sounds reasonable to me 
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Hi there,
Speaking of clones⌠the average clone goes for above $150 on Strainly. Many go for a lot more. Clone sellers make thousands each month, for a $99 fee + commission. It does seem fair to take such a fee for allowing people to make a living.
Close to $100k has been invested into the platform over the past 8 months only. I do not make a living off of the platform. I have been doing a second shift without paying myself for 7 years.
Thereâs a good number of people making a living off their Strainly sales and I do not feel bad for charging for the service, after 7 years of commitment providing it for almost free.
The vetting goes like this:
- you need 3 positive reviews from other verified vendors to start posting
- you need to pay a monthly fee to offer clones (which discourages a good chunk of scammers)
- you lose your verification if going under 90% positive ratings
- you are banned if going under 70% positive ratings
You certainly know that pathogens are everywhere, including in clones sold by dispensaries⌠this is not an issue specific to Strainly. Some clone vendors have lost there verifications over this. Look at reviews to procure from the right sources.
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Could you please provide specific examples?
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I think an extremely low number of sellers are actually making a living on strainly. Using them as an example for everyone is misleading. For most people itâs a side hustle at best. I think now is the time to ask yourself why did you spend so much time and money on Strainly? Is it for the love of the plant and the passion to spread genetics around the world? Or an investment in the cannabis industry that youâre expecting to pay off someday? If itâs the first reason you will make tons of money and the whole community will support you. If we suspect the second reason then good luck staying in business. Us growers have been taken advantage of by everyone for as long as I can remember. If you really want to help us then make it cheaper and easier to buy and sell on Strainly. You need more listings and more traffic then you make your cut on volume. Squeezing your existing customers for more cash isnât the way to go.
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Thank for your feedback.
âYou need more listings and more trafficâ. Who pays for the advertising? Do you know how much it costs to advertise in this industry? You know why you never saw any ad for Strainly? I invested everything into the features members asked for. Not in fame. I did not even advertise on here. All users are welcome to bring all their friends to help the community. There is a feature for that and when you do, your listings get bumped for free.
Members who do this as a side hustle make money and i donât feel bad for taking a small fee for the provided service that allows them to make money. I havenât seen anyone giving away free packs to help the community. Meanwhile I still work 9-5. I have been doing that second Strainly shift for 7 years without taking a single day off, coming back from work at night, or during weekend mornings and reviewing / approving 300 new pending listings, or more, to make sure only quality listings are posted⌠precisely âfor the love of the plant and the passion to spread genetics around the worldâ. And if I couldnât go through all the pending listings, I get emails in the morning from people asking âWHY TF are my listings not approved already?â. Iâve worked a second full-time shift on Strainly, without paying myself, and tapping into my 9-5 salary. I hope it put things in perspective(?).
7 years doing this and I can tell you 100% the community does not give a s%$t and I will never make a ton of money out of this. I had a donation button for 1 year. Every time someone was making sale, they were prompted to make a donation of whatever amount they wanted. I received 8 donations totalling $40+ in an entire year, while thousands of sales were being made. People see value in things when they are charged for it. Sad truth Iâve learned first hand. If money was my motivation, I would have shut it down 3 years ago when this thread was started. Magic thinking âdo good and money will fall from the skyâ does not work in the real world. I turned down money from investors to stay true to the original vision I had. If I had accepted, the fee would be 15%+, not 7%. For various reasons I can no longer afford to do all the sacrifices I did over the years.
If 7% is squeezing for cash⌠perhaps there is a number of growing expenses you need to look into. Whatâs the margin on fertilizers? Whatâs the margin on seeds? clones?
In conclusion, Strainly has to be a real business to be sustainable, where people pay for the value they get out of it, or it will shut down like anything that does not bring enough value to enough people. I have yet to meet the philanthropist who will fund it âfor the love of the plant and the passion to spread genetics around the worldâ. 
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I donât know shit about business, and I donât use Strainly myself, but you deserve to take a cut off every transaction for sure, like Ebay or Amazon.
Any reasonable person would understand that, so anyone complaining is probably an unreasonable person⌠so you can dismiss the comment as just a frustrated hustler who has no real contribution to the seed game.
Idk if youâre familiar with icmag, but their seedboutique/seedbay has had a consistent community of quality seedmakers donating to pay for the site/server for at least a decade. May not work for you, but it is proof there are philanthropic seed people out there, maybe you just havenât attracted/motivated them properly yet
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I think you are pretty spot on. I think offering Strainly mostly for free for so long set the wrong expectations and perhaps attracted more free riders than ICMAG.
To be fully transparent, so far, the vast majority of users are cool with the changes and the few loud up-in-arms people had mostly taken for granted it should remain a charity until there is no blood left to be sucked out. Most members are quite reasonable though.
I appreciate the positive words. THANK YOU
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Icmag is niche: small, tight community of 90% very passionate, dedicated people, but very low volume, probably literally 1/50 of current OG. Thatâs quite the tradeoff.
So places like here or Strainly are super popular, names you actually hear said on the streets, IRL, which obviously comes with the âproâ of endless potential, but the âconâ of a higher percentage of riff-raff, casuals/weekend warriors, and unscrupulous hustlers.
Stating the obvious maybe: but, being that widely known means youâre doing something right, even if it comes with the cost of dragging in shitty Instagram scammers, whiners, and such. You have quite a lot of potential/power if you can continue to leverage it! Sounds like itâs been stressful but keep up the good fight my dude
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THANK YOU SO MUCH.
I had no idea Strainly was âthat popularâ (all things into perspective) to be fully honest.
You are not stating the obvious. I think this it just spot on. It is hard and takes a long time to do things right. And we are all humans. I donât have super powers. Thanks again for the kind words.
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Dude you tried to do some weird bitcoin tax on every transaction then you totally backtracked. Now youâre saying itâs not making enough money to survive but youâre totally jealous of the people making more money than you on your own website. Iâm sorry but this is hard to take seriously. If growing clones is so freaking easy and you can just do that to survive why havenât you figured out how to do it yourself? You know why? Because if freaking hard to do. Growers deserve every penny they get.
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Well perhaps not on Strainly but I have personally given out thousands of packs of seeds for free to help the community. Also hundreds of packs of pollen so people can make their own seeds Itâs pretty common on OG.
Nor should you. You provide a platform where people can make some money, seems like common sense to take a small fee to keep the lights on. I personally see zero issues with that. 
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Did not backtrack at all. Still taking a 7% fee (discounted to 6% for the first month) on transactions.
What you seem to be confused about is all payment methods are allowed. Bitcoin is not a mandatory payment method between parties.
I think you are assuming a lot about my growing skills (or lack thereof). I will only say that running a platform like Strainly takes me a lot more time and gives a lot more headaches and sleepless nights than when I could afford the time to germinate, grow and clone.
Once again, I believe Strainly helps breeders and growers to get more pennies they deserve and I donât feel bad for charging the service allowing them to increase the revenue from their hard work. If they can make more from what they love doing and Strainly empowers themâŚ
As stated above, the most committed and serious guys have mostly welcomed those changes⌠you know why? because they know it will filter out the fly-by-night grifters.
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Blockquote
Well perhaps not on Strainly but I have personally given out thousands of packs of seeds for free to help the community. Also hundreds of packs of pollen so people can make their own seeds
RESPECT for doing that. Fun (sad?) fact, when I was still very naive, there was a âgive awayâ section on Strainly, in the spirit of what you did. Probably less than 10 actual give aways occurred. The section was full of fake give aways by people seeking attention. Those give aways were coming with conditions to buy x, do yâŚ
Had to shut this section down 
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Thatâs unfortunate but understandable. Wherever there is generosity, there will be those trying to take advantage of it. Itâs just one of the realities of life. I remember when I did my first Veterans giveaway and had some make multiple sock accounts to try and rip off the giveaway. Thankfully we have a great MOD team here that got them before they did any damage. I mean really, who steals from veterans. Special place in hell for such folks.
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As a producer of products that your site brokers what reason do I have to work with you instead of someone else? If youâre going to charge a lot for the service then I would expect something in return. Like maybe advertising for instance. I would like you to go on forums, podcasts, social networks etc. Get on the cover of high times whatever just it out there. You could even charge 10 percent if that increased sales noticeably. Itâs not always the price, sometimes itâs the value. It seems like just using reviews as a way to screen sellers is being a bit lazy. I would want a real person to be paying close attention.
What other seed selling site do you know of with a user base the size of Strainly?
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There is no question that they are the biggest. The other options are more spread out over different platforms. But thereâs not enough traffic on strainly right now to justify the prices. Even if you buy the premium package or whatever. Maybe if you have the expensive rare cuts itâs worth it but for everyone else itâs too much. Especially for the seed sellers. We make our money on volume.
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I donât think that is anything to brag about. Have you ever did any browsing at the clone section ? Quantity doesnât equal quality
What is the buyer protection you spoke of? Thanks and ty for explaining how strainly works always have been curious 
Gotcha. I donât use it/follow the story that closely, but Iâve never heard of any significant competitor. Definitely sounds like they have some things to improve on, but the internet is a-changing, a lot of places are struggling with the balance between moderation/cost and users.
You could always advertise yourself. Not all platforms will advertise/advertise for vendors
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