

Dropbox CEO: Why search advertising failed us - mgenzel
http://venturebeat.com/2010/10/27/dropbox-drew-houston-adwords/

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chesspro
Similar story -

Kevin, one of the founders of Wufoo, does a great job of explaining how he
grew the product by word of mouth. He built it from the trust of his users,
most of which was from <http://particletree.com/>. It's fascinating how much
emphasis he puts on interacting personally with the paid users and how they
scaled that. Definitely a lot of hard work, but it paid off when they had some
server trouble when Wufoo first launched - their old users trusted them and
backed them up when some of the initial comments were negative.

Long story short, he didn't do any search advertising either.

Interview here: <http://mixergy.com/wufoo-kevin-hale/>

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gamble
I don't think it's a coincidence that Dropbox took off just as smartphones
became popular. People use a service like Dropbox because they're juggling
more than one device. Dropbox has the advantage of being available on every
platform and integrated into a ton of apps. Even if they weren't awesome on
their own, Dropbox is the only service that makes sense now because none of
their competitors has anywhere near the same network effects. Apps are their
best marketing now.

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mgenzel
Who am I to question the Dropbox CEO, but... Even if the solution is new, if
you're solving a real problem that people have (and if you're not, what's
wrong?), can't you use the search terms around that? E.g., "how to recover
lost files", or "increase disk space", or "share files", or whatnot... Just
get people at the point at which they're experiencing the pain you're
addressing... No?

~~~
byoung2
_can't you use the search terms around that? E.g., "how to recover lost
files", or "increase disk space", or "share files", or whatnot... Just get
people at the point at which they're experiencing the pain you're addressing_

I think the problem is that those searchers are likely just looking for free
online tutorials, not a paid solution. They got plenty of clicks, but few
sales. I ran into the same problem with my outsourcing company. Small
businesses with 5-10 employees aren't searching for outsourcing on Google, big
multinational companies are. But I don't have a 1000 seat call center, just a
dozen guys who can do web design, data entry, etc. It turns out my target
market was best reached through word of mouth among small business owners, not
through Adwords.

