Thanks to Dropbox my photo sharing site has the world's best uploader. (1) Since it's an ordinary folder, all photo management software (iPhoto, Aperture, Lightroom, etc.) can export to it without installing a plugin. (2) People can queue up photos to upload while traveling even if they're currently without Internet access. (3) Mobile clients are already built, and people can use the same client either to upload to my site or to send to their desktop for post-processing.
If you're running a site that people upload files to, I highly recommend integrating with Dropbox. They have an API, but I just did it by letting people share a new folder with [email protected] and pulling photos from that folder.
Sounds great for people that already have dropbox, for others that might not work so great. Most savvy computer users understand dropbox, but sometimes (less savvy users) just can't get it to work.
I know it will probably end up being the first $1 billion+ exit for YC but I'm really hoping it's the first IPO. It'd really put an end to the myth that YC startups are "dipshit companies" once and for all (not that Heroku didn't do a decent job of that).
Your comment makes me wonder if Dropbox has an exit strategy. Or if they're going to do like Digg and sit there until the entire industry moves on. With anything cloud-related being big busines right now, Dropbox should quit winners and either sell-out or go public.
> It'd really put an end to the myth that YC startups are "dipshit companies" once and for all.
Of course it won't. Dropbox will just be labeled a fluke and the same rhetoric will continue. The underlying issue is not the lack of 1B exits, but rather a form of animosity or envy depending on how you view it.
Dropbox is the best startup to rise in the last few years. In terms of startups I use that have actually changed the way I use computers in a huge way, it is right up there with Facebook. It is one of the services that I simply could not imagine living without, now that I know it exists.
If you haven't used it, or are still on the free plan, you really should try it out and buy at least 50gb. Stick all your most important files in there, and forget about that annoying thing called "backups".
That's what I've done. And it's amazing having access to all the files from my iPad, iPhone and generally, for those few times I need it, from everywhere through the website. It's made my life a little simpler, that's for sure.
It'd be really interesting to see how many of their users are paying subscribers. Most of the heavy Dropbox users I know do have pro accounts, and for me, it's the best spent SaaS money I've every spent!
I imagine word of mouth has been a big factor for Dropbox. Who here has not at some point sung the holy gospel of Dropbox to someone else? Especially study groups.
Looks like O(n^2) growth to me. If we take month 0 as being in late 2009, then it looks like at month n they have about 19x^2/162-5x/6+2 million subscribers.
Their financials must be incredible. If it costs $2/yr to support a free customer, they must already have 500k paying customers to cover the cost. They could just as easily have 1M paying customers and be wildly profitable.
My guess is they are keeping their financials a massive secret, because if they became public it would invite competition from copycats with a budget for TV ads.
They do have something like 40 employees, so they're spending on the order of $10M/year on salaries + benefits + office + etc.
That said, I get the impression (from how PG talks about them, the fact that they seem to have supported this massive growth in users & employees without more funding, etc) that they are doing very well, and improving quickly.
I don't think a Dropbox competitor that tried TV ads would do well. TV ads fall into two broad categories. First there are those that are trying to build up the brand. For instance, when Charmin runs an ad showing bears cleaning up after implicitly answering an age old question, and touts how Charmin leaves less pieces stuck to your ass than the other leading brands, they are not trying to get you to leap off the couch and rush down to buy Charmin.
Rather, they are trying to get you to remember Charmin and its superior ability to keep your ass free of toilet paper pieces when you are next in the market picking up toilet paper.
The second category of ads are those that want to get you to actually buy as soon as possible. They want you to call ("Operators are standing by!") or go to their website right then.
Let's consider the first category. Do those kind of ads work for a Dropbox competitor? I don't think so. They might make people aware of the category Dropbox is in, and some people will remember subsequently when they are online and maybe go looking for the product. Most likely they will then do a search, and if Dropbox has played its cards right, it is going to have sponsored ads in the search results, hitting on the same selling points that the competitors TV ads were hitting. Dropbox will end up capturing much of the benefits of the competitor's ads raising awareness of the category.
As far as the competitor goes, they will have spent a lot of money on TV ads, and have no clue whatsoever if the ads actually brought them any business. When we were doing TV ads for a software-based service, this was a nightmare. At one point we were doing things like calculating signal propagation from the FCC data on antenna height and power for stations that ran our ads, in order to figure out out zip codes might have seen have them, and then trying to look at statistical anomalies in purchases from those zips compared to zips in similar regions that would not have been able to see the ad, and attributing those to the effects of the ads.
Now let's consider the second category--the ads that try to get you to buy right now. If you've got a big budget, you can run ads at times that you know well in advance. You can have operators standing by. You can track call center response as the ad shows. If you are are really big, you can have a control center that looks like something out of NASA (see the first season of "Pitchmen", and watch how Billy Mays and Anthony Sullivan would monitor the results as a new infomercial rolled out). But unless you've got a really big budget, more likely you are buying your ad time via a system where it isn't determined when your ads will run until fairly late, depending on what other people are bidding for the time. It's a lot like the way search ads are sold--you and the other advertisers have a budget with an agency, and they are deciding how to divvy out their inventory of TV slots.
It's hard to have operators standing by for this, especially since a lot of these slots will be well out of prime time. So you are relying on getting people off the couch to your web site. Dream on.
Personally, I'd be happy if I saw competitors doing TV ads.
Dropbox it's ok, but what I'd really love is a software which does something a bit different: to arrange all the unused space in the hard disks of a LAN as a big virtual folder, with redundancy and all.
Every time I think of the Outlook-and-Word users I have at the office with 500Gb hard disks...
Dropbox worked great for me for quite a while. Then my Keypass password.kdb file got corrupted. This file contained all the passwords to my personal / freelance and office projects. Impossible to retrieve the data. Major PITA. So now I just use it for funny pictures and music but I don't trust it with really important things anymore.
I'm pretty sure dropbox does file versioning, so you should be able to revert to an earlier (uncorrupted) version of your file. Tell me if that works for you, b/c I use dropbox+truecrypt for hosting my super important docs...
This is definitely a service that I have no problem paying for. Whenever people say to me that people will not pay for online services and you have to use ads, I use Dropbox and Netflix as an example now that Netflix's streaming service has really taken over.
I am massive fan of Dropbox and like to see it doing well. I have talked about its virtues on many Quora posts. I have ussually recommended using a Truecrypt volume within the Dropbox folder to guarantee encryption.
Now reading findings like this and the authentication issues exposed in the last few weeks I'm getting quite worried about the security of the whole solution. Going to have to change a lot of my posts to say do not store anything sensitive without Truecrypt: http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2011/04/how-dropbox-sacrifices-u...
Amazing... One thing I would like to point that even though people claim that systems such as Dropbox are "simple" it is really not so simple to implement.
Just ensuring that Windows piece does not mess up your computer (eat all your CPU, bandwidth etc.) is really hard. There are a lot of not-so-sexy work behind the curtains.
BTW, we just started private beta for cloudHQ for Dropbox (http://www.cloudHQ.net/dropbox). Basically this service provides synchronization of Google Docs and Dropbox files and backup of Google Docs to Dropbox. And we have a cool thing that you can edit Dropbox files directly with Google docs (you need to install our Google Chrome extension). We need some beta testers ....
[+] [-] brlewis|15 years ago|reply
If you're running a site that people upload files to, I highly recommend integrating with Dropbox. They have an API, but I just did it by letting people share a new folder with [email protected] and pulling photos from that folder.
[+] [-] joelhaasnoot|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] staunch|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] citizenkeys|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eps|15 years ago|reply
Of course it won't. Dropbox will just be labeled a fluke and the same rhetoric will continue. The underlying issue is not the lack of 1B exits, but rather a form of animosity or envy depending on how you view it.
[+] [-] sahillavingia|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edanm|15 years ago|reply
If you haven't used it, or are still on the free plan, you really should try it out and buy at least 50gb. Stick all your most important files in there, and forget about that annoying thing called "backups".
[+] [-] JonnieCache|15 years ago|reply
Good luck with that, when dropbox has its first inevitable data loss incident.
If you don't have physical control over the hardware, it doesn't count as a proper backup.
[+] [-] kjbekkelund|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] citizenkeys|15 years ago|reply
Google never got around to releasing the "G Drive". None of the other competitors for Dropbox ever caught on, either.
[+] [-] maguay|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rmorrison|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kmfrk|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tzs|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcampbell1|15 years ago|reply
Their financials must be incredible. If it costs $2/yr to support a free customer, they must already have 500k paying customers to cover the cost. They could just as easily have 1M paying customers and be wildly profitable.
My guess is they are keeping their financials a massive secret, because if they became public it would invite competition from copycats with a budget for TV ads.
[+] [-] jackowayed|15 years ago|reply
That said, I get the impression (from how PG talks about them, the fact that they seem to have supported this massive growth in users & employees without more funding, etc) that they are doing very well, and improving quickly.
[+] [-] tzs|15 years ago|reply
Rather, they are trying to get you to remember Charmin and its superior ability to keep your ass free of toilet paper pieces when you are next in the market picking up toilet paper.
The second category of ads are those that want to get you to actually buy as soon as possible. They want you to call ("Operators are standing by!") or go to their website right then.
Let's consider the first category. Do those kind of ads work for a Dropbox competitor? I don't think so. They might make people aware of the category Dropbox is in, and some people will remember subsequently when they are online and maybe go looking for the product. Most likely they will then do a search, and if Dropbox has played its cards right, it is going to have sponsored ads in the search results, hitting on the same selling points that the competitors TV ads were hitting. Dropbox will end up capturing much of the benefits of the competitor's ads raising awareness of the category.
As far as the competitor goes, they will have spent a lot of money on TV ads, and have no clue whatsoever if the ads actually brought them any business. When we were doing TV ads for a software-based service, this was a nightmare. At one point we were doing things like calculating signal propagation from the FCC data on antenna height and power for stations that ran our ads, in order to figure out out zip codes might have seen have them, and then trying to look at statistical anomalies in purchases from those zips compared to zips in similar regions that would not have been able to see the ad, and attributing those to the effects of the ads.
Now let's consider the second category--the ads that try to get you to buy right now. If you've got a big budget, you can run ads at times that you know well in advance. You can have operators standing by. You can track call center response as the ad shows. If you are are really big, you can have a control center that looks like something out of NASA (see the first season of "Pitchmen", and watch how Billy Mays and Anthony Sullivan would monitor the results as a new infomercial rolled out). But unless you've got a really big budget, more likely you are buying your ad time via a system where it isn't determined when your ads will run until fairly late, depending on what other people are bidding for the time. It's a lot like the way search ads are sold--you and the other advertisers have a budget with an agency, and they are deciding how to divvy out their inventory of TV slots.
It's hard to have operators standing by for this, especially since a lot of these slots will be well out of prime time. So you are relying on getting people off the couch to your web site. Dream on.
Personally, I'd be happy if I saw competitors doing TV ads.
[+] [-] tropin|15 years ago|reply
Every time I think of the Outlook-and-Word users I have at the office with 500Gb hard disks...
[+] [-] RK|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dhouston|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jswanson|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] revorad|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stef25|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ssebro|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loso|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geoffw8|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rakkhi|15 years ago|reply
Now reading findings like this and the authentication issues exposed in the last few weeks I'm getting quite worried about the security of the whole solution. Going to have to change a lot of my posts to say do not store anything sensitive without Truecrypt: http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2011/04/how-dropbox-sacrifices-u...
[+] [-] didip|15 years ago|reply
Convincing a girly teenage girl to have a habit in backing up her computer regularly.
No other service could do that, not even Time Machine.
[+] [-] sdizdar|15 years ago|reply
BTW, we just started private beta for cloudHQ for Dropbox (http://www.cloudHQ.net/dropbox). Basically this service provides synchronization of Google Docs and Dropbox files and backup of Google Docs to Dropbox. And we have a cool thing that you can edit Dropbox files directly with Google docs (you need to install our Google Chrome extension). We need some beta testers ....
[+] [-] plainOldText|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Fester|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brown9-2|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] huhtenberg|15 years ago|reply