TL;DR

• Having 20,000 actively used Saga phones in the world, each with a tagged wallet address, means the process can now look like this:

  1. Take the money you’d usually spend on acquiring a new customer.

  2. Give that money to the customer in the form of crypto tokens, once they’ve signed up/started using your product.

• No more Terms of Service violations, no more banned ad accounts, no more middle men. Just a direct, mutually beneficial relationship between you and your users.

Full Story

If you missed what happened with the Solana Saga phone over the holiday break, here’s a quick recap:

20,000 Saga phones were made → less than 1,000 were able to be sold → the price was lowered from $1k to $499…

This price drop then meant the free $BONK tokens that came with the phone essentially made it a free purchase.

Once that arbitrage was figured out, Saga phones sold out within days, and quickly started selling on eBay for $5k+.

And because of that, Solana Mobile has unveiled a cheaper $450 successor to the Saga, which is expected to ship in the first half of 2025.

The weird thing is, the Saga is (apparently) a pretty lackluster phone.

Which made it easy for us to frame its success as a hype fueled stroke of luck (which it was).

But! The Solana Saga phone, and products like it, are WAY more important than they first appear.

Here’s why…

If you want to create and launch a crypto product, the marketing side of things can get pretty grim.

As it stands today, your options are:

1. Try to launch Google ads, before learning crypto ads aren’t allowed on the platform.

2. Try to launch Facebook/Instagram ads, before learning crypto ads aren’t allowed on the platform.

3. Try launching ads on the hellscape that is X/Twitter’s ad platform, before learning that getting folks to purchase anything from a Twitter ad, is like drawing blood from a stone.

4. Advertise through crypto news publications (hi 👋) which can be effective, but is much more of a manual/relationship-based process.

Having 20,000 actively used Saga phones in the world, each with a tagged wallet address, means the process can now look like this:

1. Take the money you’d usually spend on acquiring a new customer.

2. Give that money to the customer in the form of crypto tokens, once they’ve signed up/started using your product.

No more Terms of Service violations, no more banned ad accounts, no more middle men.

Just a direct, mutually beneficial relationship between you and your users.

(Helluva concept!)