If they can keep showing exponential growth, they will have the opportunity to attract investors as well. Token reserves aren’t the only way to get a runway.
I used to use a now defunct service called Symform, which had a really simple business model. You share 2TB of space, you get 1TB of storage. The clever part of that is that people always share the entire storage space before using the full 1TB themselves. With a little tweaking of the RS settings, Storj could get the expansion factor down to 2x (lower when segment availability drops towards repair threshold) and basically pocket the extra storage space for paying customers.
You’d have to do some checks to balance egress use as well. But this could be provided as a single package to run on NAS systems for example. With minimal setup. You could get large amounts of extra storage space by simply offering free storage to NAS users. And all extra space provided could be used to serve paying customers and Storj could pocket all that income.
These NAS users will usually be low egress users (mostly backups), while they can provide decent egress traffic. So Storj could also make money on the egress balance potentially. And it would be quite reasonable to limit these kinds of users to at most 100% egress of stored data per month to ensure this balance doesn’t get out of whack.
It would also allow Storj to get rid of all the complexity and barriers to entry tied to crypto wallets for payments etc. And when choosing a backup provider on a NAS you have a really unique option available to users that would probably attract a lot more customers than “it’s cheaper” because you can market it as “it’s free!”.
STORJ has only one problem the way I see it and thats marketing.
Did you ever see anyone walking into a lamborghini, ferrari, apple store etc etc and ask for a discount? No. You have to market on being greener, secure or whatever but not being cheap. If you do that you need to be cheap forever which will not work as many did the calculations above.
That would be a great analogy if Storj were anything like those big name brands. Sticking with the car analogy, Storj is just like one of the first unknown electric car brands that now needs to prove they are Tesla and not one of the many failed attempts that came before and alongside it. They are asking people to trust something new.
Furthermore, there’s no such thing as luxury data storage. This is a commodity market where you have to compete with incumbents. And there is no way to market over the top luxury because absurd prices simply don’t find customers in this space. In tech, when you introduce something new, you use your runway to gain market share. Über still loses money on every ride. That’s just how it works, you show your worth, get more investors and show your worth some more. That exponential growth curve is exactly what investors are looking for, so I think there will be opportunities like that for them. A solid long term economic models would be the second thing investors look for. So that’s on track too. More customers leads to more trust and a bigger name and that snowball can start rolling fast. It’s a solid product, it’ll get there. But it just needs some time.
I understand this. Tesla doesn’t sell their cars 80% under their competition. Not even their first one. If you offer the same like Amazon AWS dont ask 80% less for it. Instead market it cleverly.
I wouldn’t go there with Elon Musk at the head, haha. Probably… yeah. At the least they demanded unpaid overtime. (also node operators aren’t workers, but suppliers)
And you can point to Amazon, sure that’s an 80% difference. But people WILL also be comparing Storj to backblaze and wasabi. Both of which are only slightly more expensive. And the argument that Storj is better than those holds less water if you don’t have a name yet. So grab that market share first, THEN compete with the services that provide similar quality.
In the mean time… take a look at this page: https://www.capterra.com/backup-software/compare/155180-175835/Backblaze-for-Business-vs-Storj
That’s the kind of site people use to compare these services. Can you tell from that that Storj is better? Similar customer ratings, less features listed. Nothing about performance. People only give Storj a serious look with such comparisons if it’s also cheaper. It’ll get there, but right now, they need to grow market share and convince people.
Your math makes a mistake here, I’ve done this before myself when calculating things. You properly pointed that Storj makes 50k per month, and then stated that this wasn’t enough to cover one developer. That’s because you likely thought of that 50k as yearly income. It is monthly, so the income based on your math would be 600k. Which covers more than one developer and then some.
Also, consider all of this onboarding that is going on with new customers. They are potentially bringing their data into Storj. Some are evaluating, some are fully on boarded, and many are in process of transferring their data into Storj. That takes time when you are dealing with large data sets and narrow bandwidth on their end. Data continues to grow. Revenue will as well.
John stated he wants Exabyte storage availability. This isn’t because the company wants that much empty storage lying around. There is a plan here that we’re going to NEED that much storage, and then some. We are just in a growth phase. If you look where we were a year ago, and where we are now, you can pretty easily see where we are headed. A lot of very smart and dedicated people are working night and day to make Storj great.
The numbers are going to change. We know that. We’ll have to wait and see what the plans are for SNO’s. Revenue though, it is growing. Stay tuned.
Whenever there is talk about payouts on a forum, the tread tends to become huge
I’m on the positive side too. If I didn’t belive in the success of the project, I wouldn’t invested almost 7000$ in it.
I Agree, people will be comparing but not on price… Backblaze is far ahead of Storj on S3 api compatibility, the price isn’t the highest priority. I Agree with the other poster, that cost is a race to the bottom.
S3 is now increasingly the standard for data tier applications, and it’s come about really quickly - That’s a really exciting opportunity for Storj given the estimated throughput and redundancy that can be offered, but…
Storj S3 implementation is fine for basic backups, but it’s missing soooo much of the S3 api specifically versioning, and more on the multi-part that it’s not a simple migration for apps using these features.
Furthermore, the point of my comment was when you compare the backblaze S3 support
to things like this in Storj Github maybe I read wrong, but it reads like S3 API development is shelved, pending individual requirements to implement, they have also dropped out of the roadmap, like the ability for the community to run their own Satellites was under Dev, and now it’s like it’s not happening any time soon.
Please fix the S3 gateway, it will open up more opportunity’s - I understand the technical issue around that, but it has to be addressed at some point ? or not.
You are right. @John has even admitted in one of their Twitter spaces that they had a totally wrong idea about getting customers:
i remember early on we had a a theory that our hypothesis was that it would be hard to find people to contribute capacity but it would be easy to find people who would use the space and we actually had it exactly backwards right it was new technology so people were very reticent to adopt it from using it to store their data perspective but anybody we found it very easy to get people to contribute space
But that has obviously changed we see a lot more effort to attract new customers than before. Still there are tons of things that could be done.
Such sites are very good and helpful, but Storj would need to keep track of them and check if information listed is accurate so they remain informative. Sometimes information is false or outdated.
Another thing is that that there are a lot of articles written or sometimes even partners that spread false information, babbling about blockchain storage which is not only outright wrong, but can also repel potential customers. I would say that at the current state of cryptocurrencies, most serious (enterprise) customers don’t want to have anything to do with blockchain or cryptos.
Here are 2 examples of that. Storj should invest some effort to ensure that information is correct:
Some decentralized storage networks may charge different fees for uploading (ingress) and retrieving (egress) data. For example, Storj charges a fixed price of $7 / TB to upload or download, while Sia costs $0.41 / TB to upload and $2 / TB to download.
That is not what I am talking about. My example was something different. Lets assume I only wanna backup my TrueNAS. I don’t wanna operate as a Node and I don’t wanna be part of a disk space exchange.
If I just backup my TrueNAS, why not use Backblaze instead of STORJ?
You will never be profitable. This is the reason why even STROJ themselves recommends against buying hardware.
100%! That is what I mean when is say ditch the web3 buzzword bingo bs.
yeah, well… knowing the biggest retarded ever (Ellon, who else?), there might have been reduced payments along the way. If not reduced payments, working overtime with severe exposure to covid certainly happened. Not the best example, man… let’s find another one. Maybe not from the US of A?
Not enough. If I backup a medium business, they use around 5TB. That is 60$ per year, which is basically nothing for any company. If I need to reconfigure the S3 endpoint because STORJ goes belly up, the labor costs succeed these savings by far. Even worse would be if the whole system suddenly collapses and I am unable to transfer to another S3 provider.
But don’t get me wrong, I am not arguing, that STORJ has to become way cheaper than Backblaze for me to consider. 20% cheaper is sufficient. I am more concerned with the longevity part of the equation! Because atm STORJ does not stand on a solid foundation. It is all based in VC money and subsidies. I guess that STORJ can become self-sustaining in the future, but that still has to be proven! Because right now, it is not. Until then I consider the chances of survival lower than the competition.
You’ve blown me away with your counter argument… I don’t know what to say…
Anyway, yes, Backblaze is further along in their growth. But no company gets to just skip that phase. And yes, it doesn’t matter what you and I think. I’ve argued several times that Storj has more to prove. This just isn’t the right argument.
Why should it be cheaper than Backblaze at all? Backblaze is cold storage, Storj is hot storage. It should more clearly position itself as such and not try to compete on all markets.
Coldstorage is probably a much bigger market, but hot storage is more profitable. But that is also the issue with the customers. Because they can’t estimate how much they have to pay at the end of the month. That’s why many large companies moved their data from S3 into their own infrastructure.
These customers are gone for Storj, they already manage their own infrastructure, they won’t move. The difficulty is to find those companies which are still using S3 (or comparable), but are hesitant to build into their own infrastructure. Those might happily accept the savings in cost that Storj offers.
CP