From Zero to a Million Users - Dropbox and Xobni Lessons Learned | Hacker News Reader

From Zero to a Million Users - Dropbox and Xobni Lessons Learned

blog.adamsmith.cc

138 pointsdhouston22 comments

Surprisingly engaging considering that it's just the slides from their talk. Does anyone have a link to a video (or even just audio)?

Here's video for a different talk, by Drew (Dropbox). There's a fair bit of overlap: http://www.justin.tv/startuplessonslearned/b/262672510 (story here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1290303)

Slide 57 is a good one (Netflix):

Total Lifetime Value of a user: $6/mo x 22 mo. lifetime = $132

Acquisition Cost of user: $40 affiliate or advertising

Lifetime gross profit of user: $92

Seems like a great complement to Drew's other lessons learned deck: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1290303

How Dropbox is different from hundreds of "storage in the cloud" companies ? All of what I saw in the slideshow I might assume was more or less done by the other companies. General marketing fluff that is quite obvious.( Nothing against Dropbox, since I'm a happy user). Luck played a certain part(big part?). I want to see the slideshows of companies that took years to get to 100,000 users :) Then I might think they had less luck and their lessons would apply to your average startup. Patrick McKenzie for example (no offence), I don't think he was lucky it just lots and lots of work and I get real gems from his talks/blogs...

it wasn't pure luck, Dropbox also nailed the product by making it stupid simple with their OS plugins to upload from Finder/Explorer - that and the viral invite friends to get more space thing were just two things that occur to me so it's never plain dumb luck!

The same way Google was different from the crowd of search engines that already existed when they started: better execution.

Interesting to note from a success story how little tech and how much marketing was involved.

I think this kind of thing gets overlooked a lot on HN considering the tech heavy role most have here. Personally I'm not surprised at all.

But never underestimate marketing. Building the best widget in the world means nothing if no one knows it exists.

(that being said having the best widget in the world is, in itself, a great marketing tool)

At the same time though, their products so good that it wasn't really necessary for them to hire some stellar biz dev/sales whiz, they were instead able to use these methods to attract users. I don't think these methods would work as well if the product was not up to par.

Well, they do say that the product is #1. I think the focus of the slides was the nontechnical stuff.

I think that's partly because that was the focus of the talk. I believe that Drew (for example) had a working prototype of Dropbox before applying to YC, and he'd been thinking about it for years. Then, after funding, it was quite a while (I think 6 months+) before the initial version was released. That's a lot of work on tech.

I'd love to hear a talk on the tech journey of DropBox.

Great slideshow. I voted with my wallet for DropBox after buying my iPhone and finding them in the AppStore. I don't really need 50GB worth of storage, but it's an awesome app that I'll make daily use of, so it seemed a shame to stick to the free account and not say thanks by subscribing.

Is this Xobni really comparable to Dropbox? I mean, I hadn't heard of Xobni until just now.

I don't know what xobni's advertising was like in other cities, but I was very surprised with the amount of advertising they had here in Seattle. Just a few weeks ago, when Microsoft released Office 2010, Xobni had this gigantic advertising campaign. I don't think I've ever seen so much advertising for a simple app.

Advertising I saw: Tons of teens dancing with Xobni signs around the edges of the Microsoft campus. Planes circling Seattle, with signs trailing behind them. Radio ads. Bus ads. TV commercials. Tons of shit plastering Bellevue.

It was impressive to say the least. I'm probably one of the most difficult consumers to advertise to, and I nearly wanted to try the product after seeing that advertisement campaign.

Anyways, nothing for me to say about the product, just the advertising.

That's just you ;-)

http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/202911.asp

They seem to be courting Redmond.

We are courting msft employees to use Xobni again. At one point we had 16k msft employees using Xobni. Then they started beta testing Outlook 2010 internally and we weren't compatible, so we lost all but 1,000. Our seattle campaign was designed to let them all know we are now compatible with Outlook 2010. When MSFT buys a Xobni Enterprise license for their employees, they will easily pay back the cost of our advertising campaign :)

And despite some media theories, No we didn't do this to get MSFT to acquire us.

Awesome slides - inspiring stuff!

Funny timing, since I just got spam [1] from Dropbox.

[1] It was an email from an address I don't recognize using a first name that no one I know has.

I think users get more storage if you use their referral link. Could be a sleazy way of trolling for storage.

Which they should crack down very hard on. The recipient of an affiliate's spam can't tell the difference between them and the actual company. A quick way to a tarnished reputation.

Nice slides.

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