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> This take feels more like being upset about one individual's (Vlad) personal opinions about privacy and politics. But in my opinion, it fails to realize that assigning one person's views to an entire organization is a fallacy. Even if they are the leader.

And Vlad didn't even say anything that crazy from a political perspective. "News should not only be about politics" is super reasonable, and I found myself agreeing with him much more than the person he was talking to.

It'd be reasonable if it was achievable. News are always colored by politics. And usually the people who want "apolitical" news are just defending the status quo they've internalized as the baseline (which especially in the US is by no means a commonly understood one).

Let's put it a different way, if Vlad wasn't apolitical, like all the haters seem to be complaining about, I wouldn't be paying Kagi any money, it wouldn't even be on my radar.

While no one can truly be unbiased, I want them to try. Arguments against this are just sophist nonsense, and I'm not convinced they are made in good faith.

He isn't apolitical. He thinks he is apolitical, which is more troubling than being openly political. (Well, unless you're Elon Musk political, I suppose.)

Someone who believes in objective truth believes their own viewpoint to be the only valid viewpoint, as indeed we see in the quotes in TFA.

All news is political.

Oh really?

So when some local newspaper reports about some random old person in an old-age home that's political?

Please, take this destructive attitude and reassess it.

Not all things are political and making them so actively makes the world worse.

Yeah it is political lol. What do you think political means? Why is it important to society that we know more about old people in the old age homes? Do they need more or less support? Social security and supporting older people past retirement is a political choice. Choosing to publicly fund Healthcare for the elderly is a political choice. Who owns the newspaper? What are their goals? Why are they using their limited space to express this story?

Political isn't always negative but the news is always political. All news, including good sources like NPR, is promoting a point of view. Nothing is impartial even if that's the goal. Ignoring this doesn't change it.

Sending t-shirts to existing users is unlikely to be an effective marketing strategy to grow/maintain the business. The way they did it was also inefficient and high-risk. It may reduce churn, but with 20k users there's a very low cap on how good a churn reduction can be vs bringing in new users.

As a counterpoint, nearly all of Kagi's growth so far can be directly attributed to word-of-mouth marketing from those 20k early adopters. I can see a rational case to be made that making those vocal early adopters feel appreciated will pay off in the long run as they continue to advocate for Kagi in places like HN.

That's fair, but many of them may also prefer to see the money spent on the service (or other marketing). If I was paying $20 a month for a service on the basis of creating a sustainable paid search business, I think being sent a "free" t-shirt would call into question the sustainability and make it harder to justify the cost – can I pay $15 for a service that doesn't send t-shirts?

More generally though, word of mouth is a good place to start but it maxes out quickly, especially for niche products. There will need to be some support from other channels. Even just putting the name of the company on the t-shirt would have supported it a bit.

I first heard about Stripe in it's early days because a friend of mine wore a stripe shirt to a LAN party. It's not the first time I've discovered something new by seeing a shirt or a hoodie or some other piece of clothing.

The Kagi T-shirts don't say "Kagi" on them [1], so that won't happen.

[1] https://blog.kagi.com/celebrating-20k

they don't need to because users are wearing them and they can vocalize the brand name. t-shirts just need to be beautiful

That seems far less likely to work (and I wouldn't call these shirts beautiful). If I see a brand name on a T-shirt someone interesting is wearing, I'll search for it online, not ask them. If I see a cartoon dog on a T-shirt someone interesting is wearing, I'll assume it's just art.

Simply put it's bikeshedding.

t-shirts are something that people think they can understand, so they speak most at length about it compared to the other things Kagi is doing.

I do not believe this is a good example of bikeshedding. They made what I would consider a pretty long post and announcement about shirts but there is a fairly sizeable paying user base that worry its a distraction. I agree that some of the specific nitpicks are probably unfair but we love the products but see tshirts as a repeated problem of maybe doing too much. We are all armchairing the problem though and its up to Vlad to do his own thing.

I mean, the main value proposition for Kagi is privacy. They need to be really focused on maintaining trust when privacy is their brand. I won't condemn the company based on some out of context quotes from the founder, but those screenshots weren't reassuring either. Not paying taxes and focusing on adding AI to your search doesn't make me more confident that they're protecting my data. It makes me more likely to think "someday they will need a little cash infusion to keep the lights on; at that point they'll begin to consider collecting my data and selling it".

I don’t think privacy was ever Kagi’s value prop. That’s Brave. Kagi’s value prop is that it’s search that actually works.

It's both. Their marketing copy states it as "search which is aligned with what's best for you", which they say includes both personalized search, no advertisements, and being "100% privacy-respecting". Privacy is definitely spoken of every time they talk about the product.