I read today and one thought definitely haunts me, this is the transition for ordinary users to USDT.
Personally, I am an operator and I have a lot of free space, I have knowledge and equipment, but I pay for the Google cloud, I pay for the iCloud, for the asus cloud… Why? Everything is simple, they have an application and a simple payment method - this is exactly what you need to attract users.
The corporate sector can use the token, receive discounts and bonuses, but even they need to transparently see and understand how much money they will spend. Alas, the token floats in price and only developers benefit from having a token, but ordinary users will definitely not use it.
On the other hand, you can cooperate with the TON network or with Binance and it will be convenient for users on their payment platform.
Guys, as I said, I stay with you because I contacted your support service and I liked the live communication, also thanks for your revelation. But now is the time to make a radical decision and act, and we operators will support you.
Hi, i’m with Storj. I have 20 nodes for a total 80TB of which 50 TB filled. I’m a SNO from 2020 and I support the “cause” also because I’m a customer and I upload my VM and Docker backups in Storj. Please find a method to always stay active. I also use the Photos+ android app to upload my photos from both my and my wife’s smartphones. Help us stay with you and we’ll help you stay up.
Thanks
price doesn’t matter, when you pay with STORJ they converted to USD +10% on your balance. Tokens just a convenient pay method, not investment or similar. The alternative payment method is CC, but no bonus.
We do not participate in any trade or market activity related to any tokens, it’s not our goal.
Burn rate of the Storj reserves. The lower the token goes the faster Storj will burn their reserves.
Having a viable amount of Storj to cash out with regards to fees. As a small SNO you could end up having to hold your Storj payments for a long time before cashing out - as was the case when ETH fees were sky high. Particularly as I have no interest in zksync still given the large amount of unknowns there still. So the 10% bonus there from Storj doesn’t apply to me. Might that change when zksync 2.0 goes fully live? Sure. But lets say zksync has not lived up to the hype surrounding it just yet.
I refer to the sentence about customers who want to pay with tokens, not about SNO.
Because for SNO it could matter, depending on used strategy. And I wouldn’t start this discussion here again, everything already discussed. You may convert them right away as soon as you received them, then likely you would get the same amount of earned USD except fees (either to miners or to the exchange or both, again, depends), or you may wait, or opt-in for zkSync or do not, it’s up on you.
no, this is applied to the payments from customers. For SNO the 10% bonus is exist only for zkSync.
Please keep in mind that Storj is not a consumer product. There are some features implemented like the web client to upload files to make it easy to see the capabilities, but the target group are not consumers.
Storj is not Google, Apple or Dropbox, they don’t have 100 developers to throw at a problem and a nice easy to use app will appear. They look to other developers or businesses, who are interested to build apps on top of storj infrastructure.
You see how much effort goes into developing the storj software itself. Do you believe they can just simply pull out a photo app or dropbox app from their sleeve?
I see that their business model has already led to the fact that they are going to reduce payments to miners due to the unprofitability of the network. This is enough to review the positioning of the product and adjust the roadmap.
Uber also initially subsidized drivers, but in order to knock out competitors and capture the market. As soon as this was achieved, they became monopolists and raised prices. This is business, this is a common tactic.
Storj has a completely different problem - the market does not perceive them as a commercial project, and there are reasons for this. And if nothing is done in this direction, the network will collapse like a house of cards. I have already written that data storage networks do not represent anything new, this technology has been around for 15 years, if not more. No one has been able to succeed here, because people don’t care about decentralization - they need a service, SPA, low prices, bonuses, mobile applications, a package of documents, etc.
That’s your believe. Where is your evidence for this? SNOs are not miners.
Storj is targeting large businesses. Those who could save 100k$ in monthly S3 fees, but large companies also move slowly. These savings can sway some company to invest some time in figuring out if storj is legit for their use case.
What you are proposing is developing photo and dropbox apps. Do you think someone will move their data from dropbox premium for saving 2$/month if storj would offer a dropbox like app? How many people could be convinced to switch?
How long would it take for storj flip their business model by 180 degrees? Can you expect customers storming through the doors then? How many customers would you need? 10000 customers á 2 TB at 8$/month that makes potentially 80k$/month and 20k TB. That’s nice, but with storj you pay what you use, so those amounts will be less.
I believe these apps won’t do much for storj. Someone could build a nice business with that, but that won’t save storj. Also, nobody want’s to deal with consumers. Consumers have consumer problems, better deal with businesses. They are easier to handle and hold much more data.
What do you think is easier? Convincing 10000 consumers to use storj or one business?
All these questions should be answered by a professional marketer with a high salary and experience in IT startups. I am not one, although I have been associated with IT marketing for a long time.
I have enough of my own experience to see the prospects of projects like STORJ, and I am well aware that I am unlikely to be able to convince developers of my vision.
If sales managers can sell a large company in need of S3 storage, a way to store data “on housewives’ refrigerators” and on Raspberry Pi under the sofa, then I can only applaud them.
That’s a good one. I would also applaud them, but it doesn’t reflect the reality. It’s a little bit over simplified.
For detailed planning yes, but anyone can throw around ball park numbers and see if something is realistic. You where throwing around arguments about which direction storj should go. You should also have an idea what they would gain from that. Since you have experience in that area, you can easily come up with some numbers that would strengthen your claim.
If not then maybe we can think about this question:
I have already expressed my idea, it is simple: go and hire the most expensive marketing specialist with a good portfolio and recommendations. I analyze cryptocurrency startups a lot - almost all of them suffer from a lack of marketing. Here, this issue should come first.
I would even say that if you do not take exit-scam and hacking by hackers, then 99.9% of very promising cryptocurrency projects fall apart due to poor marketing.
This has a lot to do with it, but actually from what I’m seeing from working with some of them is that many projects are failing primarily due to the poor management of funds in combination with not having a marketable product or means of generating any meaningful profit. Many projects are simply surviving off reserves from initial investments which are often dependent on market conditions, or continued funding by other means. This is why so many companies go under when the markets swing so low. Many people involved with crypto startups are young. Although many are very smart and skilled in their particular fields, they often lack the knowledge and skills required to run a successful business, manage money etc. There are plenty of examples of failed projects where this is the case. I’m not claiming this is the case for Storj, just speaking generally.
However, in the case of Storj I still don’t understand how they plan to make money… even after reducing node payouts. This is still a mystery to me, and since nobody can seem to answer I assume it’s a mystery accross the board. I have to assume they have some sort of plan, but what? Let’s say payouts get reduced to match what customers pay, which will be more than a 30% cut, that still doesn’t leave room for Storj to profit.
This same conversation is happening in 2 separate threads where I’ve probably already wrote to much about this.
Very frequently I see suggestions about Storj doing something with marketing. We actually have a very competent sales and marketing team. You’ll find some details on our Twitter announcements page, Youtube, and our blog postings. We also attend trade shows, are in interviews, and there are articles written (Such as the recent Tech Crunch article). We are in many of the places business expects to find us in.
But many business contacts and deals are not discussed publicly. If we have a partnership like we recently announced with ixsystems (TrueNas) you’ll hear about it. But in terms of a company signing on with Storj and using the product for their data needs, you will not unless that customer wants to make it known.
As previously mentioned, business deals may take a while to develop. It is not unusual for deals to take months or sometimes years to kick off. Execution of the deal can take even longer. Of course, some business customers are nimble and can start right away. It varies.
These adjustment to the Storj payout model has nothing to do with Storj not having customers. We have many, and are adding new ones all the time. It’s about having a sustainable model. Paying SNO’s more than we take in is not sustainable. And yes, I understand the arguments about charging more, or charging for value added services instead, as well as cutting costs by trimming things like the free tier, etc. Some of these things may or may not happen. At the end of the day though, we have to adjust the numbers so that Storj Labs earns money and isn’t just giving it all away. Or it won’t matter how many new customers we sign.
It isn’t doom and gloom. The business is doing well as a start up operation. We are on the right trajectory. These adjustments are necessary if we want the company to continue to grow and be here for a long time. It’s nice that the executives have the foresight to adjust these numbers now when we have a long runway ahead of us. It means they are thinking of the future and how to get there in a workable business model, and they are doing it transparently with plenty of discussion and notice to those impacted. This is a good company that tries very hard to be fair. I applaud them for their efforts.
Which aren’t usually the same places node operators (often individuals) are in. But for what it’s worth, I’ve seen Storj ads in several different places as well.
But yeah, growth is not something I’m worried about if the curve for data usage looks like this…
No, my friend, you are confusing PR and marketing. The task of a marketer is to study the needs of the market and form a product development strategy to attract more customers and increase the market. And just the PR department is engaged in all sorts of interviews, publications and speeches.
To clarify, we have a fully dedicated marketing team, as well as a teams specifically dedicated to sales and PR/social media. Each is headed by highly qualified leadership with years of professional experience.
As mentioned before, marketing efforts are not targeted at end users but enterprise customers. So it is not unexpected that you may not be aware of all the effort Storj puts into marketing and generating sales leads and closing contracts.
Thanks to our marketing and sales teams, you are seeing the kind of growth shown in the graph posted by @BrightSilence above, and we are on track for accelerating this growth during 2023.
To echo what the other Leaders and Storjlings have said, there are enormous efforts being made in both Marketing and PR, much of which is not specifically targeted where the node operators are.
The team is at Eth Denver right now as we have this conversation.
If you want to see past items and what is upcoming you may want to check our Events, Webinars and Blog pages
That’s a good one. I would also applaud them, but it doesn’t reflect the reality. It’s a little bit over simplified.
