Dropbox: The hottest startup you've never heard of

I think this article is perfectly valid. What everyone here is forgetting is that we are a pretty focused demographic of technical people. If you ask the average CNN user what Dropbox is you'll probably get a blank stare. The fact that an article like this is BEING written is just another sign of Dropbox's success... it may be crossing the tipping point to main-stream media and adoption outside of the tech community. I bet if you looked you would have found something similar about Twitter at some point where social media savvy people were going "WTF? I've used it forever"

I've been shocked at how often I see the Dropbox icon on friend's systems. I no longer live in silicon valley, and so I am completely out of the echo chamber (except what I read here at HN). These are not nerds, not techies, and not people who follow TechCrunch. These are artists, musicians, old folks, nomads, and all sorts of folks that just don't do technology. But, they get Dropbox. Admittedly, my parents aren't using Dropbox, but my parents don't read CNN.com, either, and I can't imagine what they would even use Dropbox for. I can't even get them to use flickr for photos, despite buying them a digital camera (my mom still uses a film camera when she travels because she's afraid she'll lose or break the digital one).

If I could invest in Dropbox, I would. But, that wasn't always true. I met Drew at a YC party before they had anything to show, and were still figuring out the diffing/versioning problems, and all the underlying hard problems. And, I came away thinking, "Well, that's been done before. A lot. And it never went anywhere." I had even built a little web-based file manager and sharing app as a RoR practice app, a couple weeks before. So, I thought I knew a business that wouldn't go anywhere when I saw it. I thought highly of Drew, but not much of the idea. I was obviously very wrong about the idea.

Anyway, my point is, Dropbox hasn't been something "you've never heard of" for quite some time.

Major news outlet learns about cheaper way to share files from their intern who uses it at school like everyone else: News at 11

>> "...And there's little to stop...Amazon (AMZN), with its own Amazon Web Services, from making a greater push into Dropbox's territory...."

Dropbox actually runs on AWS by using Amazon's S3 for storage. This is what allowed them to get up and running quickly and cheaply without needing a lot of venture funding.

I would not be surprised with Dropbox's continued growth, if they in the future were to set up and manage their own data centers to avoid being dependent on Amazon or anyone else's platform. This would be advantageous if Amazon were to decide to compete directly with a similar product.

counterpoint: Dropbox is a great product, clever tech, insightful marketing etc. Even the YC application was great. And I think there's a large market (even its present size is more than enough to sate my own avarice), but... it doesn't seem that it could become a truly huge company (like Xerox, Google), without launching a series of increasingly unrelated products. Though perhaps that's true of many huge companies (e.g. Apple, Sony, HP - even Microsoft has Office).

When we were trying to figure out if Dropbox would be a good sync tool for Leanpub, Peter went in to a local coffee shop and asked a bunch of people if they'd ever heard of Dropbox. All of the baristas and everyone else in their 20s had, and had accounts. About half of the people 30 or older had heard of it, and most of them had accounts.

We were pretty impressed with the numbers, and we ended up going with Dropbox, and we've never regretted it.

> The hottest startup you've never heard of

I wish this were true; unfortunately I hear lots and lots about them when they run a "spam your friends for more free space" promotional.

Expected an article from 4 years ago...

Excellent, if my non-technical friends ever ask why I don't go to mainstream media for tech news, I'll point them to this article.

My dad uses Dropbox and I didn't even tell him about it. Such a badass company.

My mom came to me earlier asking me to help her install Dropbox. She's about as informed about computer stuff as i am about fashion. That's a good sign for Dropbox :-)

While I'm sure Dropbox has their work cut out, you know they are onto something when you run into their flyers outside college dorms cross country in Chapel Hill, NC.

Today I was at a University small business lecture. Someone asked one of the entrepreneurs "What was your biggest mistake?". The guy said his laptop had been stolen, but luckily it was all auto-backed up onto Dropbox. A nice anecdote and good press!

I love dropbox and we use it personally and for our company (we are paid subscribers). But it seems to me that this space has fewer barriers to entry than say Groupon. People argue that Groupon has little barriers to entry but the fact is that it cost a lot to sell and get merchants on board. Dropbox is a very unique and helpful product but what will stop the competition from creating something similar and possibly better?

Now is maybe the really scary time for Dropbox - here come the "me too's" including corporates who will say "Hey looks like people are starting to want this file storage and sharing thingy" - we can do that too and offer it to our own customers.

Should be interesting.

Dropbox is awesome, I use it, I love it.

I had the same thought as SwellJoe around early 2008: That's been done, it ain't gonna go anywhere big. Obviously failed prediction on my part.

So the question is, what made Dropbox successful? There are plenty of players in this area (some of them are older than dropbox): box.net, mozy.com, Windows Live mesh, backblaze.

Furthermore, techies can easily do backup to their own S3 account, but they love Dropbox.

What's the success factors? YC? Being MIT graduates? The clever "Tell your friends and get more space for free" email? The market is just HUGE?

I know that 1 of them is using Python. =)

I like Dropbox but i use it less often. What i am waiting for is the same solution from Apple. Their cloud facility has been just finished and they will probably offer similar service not later than this year. It might not start as pure storage facility but will start by account and device activation from cloud, iphoto & music backup and then after figuring out how this cloud thing work will probably offer similar subscription fee based service. After all why they still didn't buy Dropbox? Probably they are working on it.

There is a PyCon video about Dropbox: PyCon 2011: How Dropbox Did It and How Python Helped http://pycon.blip.tv/file/4878722/

I'm glad the article pointed out the cartoon dinosaur riding a shark on the jobs page, even though they mistook it as not taking things seriously, instead of convincingly signalling, by the fact of its nature and presence (as an awesome and surprising drawing on a recruitment page that's subversive of conventional expectations for a potential employer), the claim made in the heading on that page, that Dropbox is a pretty sweet place to work.

We've been using it for our band, and it's been working great. A really useful tool that the non-techy members have had no trouble adopting.

Dropbox it's certainly one of the most helpful startups for the average guy.

I put into use at the last company I was working for (a non-tech company) and everyone got immediately hooked on Dropbox. It made their file-sharing much easier.

So I honestly understand this article, even though for us it's been around for so long.

Any media outlet tempted to use a "you've never heard of" headline should seriously reconsider. Guaranteed to irritate everyone who HAS heard of it instantly.

This is why traditional / mainstream media is fighting a battle to remain relevant.

Finally something I can be hipster about.

Eh, "you've never heard of"?