Comment by recursivegirth
7 months ago
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. Embrace change, be agile, and most importantly listen to your feedback.
Wish Kagi nothing but success, I would very much like a disruptor in this space. Best of luck to you and your team.
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 sustainable base of like-minded customers/partners and fewer companies that pretend they can please 7B people by radically changing their product every 3 months.
Interesting take. It is valid and don't take my alternative interpretation as suggesting otherwise.
I owned a business for 18 years. For 15 of those years it was my primary source of income. I valued feedback, tried my hardest to solicit as much of it as possible, and always took it to heart (though I had to always try and glean statistics from the sum of all feedback so that I was never spending resources on minority opinions).
What I read from the user was that the company created an optics problem. It wasn't whether the company was losing money or not, it was just that the user is choosing to support that company because they want a really good search engine, and the optics of divesting the company's resources into multiple projects makes it appear as if it could be the case that not enough focus is being spent on what really matters to that user.
What I read from the founder was that the optics issue went completely over his head and a complete dismissal of the user's concerns and feedback, along with a doubling down of the decisions made.
It's not a good look in my opinion. Even though the founder was polite and didn't say anything inappropriate, I would NEVER have responded to a customer of mine like that.
I get OP's take, but freediver is essentially saying that Orion and their other ventures are a part of the vision. To OP and others, it may seem like a side-mission or a waste of resources, but I trust the guy bootstrapping the company with his own money.
Hell, Orion is the first Webkit browser where FireFox and Chrome plug-ins work on iOS. If may seem like a misstep, but I see it as calculated. If Kagi search hopes to ever take on Google and Chrome, they need their own champion.
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> pretend they can please 7B people
I think the most positive aspect of freediver's response is the implied dismissal of the above. - that their stubborness is genuine, not a more robotic, seemingly hollow, response of concern. As a marketing approach, I'm wondering if maybe that would give you less reach and more impact in general.
You sound like a very good businessman, and a reasonably astute interrogator of user feedback. I wish there were more businesses with people having those traits at the helm!
.. and then the founder decided to harangue the author in email. Guy can't seem to stop stepping on his own dick.
https://hackers.town/@lori/112255132348604770
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>I work in CX, you should listen to your customers.
The only way a customer speaks is with money. If people like what you sell, you'll have more customers speaking with their wallet. If they don't then they tell you so by not purchasing what you sell. Internet commenters (such as myself) do not represent all customers or even a majority. People who are happy with a product usually see no reason to give feedback – especially when it's a small purchase. Likewise, people who hate your product wouldn't purchase it in the first place.
This sounds like a great argument for not listening to anyone, or improving your product or messaging at all. Make the obvious observation that the complainers are a minority (ignoring that vocal non-complainers are also a minority), that their public complaints don't represent the opinions of one or two orders of magnitude of people who won't ever complain (just silently drop), are not ever influential, and that the silent majority support every decision you've made.
The cool part is that as people start leaving your product, complainers will become an even smaller minority, so you'll never have to second guess yourself. Maybe blame it on bullying?
What people say they want is usually something completely different to their purchasing behaviour, and as a business you should listen little to what people say they want and listen much to how they spend their money.
For just about any business, if they were to ask their customers or the public at large what they want, the answer is usually "We want free stuff!". Cool to do if you're a politician, but bad business practice.
There's an old expression saying "the customer is always right", meaning that you can never blame the customers for how they spend or don't spend their money. If paying customers show a certain preference you better give it to them.
People who don't complain but silently drop are speaking with their wallets and that has to be listened to, as I said in my previous post. A business has to listen to customer spending behaviour and not listen too much to complainers. Normal people will give hotels awful reviews if it was raining on their vacation and great reviews if the weather was good and they had fun with their friends. Complaining is a past time to release some stress for many, and a pathological problem for a few. But when it comes to actually spending money is where the truth comes out.
Most people will not like your product and not buy your product, that's the large majority. That's why most normal businesses do not have the same reach as for example Apple or Toyota.
> The cool part is that as people start leaving your product, complainers will become an even smaller minority, so you'll never have to second guess yourself.
You can be sure that nobody second guesses themselves more than business leaders – especially if sales drop or stagnate. That doesn't mean that every complainer is right in their complaints.
As for Kagi there seems to be very many commenters online and in their feedback forums who believe that the main selling point of the service is privacy or extensive customisation. But I believe that the main selling point is search results quality and that everything else comes second. At least if they want to widen their customer base beyond computer hackers.
If you take a look at the Kagi feedback forums, there's almost every week somebody starting a thread where they demand that Kagi implements a very niche feature and then threatens to unsubscribe if they don't do it. Or demands a niche feature or they won't sign up. You can't listen too much to these people, you have to follow your own vision and if people agree with your decisions you'll see it in sales. If not, then you were wrong in your vision.
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Terrible take. A complaint is worth twice a compliment because complaints are actionable. And both are worth more than silence.
That doesn’t mean a business needs to acquiesce to every little demand. But “just listen to the money” is a horrible path for product improvement.
> because complaints are actionable
plenty of actionable complaints are just wild goose chases to nowhere.
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The problem is, there are many customers. You should listen, but that doesn’t mean you have to agree with everything or submit to every demand. I for one find Orion useful and it would be a bummer if it was scrapped because of a single comment on HN. Also, “I lost faith in a company because it made T-shirts” sounds a bit hyperbolic to take seriously IMO.
> I work in CX, you should listen to your customers.
...and to be clear, Hacker News is not a representative sample of their customers.
> ...and to be clear, Hacker News is not a representative sample of their customers.
I am a customer and I learned about Kagi here. I assume many people are on the same boat, so I wouldn't be so sure about that.
FWIW I'm a customer and had never read about it on HN until this post. I learned about it from a private Discord programmer community.
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> I am a customer and I learned about Kagi here.
Perhaps I should have said "target customers" where I said "customers", I don't know. But it should not be surprising that "being an HN user" correlates strongly with "finds out about things on HN".
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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…
I think that statement is generally true for any random company, but I think for a company like Kagi, HN users are actually a lot more representative of their user base.
Kagi has always explicitly gone after Hacker News readers as their target customer.
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.
Iirc it was said that speeds over 30 km/h will kill you too.
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