, 10, 25 USD - are you getting a good service for it? If not, unsubscribe, if yes, what's the problem? Sounds like they're profitable now, so little risk of the service dissapearing. Unnecessary drama by people who live for drama. My only ad…

People pay $0 to Google/Meta/Twitter/TikTok for their base level offerings, and their privacy policy is valid to discuss and criticize. Does it somehow become less important just because they are also getting paid money? People discuss Apple's commitment to privacy and if it is real or adequate.

> People pay $0 to Google/Meta/Twitter/TikTok for their base level offerings

There are costs other than direct monetary. We're still "paying" for it, just via ads, sponsored results, etc.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#333
Fair criticisms, but at the end of the day, Kagi offers a better search experience then all the alternatives for a fair price, so I pay for it. I don't really need to have 'faith' in it, though I do hope it sticks around.

Also, can't wait to get my tshirt! (closed beta user here)

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 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. E…

That 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.]

Maybe 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.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 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. E…

This is a forum where people respond well to practical explanations from thoughtful founders. I don't know if the OP got what they needed from this reply, but I assume I'm not alone in being impressed by the humility and candor of the response and developed much greater affinity for Kagi from some of the specifics of what were said. I want more companies to have communicative, principled management that invites a sus…

[deleted]

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#337
VERY ironic to me that a web search company has its community platform hosted on Discord, which is un-indexable. Honestly, companies having their community platform on Discord is a huge red flag for me.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 an…

I 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. E…

> I work in CX, you should listen to your customers.

...and to be clear, Hacker News is not a representative sample of their customers.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with Brave?

The founder, Brandon Eich, made donations in favour of banning same-sex marriage. I also refuse to use anything from Brave for this reason.

Brendan Eich also created JavaScript. So you're going to have to pretty much stop using the Internet entirely if you're going to act like his work has anything to do with his political opinions. Personally, I separate a person's work from their political opinions and I think you should too.

Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi

#340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 an…

Keep going! Kagi is great. Years ago nobody thought Google could be challenged and that nobody would pay for search, yet here you are.

do they have a decent subscriber base? i thought it was still very niche
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