So he's mad they bought promotional t-shirts after a hitting a subscription goal?
If it's deeper than that, I'd recommend adding a summary. It's a big ask to expect strangers to read a ranting wall of text.
I Lost Faith in Kagi
371–380 of 639 posts
Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi
#372Earlier 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…
> I work in CX, you should listen to your customers. ...and to be clear, Hacker News is not a representative sample of their customers.
In fact, HN is the only place I’ve heard anything about Kagi. I’ve done my best to evangelize to non-HN friends though :)
If anything, I’m interested in what the evolution will look like as their customer base expands beyond HN types…
Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi
#373Kagi just works for me. I pay a monthly bill and I get a good search engine. Until they do something that disrupts that relationship or signals a disruption to that relationship, the things in this post don't strike me as that, I don't have much patience for posts like these. It's like a child making a "dead game" post for a game that made a change they didn't like.
Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi
#374I still pay for Kagi for its search but this has kind of been the problem from the beginning with their org. - Search has been a breath of fresh air, I wish they dedicated more time to it. - Orion...is ok? I use it off and on and it is fine but would rather have better search. The premise of the browser is nice but it feels like this could probably be a whole separate company or a purely open source endeavor. It has…
> 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…
Thanks for your response!
Honestly I get the T-shirt part this way. You got to Doo crazy stuff as a start-up. I also get that you try ai stuff. As long as you keep up de search.
However what scares me is the apparent lack of knowledge about privacy, gdpr and what is PII in a product that, to me, is all about privacy. Have one person in the company be an expert in privacy and GDPR etc and use their insights, since it is critical for your right of existence.
Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are right, we started doing that last week so technically we are doing marketing now.
It really does seem like you’re being a bit too unfocused Vlad. Delivering high-quality search over the entire Internet, higher quality than Google, is something so complex that even if you were literally the worlds smartest person and all the other Kagi employees were number 2 to number 26, there would still likely be stumbles at least once a year on something. Because there’s like a million gotchas hidden along the…
Serving optimally performing ads to billions of global users is a radically different problem than serving optimal search results and accessory features to a self-selected 50,000 or 500,000 customers.
Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes - but why do it is the main point? Why not focus on doing one thing properly? Although you seem to obviously be attracting enough money so it's up to you how to spend/burn it :)
Because I think you can not succeed as a search company without a browser. And I think that both and Orion and Kagi have proper focus. There are bugs yes, but they are not there due to lack of focus, otherwise every product out there has lack of focus.
I think this comment is the one that finally made Orion click for me from a business perspective. Without it you're sharecropping on land owned by your direct competitors who fund their browsers through money coming in from search. If you ever encroach on their revenue even a little bit they'll fight you tooth and nail.
I think it's a crazy ambitious bet but I can see why you're making it.
Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can make that argument for initial approach, but it falls flat on its face after the author told Vlad that they didn't want to communicate with them and Vlad responded with a lecture. Vlad comes off as fairly unhinged here.
One thing I absolutely love about online discourse: shit all over someone, then block them. It is something that you don't see with in-person communications - because you really can't just "close off" the discussion to one way. Anyway, I just think that people do things in online discussions that they wouldn't do to someone's face. And that tends to be a bad thing for reasonable discourse.
> One thing I absolutely love about online discourse: shit all over someone, then block them. It is something that you don't see with in-person communications
Ummm dating and breakups?
Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi
#378Subsequently: https://hackers.town/@lori/112255132348604770
Jesus I agree with some of the post, but the author seems to be an insufferable human. This has all the characteristics of terminally-online people that spend way too much time being angry on social media, and needing the world know how angry they are. Like, these days you do not know when you email someone if they reply to you, or if they will post screenshots of your entire conversation to social media showing how…
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Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi
#379I'm a subscriber simply because their search is far better than any available alternative. That's the primary thing I want from them and so far they're delivering it at a cost I consider fair. Their other projects are not interesting or useful to me, but so far I can simply ignore them. Yes, on some level I wish they'd focus and quit wasting money and energy on things I don't care about, but that's really not my affa…
I've been curious about Kagi but the idea of running all my searches through one company while logged in worries me. Yes, I realize most people do that with Google and could care less, but I do. For me to try Kagi I'd need a much firmer commitment to user privacy, not the wishy-washy hand-waving portrayed here.
Re: I Lost Faith in Kagi
#380Earlier 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…
> I work in CX, you should listen to your customers. ...and to be clear, Hacker News is not a representative sample of their customers.
Kagi has always explicitly gone after Hacker News readers as their target customer.