How I Built It: Dropbox | Hacker News Reader

How I Built It: Dropbox

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Dear Dropbox,

How I love thee, though I have some issues I would hope you can see.

I am a paying customer. I have used dropbox for a time, though now I have been using it on a team - but not as a paid team.

We are in a grey area - between really needing to pay for a much more expensive team account and being crippled by the free account.

Here is my issue: Matrixed relationships of shared folders.

If I, a paid user, have 50GB of space, and I create several folders, 1,2 & 3 - and I share them with unpaid users A, B, C, D, E, & F -- my paid space consumes their unpaid space.

So, if I share folder 1 with users A B and C who all have 2GB of space - and I add 3GB into that folder (I have 50 remember) it breaks their account (Sync stops).

I would request the following: ONLY folders that YOU share out/create should eat your quota.

I know this is not a simple request, or easy -- but I think that when one joins a folder I share, it should not affect their quota.

If this is not feasible, we need more options.

I am willing to pay, but the current model is half-broken.

How about letting me create a paid for share that is communal, which is outside my free 2GB.

So, we pay $20/month for 100GB - It is a space that is associated with multiple users. I still have my 2GB "personal" storage, but I have one shared folder that is 100GB that we all share.

the shared folder allows all users to place stuff in there, but it does not eat away at their local quota.

Let me have ~5 users on that $20/month share. Each additional user is ~$3 per month...

The spectrum as it stands doesn't quite fit. Can we come up with other options?

Thanks

Doesn't work. People would just create dummy accounts with 2GB folders, share them with themselves, and have infinite storage.

If they offered a 100GB plan for $20 / month, it would destroy their $125 / year / person plan since I would imagine that in almost all cases that's a much cheaper arrangement for teams.

That's why the current solution is such a disaster. The alternatives are either too easily gamed or they rape Dropbox's revenue.

If I'm not mistaken, you cannot create dummy accounts. Every account needs to be activated on a machine which doesn't have another copy of dropbox, and this means that you can't have multiple 2GB accounts running at the same time at the same machine.

The current sharing model needs to be thought again.

Create multiple VM's, install multiple Dropbox with multiple account, share with your main account. Profit.

Or this could only be for paid customers.

i.e. a folder shared by a paid customer does not consume space for anyone who joins it however a folder shared by a free customer does.

Thats exactly what I am asking. I am paying for 50GB, I have shared out folders from my source to free users. If I put 2GB in those folders, all the free users stop syncing.

I think this is wrong.

We are in a grey area - between really needing to pay for a much more expensive team account and being crippled by the free account.

That's not a grey area. You're a business -- apparently a business which finds it difficult to pay $0.30 per employee per day, but a business nonetheless. If you can't afford a business input, you don't get to use it.

More broadly, to everyone on HN quote has business pricing for their goods/services: if HNers won't pay it that is not a problem. Charge more. Most businesses will not give $0.30 per day per employee a second thought for anything which provides non-trivial value to them.

I disagree, the value we get betweeen free and what we really need is not equal to $120 per year per employee.

I think you have a bit of a bias because you're coming from the side that dropbox is on, where you have a service you sell.

I sit and use the service daily, along with my colleagues and to get the few extra gigs per needed does not == $100+ per month.

I think there is another offering option which would meet more needs, maybe the one I proposed is wrong, as was pointed out - but the need is not wrong.

I think I have seen you say "charge more" a lot on HN - while this sounds like "no nonsense" business confidence -- it alienates users who don't find you service to be worth what you think its worth.

If, to you, that means "fuck those users - who wants em" then that's ok - but don't blame users who hold your services at different values than you do.

Interestingly enough, Dropbox was launched here on Hacker News with a video to "throw away your usb drive".

Since I had been writing "ad copy" for many years for my own shareware app at the time, and liked to encourage posters rather than criticize (as I knew how hard it could be to launch something), I instead posted a list of benefits in a way a person 30-70 years old could understand.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

I've been honored to watch as subsequent Dropbox videos had become better at explaining the benefits to real people, with wording similar to mine, as well as surprised to see screen shots of that page with my username on it in presentations done by Drew Houston and Adam Smith at YC Startup School or MIT Startup Bootcamp.

I had the pleasure of meeting Drew after YC Startup School 2007, when he was still looking for a partner, at the apartment where the Xobni founders lived. I got a good overview of what he was building but didn't have time to show him what I was working on. A few people left to pick up burgers while I was talking with Drew.

My next encounter with Drew was also the day after Startup School, this time in 2011. It was surreal to sit around a table with Drew and visitors to Dropbox Headquarters in large office in downtown San Francisco, joining the people peppering him with questions about taking Dropbox. Again, people ate, but (mini) burgers were catered, and hundreds of them. :)

Edit:

Also, when I interned at Justin.tv (I went back to college to complete a B.S. Computer Science and a B.S. Mathematics), I created a console app (in Python) for broadcasters that could start with their JTV credentials and channel name and modify the packets of the video stream playing on VLC in real-time in multiple ways. Arash Ferdowsi was helpful in putting me in touch with the person at Dropbox responsible for client-side builds for some tips on building executables of my app for Windows, Mac, and Linux users.

Out of curiosity, does anyone have any info on if Dropbox is profitable?

I personally don't know anyone who actually pays for more space. Most people that use it are not tech savy and I don't think would take the leap to start paying monthly for virtual space. If I had to guesstimate, I'd say maybe 2% of users pay; but that's purely on gut feeling.

I feel like their business model is like Youtube: ie. provide massive amounts of storage and make very little money per GB stored (last I heard Google isn't making much money off of that). It's the "new" traffic + users = success. Not profits - costs = success.

The fact that they didn't sell themselves to Apple seems to suggest that they have higher hopes... Or maybe they're waiting out for a higher bid.

Yes, Dropbox is profitable. I believe their numbers are particularly high for a freemium model, more than 2%.

They've said quite a bit that don't plan on getting acquired, all signs point to them going public.

"How we've scaled Dropbox" by Kevin Modzelewski http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/120222.html

The video for the talk is on http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/winter-schedule-20112012... .

Most interesting answer, in my opinion:

"Mr. Ferdowsi: The problem that we're trying to solve is a problem that only an independent company can solve. We want to let you use a Mac, or Windows PC, or iPad, or Android, without having to think about any of the technical details. It isn't a problem any of those larger companies is going to be as inclined to solve in the same way we are."

The other companies I am familiar with that are trying to solve the same problems are the consumer NAS OEMs like QNAP, Synology, and Netgear. I have 2TB of RAID storage I paid $500 for 2 years ago. My solution involves using a VPN, but I still find it quite usable and it also addresses my privacy concerns.

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