Dropbox (YC S08) Now Effortlessly Syncing Files For 1 Million Members
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
As someone how developed and grew (somewhat) similar service to 3 million users, I am guessing there's a lot of abandoned and idle accounts in this million. Anywhere between 75% and 95%.
But even if they are actively synch'ing files for just 100K users instead of a million, it is still a pretty big achievement. Also the growth of the active users tends to follow the curve of the cumulative number, so the exponent nature of it is quite impressive as well. It would help to keep the title of the PR bit factual though, especially when it's geared towards the technical community. As they are not synch'ing files for 1 million users.
Also, well over 100K users actively sync a file each and every day.
There are a variety of things that can be used to define "active user". Logically, the point of defining "active user" is to differentiate between users who have a good chance of using a product/service again or on a regular basis or something like that (depends on the nature of your service), and users who almost certainly won't and are just taking up space in your user registry (or in our case, space on our servers as well). I won't go into any further details, but the number of people who do a file sync at least once a week is much higher than the number of people who do a file sync every day, and the number of people who do a file sync at least once a month is much higher than that. In addition, there are people who don't add or edit new files very often, but do frequently access their existing files, who aren't being counted in the approximate numbers I gave above. Anyway, going off of this qualitative "definition" of activity, I consider much, much more than 10% of our users to be active users.
The major one is that their price point just seems too high. $99 a year just isn't a price that I'm willing to pay without seriously considering the value I'm getting. (Then when I consider the value, $99 can buy a pretty big portable hard drive or flash drive. So I buy the drives and just use the free 2 gig Dropbox for synchronizing smaller files.)
On the other hand, I had no problem paying $30/year for Flickr Pro. That's an easy price point, even for a cheap bastard like me.
The minor one is that they don't seem to own dropbox.com. I don't know how that didn't get done before settling on the name, but they gotta get that cleared up.
Would you prefer them to use a name like droppboxx or drropbox instead? Most likely some domain squatter sat on dropbox.com and demanded 3 million for the name. They could have picked a completely different name, but dropbox is nice and simple, and the correct site comes up on google which is what most people use anyway.
Personally I would have just chosen a name that isn't already taken.
As for syncing and sharing project files, that is what the git repository is for.
But quite obviously there is a market for what they sell. I'm just not in that market. Not until I can get half a TB for my $99, anyway.
For people with the need for more storage there is a 100 GB plan I think...
Flickr's been an somewhat easy way to back them up and share them at the same time. But I have growing frustration with Flickr because I'm really using it for three different purposes now: backing up all my photos, sharing family snapshots with friends and family, and sharing more artsy photography with mostly strangers (which is really Flickr's sweet spot).
Using Flickr for backup is incredibly annoying and iffy because their uploaders are so fragile and downloading the entire collection depends on third-party software that Flickr could break or disable at any moment.
I'd love to move my photo backups off of Flickr and am close to using just some rotating USB hard drives, but I'd much rather have something automated. Dropbox could definitely have my business there and be price competitive if they offered say 250 gigs for under $100 a year. Backing up my photos should be a good profit for them over time, because once I get past the initial backup, I really only upload a gig or two a month and rarely download. Unlike my other documents, I don't need my photo backup replicated between my different computers running Dropbox.
Sharing photos with friends and family is something that Dropbox could be good at or at least acceptable. The Flickr, Picasa, and Facebook uploaders all suck compared to the ease of Dropbox. If they added some better privacy settings, RSS feeds, and some more viewing/downloading options, they could be player in the photo sharing space.
Amazon S3 (some consider it wholesale) would cost you 3 times that, and that's not even considering in/out bandwidth charges or Dropbox's nifty client and version history (which lets you, for instance, restore "deleted" files).
All I am saying is adoption will rise if the price point drops. Right now it is high enough to turn off price-sensitive individuals.
(Guy's too polite to come toot his own horn here.) Might fit your use case, if you're willing to trade shine for price-efficiency.
No, you're right - my basic arithmetic comes out with the same number, now that I've checked it. Good catch.
I assumed (thwack) that, since 'tarsnap' is only taking a small premium over Amazon S3 charges for real use, it would always be a better price. Wrong (thwack), if you do have between 30 and 50 GB.
Possibly Dropbox can beat the price because the buyers of the 50GB plan use less than half, in average. (Leaving aside considerations of Amazon vs. dedicated infrastructure costs.)
With google toolbar installed, all it takes is to enter - drop box - on the address bar, anyway!
I even noticed the subtle changes on the web interface some days ago. Nice stuff and looking forward to the P2P system ahead.
I've even managed to loose data using USB drives (mistakenly wiped the wrong one, or lost it) but I haven't pulled an "unrecoverable boner" yet with DB.
Working with the same code across multiple OS platforms (rails code mostly) it's been a lifesaver always having the latest copy (even offline).
I'm considering a paid account (reaching my limit) but like the others have said, it's just beyond the "impulse buy" price-point for me these days...
Knowing that you'll never have to email another attachment is an incredible feeling.