Comment by akudha | Hacker News Reader

Comment by akudha | Hacker News Reader

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This is a very weird answer. People who are paying for your service want you to succeed, they want an alternative to Google search. Many of them (like the article above) explicitly say they don't want a t-shirt, they just want a better search product from you.

After all this very valid, very sensible feedback, you're commenting here saying "you need to be thinking out of the box" and trying to justify all the time, money and energy you spent on those t-shirts. Your customers are complaining because they want you to succeed. If they didn't care about you, they'd just cancel the subscription and move on. And your response to it is "nah, what we did was right" and not "yeah, maybe we shouldn't have spent all that resources on a stupid t-shirt that nobody wanted"?

I just don't get it. And what are you gonna do when you hit 50K members? Are you planning to send an entire wardrobe (from undies to a suit) to all your 50K customers (assuming IF you ever hit that many customers)?

I am a little lost here. So correct me.

The Founder of the company decided to pour in his own money worth of millions ( assuming that is true ) into the company. He bootstrapped it.

They were on track to becoming profitable. And now, as the replies shows they are now profitable.

He decided to spend some money to buy everyone a t-shirt as a gift.

And all I see is not thank you but anger and frustrations. Pointing to waste of time as if the product is going downhill or not iterating fast enough. But in fact according to changelog they are doing pretty well.

Spending my own money to say thank you in my own way and all I got was, all these negativity.

I just don't get it.

Kagi is playing against the likes of Google and Microsoft, who have infinite resources. Search is not a fight one can win casually. Every dollar, minute that is wasted on dumb stuff like t-shirts is an opportunity wasted on improving their core product.

Read the article, the author clearly lays out how Kagi is scattering their attention, money and energy on things that do not matter one bit.

He decided to spend some money to buy everyone a t-shirt as a gift.

A gift that nobody asked for, a gift that has zero impact, a gift that took their attention, time and money away from their core product.

Let me repeat - people are complaining because they care, because they want Kagi to succeed. Google search has gotten so bad that people are desperate for an alternative. Instead of taking it as "people are mean to us", perhaps Kagi should take it as "let us listen to our customers, they really do want us to succeed". If you see it from the perspective of a Kagi fan/customer, your opinion might change

I wonder if the t-shirts could be considered 'marketing'?

cause for their guys, search results and things related to search experience is basically everything, some stupid gift like a t-shirts just let people support them think they spend money at somewhere they just dont give a damn, despite kagi is get better now, but this behavior just bother us computer hacker :)

I don't think it's that weird at all. Nor did they say the "customer" needs to think outside the box (what a great misrepresentation). They were just explaining their thinking process.

I never said they said the customer needs to think outside the box. They claimed that they had to think outside the box (as if no company had sent promotional t-shirts before and as if promotional t-shirts is some kind of groundbreaking idea). I did not misrepresent anything

Yeah, I love that "free t-shirts" is classified outside the box thinking.

Oh, and nitpick: It's outside the box, not out of the box...

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