Hi! Thanks for this.
It would be good to have this before SNS launch proposals. Possibly in the main thread so teams have time to answer questions. Kinic’s has been open for more than a month, here → Upcoming Kinic SNS Launch
If possible please do these reports earlier 
The product is buggy/incomplete in features. We tried to “Claim Site” with several different canister IDs but the app returned error message saying “Something went wrong” with console error message “Failed to parse”. The “Ad Auction” button returned the same “Something went wrong” error message. The product
Core search features and claiming features have been running for about a year with only 1 reported issue. It makes sense that a few issues appear as we hand over control and change the process for the SNS. For example, one needs to remove all controllers other than the SNS
title, description and cover image is low hanging fruit for any search engine but Kinic does not capture that.
This is a subjective statement. Kinic plans on improving ‘search’ via on-chain machine learning modules. It will likely be better than traditional web2 search near term.
Last but not the least, Kinic has not disclosed any user traction data publicly. It only mentions in the whitepaper, “Kinic is fully functional and averages thousands of unique monthly searches.” If this is all there is, it’s too little. Many much more mature IC projects have consistently shared their user growth data publicly, such as OpenChat, DSCVR, Sonic and Dmail.
This has been disclosed publicly many times and from many sources. Just last week the numbers were discussed in Dfinity R&D. Running up to Supernova Kinic had very heavy traffic nearing 10k unique users per day. The past it has been closer to 5k per month. We see this as a proxy to more general interest in the IC. Expanding this is explained in detail in the WP.
We would expect a project that tries to raise >$7 million from retail investors to have a more polished product, unlock a proven underserved market and have achieved admirable user growth. That doesn’t seem to be the case for Kinic, yet.
The range is $2,500,000 to $7,500,000 at current ICP prices.
This amount is equivalent to a traditional seed round. Kinic has won prizes and has very heavy usage. After the SNS, we can expect further acceleration in development.