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Backblaze IPO
101–110 of 300 posts
Re: Backblaze IPO
#102It seems there's a lot of criticism here about Backblaze - about how other services do it better, etc.
I'm a current Backblaze customer, not a data hoarder, etc. If you're not using Backblaze to back up your data, what are you using? Backblaze is great for me cause all I want it to do is back up my docs, files, etc. and there's very little maintenance I have to do. Is there something out there that does it better?
Re: Backblaze IPO
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're confident, short it. Make some money.
Somebody once told me the world is gonna roll me. They also said the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
take out small medium-term, out of the money puts. Be ready to lose it all. Since you are taking a Jem'hadar-level stance on your money (your money is dead, if you are victorious, your money comes back to life), you do not have to worry about solvency.
Re: Backblaze IPO
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the hope is that 420,000 of those users are Grandmas who installed backblaze because their son told them it's a good idea to make sure she doesn't lose all her important documents, and she's backing up a couple PDFs. And then the other 10,000 are data hoarders like me with Terabytes of data. I used to be a Crashplan customer - tried them and Backblaze, and liked Crashplan more. They eventually pivoted to Busi…
> They said "yeah, we lose a ton of money on every user like you." Such an interesting statement. It's like they really think they can get away with offering "unlimited" storage without people taking full advantage of it. Like ISPs with their "unlimited" plans, they market that stuff and then they get mad if you actually saturate their link 24/7. I actually emailed backblaze about this years ago. I asked them if they…
> It's like they really think they can get away with offering "unlimited" storage without people taking full advantage of it.
I didn't sense that they were bitter about it. But in both cases I do have some sympathy for the business.
There is "unlimited" in the sense of what a regular average p50 user would consider reasonable ("every photo i've ever taken with my cellphone of my grandchild")
Then there is "unlimited" for a professional p99 user("Every RAW file of every photo i've ever taken as a professional photographer")
And then there is "unlimited" for a data hoarder p99.99 user ("Every movie i've ever torrented in 4k, plus multiple seasons of every TV show ever made")
As a business you design your model to attract to the p50 customer so that Grandma doesn't have to worry about deleting photos, taking things too far, and losing something important. Unlimited is powerful here. The hope is that the p99 use case gets offset by the person who's paying for the service but barely using it.
The p99.99 user? They're just a pain in the butt. You can't chase them away without also chasing away grandma (You can't say "Data cap of 1TB" - people have no idea how much data anything uses).
So of course you tolerate them. But ultimately? They're the reason you go out of business. They're the reason Crashplan switched to B2B, and why Backblaze isn't making any money. Can't feel good.
Re: Backblaze IPO
#105Re: Backblaze IPO
#106> We have a history of cumulative losses, and we do not expect to be profitable for the foreseeable future. Fundamentals seem solid, gotta get me some of those shares!
EDIT: I’m going to retract this comment for the time being. I think it doesn’t give justice to the complexity of an S-1 and I want to revisit this in the future to add more color. I don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea or take this the wrong way. Probably a good blog post, one day. :)
Thanks for sharing this insight! I’ve always wondered the same - why did that X startup I worked at choose to stay unprofitable when they could have paused growth for Y months and turned profitable?
Another reason can be - investors are more interested in growth multipliers. X% YoY etc. As long as the potential for profitability exists on paper.
Re: Backblaze IPO
#107Re: Backblaze IPO
#108I find this part interesting - of the ~500,000 customers, 70,000 are B2 customers and 430,000 are "backup" customers ... which are flat-rate "unlimited" users. These flat-rate users are very fickle and price-sensitive. If you peruse subreddits related to cloud storage or online backup, etc., they are filled with very picky users who expect the product to be free - or close to free. It's a fools errand to pursue this…
I have 4 machines backed up at Backblaze, and only the machine I'm currently typing on still exists. It's far less trouble to pay them a few bucks rather than try to consolidate all the stuff. (Which will not fit on this new SSD based laptop, I used to have a Terabyte)
It's data hoarding of a different nature, like the millions of rented physical storage sheds full of stuff that should have been tossed a decade or more ago, but aren't because it's "cheap enough, for now" a decade ago, then inertia.
Re: Backblaze IPO
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're confident, short it. Make some money.
Shorting it isn't a bet they'll fail. It's actually a bet they'll fail and the market will realize it, and in that time the value wont value the company higher to liquidate your position. See Gamestop for an example! It's also a bet that they will fail quick enough to make this the best opportunity for your money.
Its also a bet the company wont do a secondary offering at the higher share price and recapitalize, completely changing the fundamental analysis
Re: Backblaze IPO
#110I pay BackBlaze $7/mo to store 10TB. I feel bad about it, because they definitely don't make any money off me, and I imagine that's true for a lot of their top 5% users.