Hi folks - trying to see what search engines and sites people go to find out where to purchase storage. (i.e. Google, Brave, DuckDuckGo, CoinCap, StackOverflow, etc)
As always, we are diligently working to get the word out about DCS! We (modestly) believe it is the best solution of its kind, but people need to hear about it in order to prove that to themselves.
To help figure out how to get that info out there, my colleagues in marketing have asked if the community can weigh in on where our ideal users go, to find out where to purchase storage. Is it a search engine, a blog, a website, a social platform?
Armed with your insights, we can push even harder to get the message out about decentralized storage, to the right people
To support that, it would be really helpful if you would develop a strategy how to put your self made videos not only on Youbtube but also on Storj DCS.
Who is your ideal user and what do you want them to do? Is it the developer who codes applications or integrations for Storj DCS or is it the end user who needs storage space for their data?
But how can you expect anybody to make useful suggestions then? If you cannot tell who is your ideal customer, how should we know?
That brings me to the point where I completely fail to understand the marketing strategy behind Storjs market approach. I hope there is one. If not, then it is time to develop one.
There are so many fields that Storj could target, so many things that Storj could do āto get the word out about DCSā and so many areas where Storj could do better and should do better at least from what I see.
I am slightly getting the feeling that Storj is very much focused on the engineering part of their product and ethical company practice, but not so much on the marketing part and how to sell their product.
I used to work for a company that developed mass spectrometry analytics tool for biological labs. Things like detecting what kind of proteins is a given sample of tissue built of to look for cancer biomarkers. Turned out that our first customer was a nuclear plant. Nuclear plants donāt do tissue samples, but they do use mass spectrometry to detect impurity in coolants.
Another time it was a server/cluster monitoring tool, an early competitor to Zabbix at the time when, let say, the ELK stack was still few years from even existing. The software turned out to be great for monitoring telecom hardware, e.g. radio units, base stations etc.
i would make an offer to some of these tech channels with a sponsored of their choice and a review of Storj DCS
or something like thatā¦
I think they would fit very nicely in the target group you want your services to be known by.
and they are certainly able to give a competent evaluation, and maybe able to spot some things that have been missed.
and if not then atleast it should be good advertisement if the like the product which iām sure they will.
What you describe is one reason why you are required to write extensively about the customer you want to target when you write a business plan. For a focus that is too narrow it helps to identify additional use cases and for an approach too broad it is very helpful to refine the focus and shape the product into the right direction.
In your examples if you would have been asked who is your ideal customer, you probably would have said ābiological labsā in the first case and āserver/clusterā operators in the second case you want to target. So you had at least some idea about it. There is no contradiction in it, if your product or service gets picked up by additional use cases.
The difference here is, we got asked to help targeting the āideal userā without telling us who the ideal user is.
I still donāt know. Is the ideal user a company that wants to store 500TB of data? Or is the ideal user the developer to integrate Storj DCS in their product? Is the ideal user a cloud newbie or an existing cloud user who is looking for alternatives. Is it a software project or a hardware manufacturer or is it the average Joe who just wants to backup his PC data as cheap as possible? Does the ideal customer come from a specific industry which could make it harder to target considering the lacking certification like for HIPAA, CJIS, FERPA, GDPR or MPAA.
Knowing the customer is not an annoyance it helps to allocate sparse resources, to keep product development on track and usually results in much better conversion rates in the sales department.
Plans always change. If you believe writing extensively enough everything in the business plan works, try setting up your own company. It just doesnāt work. You rarely have enough experience, expertise and knowledge to know all potential use cases. Also market conditions change, and people change. A much better approach is to plan upfront for the fact that unpredictable happens and assume you will need to retarget, maybe even several times.
We see Sia on there and Wasabi, even Internxtā¦ So being on there might also drive Storjās exposure.
And if you are at it, if you type āS3ā into the search box youāll get tons of applications to go through, that could potentially be invited to partner with, maybe something like: https://alternativeto.net/software/s3-drive/about/.
Reviving. Iāve recently seen several mentions of Storj on r/datahoarder from multiple users, so it indeed looks like whatever marketing actions are taken, they seem to work at least within the hobbyist community.