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Comment by mrweasel

9 months ago

> a big problem for their growth

But do they need to grow to the size of Bing, Google or just DuckDuckGo? If they just want to grow a sustainable business, then it's a feature of their business model.

No I'm sorry. I don't mean "growth" as in infinite and unsustainable growth like VC-founded startups. I mean "growth" as in adopting a bigger market share.

  • But, again, do they need to? It seems to me like "market share" is a metric relevant to companies pursuing VC-founded, unicorn lottery-ticket scale. If they generate enough revenue to pay competive wages, cover their operating costs, and make a reasonable (real-world, not VC-world) return on investment, they're a gosh-darn success. It's only within tech, where valuations and evaluations sailed off into ZIRP-ified bizarro-world, that people think of that as a failure of ambition or execution. I think it's time to re-assess our mental models.

    • > But, again, do they need to?

      Why not? There are tens of millions of people who need/want a high quality search engine and can pay for it. Kagi deserves to be successful for having made a better search engine than Google. And their success can inspire other entrepreneurs to start delivering quality information products, so that maybe we can get out of this ad/scam fuelled quagmire once and for all.

      Good products and ideas should be successful, that's progress.

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    • > do they need to?

      I don’t know what Kagi’s minimum sustainable size might be, but it’s probably bigger than what it is now. Particularly if they want to stay competitive with LLMs.

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