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Dropbox Startup Lessons Learned
- 1. Startup Lessons Learned Drew Houston @drewhouston
- 4. How we applied lean startup principles at Dropbox (sometimes on purpose, sometimes by accident)
- 5. Paul Graham: Early and often Joel Spolsky: When it doesn’t completely suck (avoid “Marimba Phenomenon”) When to Launch?
- 6. 2006: Dozens and dozens of cloud storage companies
- 7. VC: “There are a million cloud storage startups!” Drew: “Do you use any of them?” VC: “No” Drew: “…”
- 8. Building a bulletproof, scalable, cross-platform cloud storage architecture is hard
- 10. Learn early, learn often
- 11. Dropbox’s minimum viable product: 3 min screencast on Hacker News (Apr 07): Lots of immediate, high-quality feedback
- 12. Simple landing page: capture interest/email address
- 13. Private beta launch video 12,000 diggs; beta waiting list jumps from 5,000 to 75,000 in one day (Mar 2008)
- 15. When “best practices” aren’t best
- 16. Public launch (Sep 2008): Time to get real
- 19. Cost per acquisition: $233-$388
- 20. Cost per acquisition: $233-$388 For a $99 product. Fail.
- 25. Fourteen Months to the Epiphany
- 26. Why were conventional techniques failing, yet we were still succeeding?
- 31. Trailing 30 days (Apr 2010) : users sent 2.8 million direct referral invites
- 34. Thank you! Questions? @drewhouston
Editor's Notes
- Unusual aspects
- A few examples/stories
- As a founder lots of questions
- Back in 2006 the cloud storage market was insane
- Investor meetings had an interesting pattern
- (as I spent the bulk of my 20s discovering) This is not your typical rails app that you can bang out in a weekend.
- One thing I ran into over and over again was products that half worked. I promise you, if they did, I wouldn’t be here, I would be using that instead. But these were the guys who launched early. And now most of them are dead, not because of Dropbox but largely by self inflicted wounds.
- So, launching early and joining the pigpile of halfassed storage products was not terribly appealing
- So shipping code was out of the question YC app – ship in 8 wks vs 18 mos Prototype worked; video could show product in best light; get much of the same feedback as if we shipped working code
- YC’s motto
- As engineers
- We ran a bunch of experiments; adwords example -- everybody else is doing it
- - SEM is an example, but others – guilt to do what everyone else is doing -- to hire a product person, or a VP of whatever, or make an analytics dashboard, or a PR firm, etc. Often these are great things to do but that’s not a license to blindly do them
- To do something well in general you’ll be doing something else poorly