Episode Summary
During this episode of Tech Qualified, Tristan Pelligrino and Justin Brown chat with the Vice President of Marketing at Backblaze, Ahin Thomas. The interview focuses on Ahin’s past experience, Backblaze’s highly effective inbound engine, and how the company competes with their competitors. Backblaze’s mission is to make backup software elegant and provide complete peace of mind to SMB storage requirements.
Episode Highlights
- Ahin provides some highlights on his past work experience which included his role as a director in the E-commerce industry.
- Ahin discusses the company’s ideal customer profile which includes SMBs (SysAdmins, CTOs or the people running the storage infrastructure at a company).
- Ahin pinpoints that Backblaze’s storage solutions are more affordable than their competitors who are Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
- Ahin talks about their affordable pricing – a quarter of the price of Amazon’s storage costs and 1/9th the price of Amazon’s downloading costs.
- Backblaze’s pricing table is a single line, with no fine print. This is a stark contrast to other competitors, with confusing price structures for the SMB marketplace.
- Backblaze is a bootstrapped organization, with growth resulting from only $3 million in invested capital.
- The organization believes that their storage server is the first ever open-sourced hardware project.
- Ahin pinpoints the unique value proposition of Backblaze – that they are simple, reliable and just less expensive than anyone else.
- Ahin is proud of the company’s success rate which has been growing at 40% year over year in the last two years.
- Ahin talks about the uniques for their content posted on their blog…which is focused on storage (recent numbers hit more than 3.25 million views) and aims to simply provide content that’s useful.
- Backblaze’s quarterly hard drive stats report has been an effective “content franchise” for over five years.
- A majority of Backblaze’s customers come to the organization because they have a fundamental problem with their workflows.
- Ahin says that Backblaze has over an Exabyte of stored customer data- placing it in the top 10 or 15 companies in the world (based on the amount of data stored)
- Ahin pinpoints how the actual customer milestones are a big deal to achieve and how Backblaze easily achieves it.
- Ahin says that listening to podcasts while commuting generates a lot of ideas for his work and keeps him up to speed with B2B tech marketing.
Key Points
- At Backblaze, we have been growing at 40% year over year in the last two years…entirely from our inbound efforts.
- All five founders of Backblaze are still in their operating roles as the company competes with large organizations such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft.
- Backblaze’s storage-focused blog received a little over 3.25 million unique page views – with zero of that traffic coming from paid efforts.
- Backblaze is the largest single publisher of drive performance statistics on the planet.
Resources
- Ahin Thomas: LinkedIn
- Backblaze: Website
- Cloudberry: Website
- Motion: Ultimate Thought Leadership Course for B2B Tech Companies
