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.
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.
> This is orthogonal to questions of morality and justice.
What?
If Kagi doesn't grow, I fully expect the owner to eventually shut it down and move on to more fruitful ventures. Nobody owes anybody to keep a business running. So yes, it would die.
Sorry If I wasn't clear. But I think the question is pretty clearly stated in the post you responded to.
The question is: Does Kagi needs to grow to be sustainable, and if so, how much.
>If Kagi doesn't grow, I fully expect the owner to eventually shut it down and move on to more fruitful ventures.
If you had a business that made you a $1 million per year profit, would you shut it down just because it wasnt growing?
Companies need to make a profit or they go out of business. However, most businesses don't need to continually increase users/ revenue to stay afloat. The coffee shop down my street is 100 years old, and didn't need to double in size every year.
I agree that nobody is owed anything. I also think that Kagi is "owed" or "deserves" tells us nothing about how many users they need to keep staff paid and the lights on.
> If you had a business that made you a $1 million per year profit, would you shut it down just because it wasnt growing?
Yeah, I would. We have to remember that these are guys who beat Google at their own game. They beat a company of a monstrous size and revenue at their own game. With that kind of capacity, I don't expect them to be satisfied with a million a year in profit to share. I expect them to go as far as they can.
If you're nobody special doing nothing special, then you can be happy with just needing to pay staff and keep the lights on. Like the coffee shop down your street, or my day job. But Kagi is clearly in a different category as a business.
Last I heard Kagi needs to grow a little bit more from current user base to break even.
Well if their goal is to make money, they haven't beaten Google yet.
Also, if you have a business that makes a million dollars a year and that's not enough, the typical solution is to sell it to someone else for 20 million or so instead of Burning It to the Ground
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.
I suspect you're correct, and am rooting for them to hit sustainable, as soon as possible. I don't know what their maximum sustainable size is, either - that's equally important, though always a moving target. I only wanted to point out that neither inflection point, for a paid-service business model, has to do with "market share" - that's a VC thing, to which I'm increasingly allergic.
