How to attract more customers

Ideas & Suggestions
1

Recently I’m reading something about a customer that’s using storj as a CDN. Aren’t there other business with similar characteristics that aren’t direct competitors (won’t want step the current customer on its toes) that can benefit from storj fast network speeds, and use the current customer as a showcase or reference?

I know from experience that good references can help a lot. Especially if the current (CDN) customer is willing to talk a little about how they did things to a potential new customer that only needs a little push.
In my line of work, this is normal and I’ve done this several times at my previous employer. But so far I only worked at non profit organizations, so maybe this idea doesn’t fly in the competitive business world.

And yes, I kown that the sales people are gone. So maybe this is more a long term thing. In that case it’s something for on the (probably already long) list of Ideas

2

In case of reference.
A colleague did one’s a Q/A on film and talked about the technical aspects, while managed told about the business case.
We also backed a whitepaper, talking about the benefits and how we tackled technical difficulties (there are always some, no point in denying).
And did several live sessions/demos on location (always fun to talk to other technicians, so many different insights and ideas how to do things)

3

This is usually how it was processed, we have several such customers, but this one is more noticeable than others.

4

It increasingly looks like Storj chose the easiest business model imaginable: spend years living on investor money while putting remarkably little effort into making sure actual customers even know the product exists.

In all these years, has anyone ever seen serious Storj advertising? Aggressive customer acquisition? A real attempt to convince businesses why they should move their storage to Storj? I certainly haven’t.

What we did get is almost impressive: a cloud-storage product that customers are apparently expected to discover through telepathy, while something as basic as mounting storage like a normal drive feels like an engineering project of its own.

Brilliant strategy. Why make the product easy to use when you can make it unnecessarily complicated and then wonder why mass adoption never happens?

They had eight years to build an ecosystem, invest in marketing, integrations, proper client software and actual customer acquisition. From the outside, however, the strategy often seems to have been:

“Investors are still paying, so everything must be fine.”

I wouldn’t be surprised if enormous amounts were spent over the years on development and salaries while the most important question — “Who exactly is going to use this, and why?” — remained somewhere near the bottom of the priority list.

And now Storj appears to be arriving exactly where this brilliant marketing strategy has been taking it for years. Unfortunately, the investors who financed the journey are being taken along for the ride.

It is almost an achievement: have the technology, the funding and years of runway — and still manage to build a product that most potential customers have barely heard of.

5

i mean not that they not heard, storj exhibited at all kinds of trade shows, but it was to much effort to change and too little gains - customers must have thought to themselves

6

I don’t mean that nobody had ever heard of Storj. The company spent years attending exhibitions, conferences and industry events, presenting decentralized storage and talking about the technology.

The more interesting question is:

What exactly were they showing potential customers at those exhibitions?

How to generate an access key?

How to configure S3 credentials?

How to install another tool, read documentation, change existing workflows and then explain to employees why they need to do any of this?

For a business, moving away from Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, a NAS or a conventional S3 provider has a real cost. It means changing processes, training people, spending engineering time and accepting additional operational risk.

So a perfectly rational customer looks at Storj and asks:

“What exactly am I getting in return for all this effort?”

And if the answer is simply somewhat cheaper storage, that is often nowhere near enough.

That, in my view, has always been one of Storj’s biggest failures. They tried to sell the technology instead of delivering a finished product.

Customers do not care how elegantly their files are split into pieces and distributed around the planet.

They want to click a button, mount a drive, move their data and forget about it.

Storj’s answer for years often felt more like:

“Here is an API, some documentation and an access key. Good luck.”

And now, if the business really is struggling, perhaps it is time to stop looking for savings primarily from node operators — the people who supplied the disks, bandwidth and electricity that made the network possible.

Maybe management should take a serious look at its own cost structure for a change.

Because from the outside, it certainly looks like developers and management have been living quite comfortably for years while building a product that still requires far too much effort from an ordinary customer.

If the economics no longer work, the first people expected to tighten their belts should be the people who spent eight years running the business — not the people whose hardware kept the network alive.

7

Even if one discovers it…There is still no “Buy” button on landing page. You have to go through “Start Free Trial” or “Contact Sales”. :joy:

8

Now we have this button. It’s called “Object Mount”. You click it, download the app, create credentials, put them to the app and done. You have your bucket(s) as a local drive.

9

There is absolutely nothing basic about it whatsoever.

10

Great. I know about Object Mount.

The problem is that at this point it feels like medicine for a corpse.

For eight years Storj did not have the most basic thing an ordinary customer could expect: a simple way to mount the storage as a local drive. Eight years.

And now, finally, the button exists — after much of the damage has already been done.

I earned around 60,000 STORJ as a node operator. At one point that actually looked like something with meaningful value. Today, to me, it feels almost like worthless junk.

So yes, I’m genuinely happy that after eight years we finally have an Object Mount button.

It’s just a shame that someone didn’t think to press the much more important button — “make the product easy for customers to use” — about seven years earlier.

11

Whenever I see “Contact Sales” instead of a clear price and a purchase button, I usually just close the page. It immediately gives me the feeling that two guys at a railway station are about to approach me and quietly offer me some “very profitable gold.”

I came here to buy cloud storage, not negotiate the procurement of a nuclear reactor.

Show me the price.
Give me a Buy button.
Take my card.
Give me access.

Done.

And somehow Storj spent years putting extra barriers in front of even the customers who had already shown up with money in their hands.

12

Some projects could use Storj.

Signal app for example pays to AWS 1.3 million per year in storage.

Maybe a special deal for linux/bsd distros, university startups?

Here is the other problem, Storj kind of has a dropbox like app, just maybe not has convenient or marketed, and I don’t know how in Europe the GDPR is actually permissive of Storj “public” network (I don’t think it is).

Storj is competing with hyperscalers, trying to do the same or better, with lower operating cost, unfortunately programmers today are convenience feed, they use stuff like Supabase, Heroku, it’s a hustle mentality, maybe that does not help?!

Storj made a deal with TrueNas and that was amazing, but if I had to grab more customers, I would also go for Synology, Terramaster, etc, maybe you did and didn’t work out.

Anyway, some things look like it was missmanaged, I go all the time on LinkedIn, I get Zero publicity from something like Storj, X(twitter), Facebook, same thing, not even on Golang, PHP, or sysadmin groups…

But the serious question is how much payed data would Storj need to keep running?

13

Already suggested that on another thread, the issue would be Storj could lower RS.
I don’t think it’s an issue, it’s just trying to be competitive, SNOs would loose a bit of money.

14

Storj is GDPR compatible, also SOC2 Type II/ISO 27001 (but it will be a Select).

As far as I can see, the “Contact Sales” button is on the Advanced pricing (it’s exactly for the case when they need a contract and/or certificates/papers required for SOC2/GDPR/etc.).
It also for the customers, who want a license of Object Mount for their existing S3 provider. Because for the Storj account they got 2 free licenses automatically.

We never tried to attract consumers, it’s a completely separate market, requires a separate company. This market has a very low margin and a lot of burdens, like support costs, chargebacks, not payments, card thefts who use you for testing stolen cards, etc. This market can be slow taken only when the company has enough profit to eat costs of supporting consumers. We are not even close. We even tried to increase a minimum monthly billing to get more profitable customers, not consumers with low or a negative profit.

So, this is not a basic requirement. Did you see a basic mount for AWS S3? No, you will use a third party tools like rclone with rclone mount command or Mountain Duck.
The Object Mount software is a result of acquiring PetaGene, thus it’s appeared only recently. And during the alpha and beta phases it was available only for the contractual customers.

15

I just signed back up to Storj to check things out again. I’ll probably run some tests with HashBackup too, to see how performance has changed since I was here about 5 years ago. I currently store my own backups, about 50GB, on B2.

Here’s my initial impression:

  • the signup process for the free trial was very easy. I got to the point of creating a project and there was a pricing link so I checked that out before continuing
  • Storj egress is $7/TB, B2 is $10/TB but B2 has a 3x storage free allowance each month
  • Storj charges a minimum object size of 50K, B2 charges by the byte
  • Storj charges a minimum duration of 30 days, B2 does not
  • Storj charges a minimum of $5/mo, B2 does not. Backblaze adds fees to my account every month (about 28 cents) and only bills when the fees exceed some threshold, I think 50 cents.
  • Storj has a 30 day free trial with a 25GB limit, B2 gives every account, including free trials, a 10GB storage credit each month, or at least it used to work that way; they’ve changed their site a lot and I couldn’t find this anywhere so it may be different now. Storj forces a yes/no decision in 30 days, B2 doesn’t.

I’ll continue because I want to test performance, but honestly, I don’t know why any customer comparing B2 and Storj would pick Storj given the above. At the very least, the logical thing to do would be to try B2 first and if you don’t run into any problems, stay with B2.

16

If you need just one reason: Backblaze mismanages user data and returns garbage to customers. They have no guardrails in place. They don’t have competent QA. They are overhyped shit. (oh, you are crapping on a company on the competitors forum? Yes. yes I do. Not only here. I shit on them at every outpost. Because they deserve it.)

Storj – never returned bad data, nor lost any data. They also don’t do all the other bullshit back blaze allowed to happen.

That’s pretty much the main reason. Others (such as blatant lies about e2e encryption and company funding and complete disregard of customer data in their “backup” applications) you can read here Data Cleanup Plan - Update - #64 by arrogantrabbit.

All you listed nitpicks – minimum retention (who cares for backup) or min object sizes (you are supposed to pack data), some allowances (!?) are petty differences that only matter in the race to the bottom. They are there in place to steer the usage that is more appropriate for the service. Storj is very good at large segments – so the pricing is there to provide right incentives.

Ultimately, Storj is not a cheap provider. It may look like one, because of garbage marketing efforts in the past. It provides what others cannot. And if you compare Backblazes S3 with Storj S3 – both will be equally shittty. Because they are bolted on adapters that remove all advantages of underlying services.

This is a positive actually. If customer cannot make up their mind in a month and cannot pay a few cents 25GB – that’s not a very valuable customer. Serious customers prepay and upload two terabytes and download ten. Not fiddle with 10GB of data for the whole month.

Does hashbackup support native uplink? If not, you will be comparing performance of free S3 gateway instead of a service.

But for backup performance is irrelevant, so I guess S3 may be enough for most users.

Most importantly, for backup you want data durability. In this domain – one strike – you are out. Backblaze is out. SO your question is moot.

And lastly, storj does not target end users. B2 too has separate (absolutely abhorrent) product that does, B2 is still aimed at developers.

17

Had been suggested:

Had been suggested:

Marketing and Sales were not existent. According to the court docs they started in December 2025 to grow the sales team. But

This initiative failed to generate revenues fast enough.

They switched direction of their product several times in the past: From enterprises to consumers, to devs to enterprises to high performance use cases. But in general it looks like they fell for the same mistake that a lot of tech start ups do: The want to make their product perfect and shiny and believe that when it is done customers will see its beauty and switch to them almost automatically because it is so much better.
But this is not how it works.
And for that to work you need USPs customers really want.
And history has proven that some core feaures of the product were not the selling point and not appealing to customers at all like the self managed encryption.
But at the end it is no wonder: Storj never was able to attract customers at large because they never understood what customer really require. And if that happends then you develop features and product offerings that the customers you want to target don’t really need. And then you are left with a product that you cannot market.

According to he court docs they are cash flow negative with around $120K deficit per month. This with just a base company without sales, CEO and whatever.
So if you put that in perspective a customer pays $7TB for storage which is around $3.7 net for Storj, that means they need very roughly +~30PB on the network even less, maybe around 25-28PB, if you add a little revenue from egress.

With a good sales team this sounds absolutely doable. But without a sales team… well the DIP financing is for 12 weeks. After that it is $120K deficit per month. A gap that cannot be closed by the company in it current state.

18

SNOs can close it if working for free. :wink:

19

Unlikely, but temporary reducing this cost can help to survive and don’t repeat mistakes in the future.

20

Storj could offer to pay SNOs with company shares until profitability is reached. This is not free but zero costs now.