Dropbox (YC S07) Announces 4 Million Users, Hires A VP From Salesforce | Hacker News Reader

Dropbox (YC S07) Announces 4 Million Users, Hires A VP From Salesforce

techcrunch.com

102 pointsedw51953 comments

I Love Dropbox. I got in as an early beta tester and have been a paying customer since the day the option was offered.

Dropbox helped me convince my old boss that I could work from home.

I use Dropbox to back up my iTunes music library...for some reason I used to lose a lot of my music every time I got a new computer.

All my work and personal files can be accessed and emailed right from my iPhone.

I sync 4 computers: work laptop, home laptop, a dell zino for my tv and my iPhone. I never have to worry about a thing... Dropbox just works.

"Dropbox helped me convince my old boss that I could work from home."

Can you talk more about this? How do you use Dropbox for telecommuting and how did you convince your boss it was an effective tool for telecommuting?

Before Dropbox our files were stored on our individual desktop computers. My work had to be done at the office because we did not have laptops. With Dropbox, I could work on all the same stuff from home I just had to install the software on my home computer. There are obviously other solutions...like a laptop...but for us, dropbox was simple and worked well.

Prediction: Dropbox will enter a cloud platform race with a set of APIs in a bid to become a File System of the Web.

One of the great things about dropbox is that you don't need to predict. You can just look at their feature request list and see what's on top.

https://www.dropbox.com/votebox (API is nr 9)

Although I'm not sure what file system for the web means. I believe dropbox itself stores files in S3.

Wouldn't this place them in competition with S3? I think that would be a pretty stupid move, actually. That's a razor-thin margin business, and will only be more so when Google and Microsoft inevitably jump into the fray.

S3 is not really a file system. It's more like a key/value store for arbitrary data. If you wanted a filesystem-like interface, you'd need something in front of it.

Isn't Dropbox hosted on S3?

At least I remember them talking about a plan to allow users plugging their own S3 instance in (that was years ago).

Congrats to Dropbox! I wish I hadn't flubbed on investing in them.

Me too!

I think its worth of note how most of the comments they get on techcrunch are people just coming in to say they love the service. A trend I've seen on dropbox that I can't say I've seen with too many other services in the past.

I, for one, am one very happy paying customer too, and have said it more than once.

What's the definition of "user" here?

edit: Not sure why the downvote. "4 million users" can mean pretty much anything.

When someone wants to use dropbox, they fill out an HTML form to create an account. Once 4M people do that (or a little more since some people delete accounts), they have 4M users.

Thanks. So this is 'total users since records began', rather than any type of 'active user' count. That's what I figured, but wasn't sure.

Just wish articles would quantify what 'user' means when they say "X has Y users".

Well, it's not like I know that for a fact, but I don't know why they would make their user count seem less impressive than it is. If they were just counting active users, they'd almost certainly say "4 million active users" very clearly.

The competition for Dropbox will be fierce I expect. I love how easy it is to work with and that it works on Windows, OS X and Linux but it lacks proper in-document search on the web interface and no editing capabilities. Also, Google Docs has an excellent PDF viewer. Nonetheless, great app.

I would love to see Dropbox and Google Docs work well together. Overall, I don't want to change my habits to much. That's why I like dropbox. I want to keep using the office programs that I've been using up till now, save them normally, access them normally via the OS file system.

The web access is great but marginal, for me. It would be a lot better if the default experience was that clicking a spreadsheet or powerpoint opened it in Google Docs (or similar) rather then downloading it.

A web experience on the web and a desktop experience on the desktop.

I think the problem with things like Google Docs (or Zoho, for example) is that they are trying to get you off the desktop. MS wants to keep you on the Desktop. Google might not be highly motivated to sync your spreedsheet to your PC for easy access via excel.

Dropbox might pull off a serious coup if they became the platform agnostic glue. Log in to Zoho, all your dropbox files are available to you. You edit them, they are still available to you via open office, Google Docs, MS Office, whatever.

Google, I suspect, might want the filesystem to be with them though.

After a few months of struggling to find a use for it personally (I have good backups, Mac.com synced web accessible storage, etc...) we started using it for our small business's file. Now we all have access to all the in-process documents, contracts, etc... and can access things as needed on our iPhones, etc... Seems like a really great solution for small business file management.

Similar situation - I've been following the Dropbox story as I have other YC companies, but never had a compelling personal use.

I assumed a new global role with my company this month, and the second task I was assigned was 'Register for Dropbox and tell us how we can use it for our 160+ people'. That it was specifically 'Dropbox' shows how a clean and simple service that works easily can make massive inroads.

Does anyone have an idea of how many paying customers they have?

Freemium models usually have a low percentage of paying accounts, i.e. between 5%-15% paid subscriptions.

Short of polling a random sampling of users we probably have to hear from dropbox for those numbers.

That's sounds high. Isn't it closer to 2-3%?

1-5% is the norm, usually towards the low end

2-3% of 4 million is still very high - about ~100,000. Most of the companies struggle to get even this many free users. Very impressive, dropbox!

Especially for Dropbox since I don't think that their 50 and 100 GB plans are even attractive for most users. At least for me they would have to offer something for $5.

I dropped my account due to lack of read/only file sharing capabilities.

I'm an avid user.. but stuff like that is also hurting me..

I should point out that read/only file sharing is the ONLY reason I left and I would come back if they added it.

From the responses in the votebox it sounds like its not a priority for them, so thats why I left.

> I'm an avid user.. but stuff like that is also hurting me..

Disclaimer: I work for http://www.humyo.com/

Humyo is not as well-known as dropbox (especially in the US) but we have a significant userbase (>500k) and are I think fairly feature-rich. (e.g. We've got a number of the top-requested features on dropbox-votebox already implemented, have Zoho integration, versioning, recyclebin, WebDAV access). Have you considered and discounted us or have we not made ourselves known to you?

There are two schools of thought - "more features == better" and "fewer features == better focus on important features == better". I'd appreciate others' thoughts on this. Is the humyo featureset: 'good' or 'too confusing'? (or is there some other turn-off on the humyo site/signup process)?

(I've held off commenting on other dropbox threads since I don't want to spam HN with what might be seen as an advert, but since this sub-thread is about featureset I'm interested in the comparison.)

I hadn't heard about the company you work for. I will be checking it out shortly.

Thanks. If you have any specific comments please reply or email me (address in profile).

What are you using instead?

I could use read-only sharing permissions as well. It would avoid me situations where my boss moves files on his desktop away from Dropbox or add a full application to a shared folder…

I'm using livemesh from MS... I really dont like it too much, but it does what i need it to do....

It's a shame their API seems to be taking an eternity. I gave up waiting about two months ago.

Don't wait. Do what I did and hack something together with a Linux CLI install of Dropbox on a server. I did that months ago and users love it, even though setup isn't as smooth as it would be if I had an API to work with.

That's a great idea. Would you be willing to share more details on your hack?

I may share technical details in a few hours, but from a use perspective: http://ourdoings.com/2009-09-08

That looks amazing, what great way for your users to interact with your site. I'd be very interested in hearing those technical details as would plenty of others I'm sure.

I have a script that receives email from dropbox re shared folders and pulls the email address and folder name. This info gets put in a table. A cron job looks in this table and notices when the folder appears. It sends an email to the user who has to do a final confirmation step to protect against fake emails. Once that's done the cron job checks every minute for new files, processes them as it would files uploaded through the web, then deletes them.

Hackish parts: 1. The email format could change. 2. If the folder name isn't unique the email contains the non-unique name. Eg "ourdoings" in email, then when I accept, the folder is named "ourdoings (28)". I have to change the folder by hand. 3. They have to use the same email for dropbox and ourdoings signup. 4. Often people make subfolders of their "Photos" folder which doesn't fit the workflow.

There are changes I could make to help address these issues. It just hasn't been a high priority. The system works great once setup is done. I'm really glad I implemented it rather than just wait for an api. There's no more convenient way to upload photos.

Thanks Bruce.

That might be fine for fun, but I generally try to avoid spending a lot of time creating solutions that rely on hacks to work.

This hack has been received with more enthusiasm than many of my better-engineered features.

What if I can't run the linux CLI?

If you have a single BSD server you're out of luck, but it might be worth it to get a small specialized server just for dropbox.

We use DB as a "file server" in our small office. I also use it to collaborate with other designers/developers for sharing comps, files, and other content.

I currently use git for versioning but i've though about trying to do a build for mediatemple to use that for deployment and updating some of our smaller web clients where git is overkill.

Dropbox has just touched the surface of what they are setup to accomplish. Very exciting!

Care to elaborate?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1065488

YC S07

Reply on news.ycombinator.com