Dropbox: how did we survive where others burnt out?

This translation is based on a presentation by Drew Houston, co-founder and CEO of Dropbox . Therefore, information will be presented in the form of key points, which Drew identified as crucial for the success of a startup.

Some facts about how Dropbox works now:

• multi-million user audience 18 months after launch;
• no advertising costs;
• a large number of competitors;
• most of the work has been done by engineers who, in principle, are not very experienced in marketing.

In 2006, a bunch of cloud storage services were introduced to the market. So why do another one?



In the comments, this slide is called one of the most successful. Really objective answer. Moreover, according to Drew, building an impenetrable, scalable, cross-platform cloud storage architecture is really difficult.

Post on the competitor support forum:

Cersis converted all Word documents and half Excel documents into 0 byte files. No words, something is not fun for me.

The leitmotif of the theses is the classical commandment “to study, study and study again”, expressed by another famous startup. With Drew, it sounds like: "Learn early and often."

The author emphasizes the fact that a good, suitable product does not need to be advertised. However, the guys did not come to this conclusion right away and at first bought the words from Google, dabbled in affiliate programs, etc. And they did another tricky thing - people who came from paid ads did not see information about a free account. But then they felt ashamed and the team decided to abandon such a move, especially since the economic model they had invented did not justify themselves.

How we acted:

• there is a great desire to do everything “according to science”. But this is a left-wing science, think better with your own head;
• fortunately, we spent all our efforts to create a simply working product that would please users;
• we tore our asses at work;
• hired the smartest people of those who knew;
• "The main thing must always remain the main one."

In doing so, we avoided:

• hire non-engineers;
• follow the mainstream with PR;
• traditional positioning;
• deadlines, procedures, “right approaches”;
• partnerships;
• desire to make a bunch of chips.

Dropbox promoted itself according to the scheme below:



Plus, we spent serious money on analytics and stimulating our users so that they invited their friends. As a result, over 30 days in April, 2.8 million invitations were sent by users.

Results:

• September 2008: 100 thousand users;
• January 2010: 4 million users;
• most came from word of mouth and referral programs;
• monthly we add 15-20% to the number of users.