As a Kagi customer, I hope their choice to allocate nearly a third of their investor-raised funds to produce and freely distribute 20,000 t-shirts doesn’t lead to their demise.
For anyone else wondering, they raised $670,000 from 42 small investors in June 2023. Non-traditional fundraise. I agree that spending that money on t-shirts is weird. As a new Kagi subscriber I don't want a t-shirt. I want a thriving search engine.
Suggestion for Kagi: If you haven't made the t-shirts yet, offer users to request/reserve one first. That way you won't ship to those who don't want it (though you won't ship to some who do, so maybe save some t-shirts on the side for those willing to contact you to ask if there's any left after the deadline)
Reading the blog post it sounds like users will get a credit toward a free shirt/stickers. They will still need to pay shipping, which should be enough to keep people from getting it just for the hell of it. After a period of time, if there are unclaimed shirts they will open them up to those users beyond the first 20k.
While it sounds like they will print 20k no matter what, it doesn’t seem like they will randomly ship them out to users. They really can’t, as they don’t have the addresses of all their users.
"Sizes are first come first serve" so I suppose they estimate how many of each size they need and then let people get a shirt as long as their size is available.
Especially ones that do not have their name. As someone who has heard about Kagi, but not actually visited their site or used it, I had no idea they had a dog mascot.
If I saw one of those shirts in the wild, and I hadn’t just read this post and seen the pictures of the shirts, I would have had no idea it was a Kagi shirt.
Having received many t shirts from companies and conferences, I mostly don't wear them if the branding is really over the top. As described, a Kagi shirt would be something I'd actually wear
There was a hilarious blog post on here a few months ago from some guy who collects database company T shirts. A lot of them are quite bad but a few are really good. IIRC his favorite was from Snowflake.
I think I might still like the Snowflake one (3) the best though. Although rereading the article he says there is writing on the back of the Snowflake one which makes me not like it as much. There are very few stylish shirts I enjoy that have writing on the back of them.
For reference, that "some guy" is Andy Pavlo, a professor of databases at Carnegie Mellon. He has a lot of neat writeups online, like this annual review of new database systems [0]. He puts up lectures on the internet for free too.
Having been to Dr. Pavlo's office - or at least, one of them - I can attest to there being multiple cardboard boxes filled with gifted shirts from different companies. One of my favorite designs was actually from CMU's DB group itself - it has a little "this database kills fascists" tag on it, with a skull motif :D
But isn't the goal of the t-shirt a gift for the first 20k paying users? The goal for them doesn't seem to be about what they get back from giving away the t-shirt.
Based on their public data, they have 20,000+ paying users, and 1500 users paying for the family plan, which if all of the users are on the cheapest $5/month plan (which, many probably are on the $10/month plan like myself, as that gives you unlimited searches) would give them $100K+ each month.
Sounds pretty sustainable already to me, unless they have a really large team and/or really inefficient infrastructure, neither which seem true to me.
I’ve used Kagi as my default search engine for months and wasn’t aware it had a dog mascot either! I’ll probably turn the shirt into some word-of-mouth marketing at my gym, so I wouldn’t say my free shirt is a terrible investment.
Is kagi’s financial status that dire? Call me stupid, but I’m excited to get the shirt and feel warmly about the fact that the leadership at Kagi might actually be thinking about their early users the way described in the blog post. The $200k probably will not pay itself back from the shirts themselves, but I’m definitely going to shill kagi much harder now.
hehe! I see it as great marketing, possibly decreasing churn (although Kagi subscribers seem among the most enthusiastic I've seen around!) and just generally continuing with the tred of goodwill towards users (the opposite of the usual treatment of users from big tech)
It’s likely to lead to more real world discussions of the product, someone is bound to ask what the shirt is about, or you might feel more motivated to talk about it while wearing it.
I didn't see published costs on the link, but it did mention the shirts were produced in Serbia... I imagine at a substantially lower cost than your assumption of full retail per shirt..
They might think it's free advertising, but I only wear t-shirts to bed or on the weekends and vacations. Most of the time I wear button-ups or polos. Them sending me a free t-shirt isn't going to get them as much advertising as they hoped for.
It feels more to me like they're giving a month (and a bit?) free service in the form of a T-shirt. At this point, their 2023 raise was "only" about three months of gross revenue. Shipped, the tshirts are probably, eh, $13 USD?
I don't really have an opinion about whether this is an effective advertising spend or not. I hope they follow up. I don't need another free T-shirt but I'll probably wear it, I like the doggo.
https://blog.kagi.com/safe-round