Let’s put this on the stress or a bad day but, seriously this explanation was absolutely not at the advantage of your project. He can be a scammer or a real nice person with lefty business practices, and all variations of this … you’re not supposed to disclose randomly the profile of your users at the first “drama-bait”. Don’t forget that it’s not a personal conversation, you’re identified as an entity.
The comparison is biased imho. I prefer to pay 5 digits on a qualified media with qualified audience (show, podcast, magazine… whatever), than 3 digits on an jungle of competitors with all kind of price’s range. You can’t seriously talk about advertising. It’s more a presence, and to be “useful to be seen there” you have to be already known by the mass. Like you logo on a football shirt. If no one know your brand, it’s pointless for the conversion.
This specific ecosystem is more complex. Little breeders are generally acting like a bank, it’s a loan-in-stock to the retailers without interests rates for the said bank. I pass on big players, it’s a hot topic. This 40% is arbitrary. The breeder/seedbank set the retail price, and also the wholesale/B2B price.
Now using a platform like Strainly is being a “one man army” in an unregulated niche. Strainly is not responsible of what is going on in term of products, you can’t say “sorry buddy, i’m unable to sell you for X or Y reason” like a retailer or a wholesaler. You can moderate the abuses, that’s all.
So, yeah. Having a complete firewall for all the retailing headache is something, and it simplify a lot the time you have to spend to increase your perceived valor.
It’s where the problematic of fees/bitcoin enter in game. It’s not an insult at all or a negative opinion, but my vision of strainly is more close to craiglist than anything else for now. At one point, it’s hard to figure out the limit between direct sales and the use of the platform because the job is the same.