
How Dropbox Got Its First 10 Million Users - llambda
http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/01/founder-storie-how-dropbox-got-its-first-10-million-users/
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Poyeyo
My take is this: LiveDrive Beta was featured in HN.

LiveDrive got lots of users used to having working and functional virtual
drives, including me.

LiveDrive closed the beta and got users searching for a replacement. I found
Dropbox in a post about LiveDrive alternatives.

LiveDrive could have been Dropbox, but they 'monetized' too fast and killed
the product.

And still some people side with Saverin in the Social Network movie...

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alttag
Yes, they have lots of users (and the article doesn't mention how they used
network incentives to increase the user count), but more interesting would be
the rate of conversion to _paying_ customer, typical time to conversion (also,
segments: do some buy right away or use for years, then buy), etc.

~~~
simondlr
I would like to see time to conversion. I have a hunch the majority of the
users haven't capped out their dropboxes yet. When that starts to happen, it
will be interesting what the conversion rate will be.

~~~
rarrrrrr
As a data point: At SpiderOak, 50% of customers purchase paid storage within
the first 4 days of opening an account. Of course there's still a long tail of
events after.

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SODaniel
I don't really understand how this video in any way explains how they got
their first 10 million users. Seems like a the standard straightforward plug
for a ycombinator company on TC that we have gotten used to.

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rayk
I'm reading the article as validation for viral marketing, as targeted towards
the big link-sharing sites. I don't remember the last time a startup hit the
front page of Reddit. Surely it's happened, but I thought it would happen more
than it has, since that site is about sharing links to things on the Web.

~~~
mindotus
Minus hit frontpage of Reddit recently but the typical front page content
isn't very much startup focused on Reddit

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ImprovedSilence
Not to bee too pedantic, but using "Why Combinator" in the article? I kinda
looked down on the article after the first paragraph. Good great grammers, an
awareness of what you're talking about, and proper spelling go a long way
towards establishing proper voice. (sea what I did there)

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younata
It was obviously some rather sophisticated speech-to-text program that didn't
realize that "ycombinator" is what he meant in the video

The actual article is rather good.

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taken11
so most likely the speech-to-text startup was not funded by ycombinator

