
My YC app: Dropbox - Throw away your USB drive - dhouston
http://www.getdropbox.com/u/2/screencast.html
======
BrandonM
I have a few qualms with this app:

1\. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite
trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and
then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP
account could be accessed through built-in software.

2\. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files
to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform
presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity
problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue.

3\. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is
premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it
reasonable to expect to make money off of this?

~~~
dhouston
1\. re: the first part, many people want something plug and play. and even if
they were plug and play, the problem is that the user experience (on windows
at least) with online drives generally sucks, and you don't have disconnected
access.

windows for sure doesn't hide latency well (CIFS is bad, webdav etc. are
worse), and most apps are written as if the disk was local, and assume, for
example, accessing a file only takes a few ms. if the server is 80ms away, and
you do 100 accesses (e.g. the open file common dialog listing a directory and
poking files for various attributes or icons) serially, suddenly your UI locks
up for _seconds_ (joel spolsky summarizes this well in his article on leaky
abstractions.) ditto saving any file; you change one character in your 20mb
word file and hit save, and your upstream-capped 40k/sec comcast connection is
hosed for 8 minutes. sure for docs of a few hundred k it's fine, but doing
work on large docs on an online drive feels like walking around with cinder
blocks tied to your feet. anyway, the point of that rant was that dropbox uses
a _local_ folder with efficient sync in the background, which is an important
difference :)

2\. true, if you're both not at your computer and on another computer without
net access, this won't replace a usb drive :) but the case i'm worried about
is being, for example, on a plane, and dropbox will let you get to the most
recent version of your docs at the time you were last connected, and will sync
everything up when you get back online (without you having to copy anything or
really do anything.)

3\. there are some unannounced viral parts i didn't get to show in there :)
it'll be a freemium model. up to x gb free, tiered plans above that.

~~~
BrandonM
You are correct that this presents a very good, easy-to-install piece of
functionality for Windows users. The Windows shortcomings that you point out
are certainly problems, and I think that your software does a good job of
overcoming that.

The part about efficient background sync is a good point, too. I have noticed
some minor lagging using curlftpfs in Linux, and that might be something that
would make for a better solution in the Linux world, so thanks for that idea.

Your use-case described in #2 does make sense, but I still agree with others'
comments here that claiming that it replaces USB drives is a bad idea in
general. All of your feedback was well-thought-out and appreciated; I only
hope that I was able to give you a sneak preview of some of the potential
criticisms you may receive. Best of luck to you!

------
brett
This is genius. It's is problem everyone is having, and everyone knew it
(<http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/lazybackup> ). If it really works as well as
it looks in that demo then they nailed it. I'm both envious and inspired. I'll
be surprised if YC does not fund them.

------
nickb
The only problem is that you have to install something. See, it's not the same
as USB drive. Most corporate laptops are locked and you can't install anything
on them. That's gonna be the problem. Also, another point where your USB
comparison fails is that USB works in places where you don't have internet
access.

My suggestion is to drop the "Throw away your USB drive" tag line and use
something else... it will just muddy your vision.

Kudos for launching it!!! Launching/shipping is extremely hard and you pulled
it off! Super!

~~~
vlad
What about this on the download page (also good for a press release.)

Drop Box: Automatically safeguards even your biggest worries, so you don't
have any!

What is a Drop Box?

Your Drop Box is a File Cabinet that Follows You Around Everywhere You Want to
Go, Across Your Computers, or Across The Country.

Download and start using it today. (link goes here.)

Your Drop Box includes your own Secretary who Files and Photocopies Every
Document You Make or Edit, So You Can See What Each Document Looked Like
Yesterday, Two Days Ago, or at Any Point In Time. Did I Mention the Secretary
and the File Cabinet are Fire-Proof and Wireless?

But, it's all digital. And, it's secure. And it's built to work between as
many Windows desktops or laptop computer you use at NO EXTRA COST! See for
yourself! (another link to the download.)

Or, access your files at work from a web-based interface! It's so flexible!

Q: Do I have to change how I work?

A: Absolutely not. Any file and folder (Word documents, spreadsheets, family
photos, etc) you add to your Drop Box folder is automatically synchronized and
saved remotely.

Q: What is the Drop Box folder?

A: It's just a special folder which will appear on your computer. Anything
added to it is automatically saved, synchronized, and "dated" so you can go
back in time!

Try it now! (another download link) It's safe, it's free, and you can use it
on as many computers to share, backup, and keep archived file versions on, as
you need to, by registering for just one account!

~~~
JMiao
"Your Drop Box is a File Cabinet that Follows You Around Everywhere You Want
to Go, Across Your Computers, or Across The Country."

Ladies & Gentlemen, the WORLD'S LIGHTEST FILE CABINET. Great for cross-country
roadtrips! =)

------
jganetsk
How are you going to scale up your storage to meet the demands of the users?
Are you doing something clever, like Google Filesystem? This is not an easy
problem, if you aren't prepared for it in advance. If 10,000 users sign up
tomorrow... you might be very very hosed, as opposed to very very happy.

~~~
ashu
Amazon S3

~~~
jganetsk
Look at the prices for S3:

_$0.15 per GB-Month of storage used._ $0.20 per GB of data transferred.

So, that means Dropbox is going to have to resell S3 at a premium for the
added value of these nice Coda-like features. Would you pay a premium for
these Dropbox features? Maybe, I don't know.

Also, what's the typical use case? How much bandwidth/storage are people going
to consume? Because, if I store 100 megabytes... my bill will pennies every
month (going on S3 prices). You cannot transact pennies per user per month. If
you could, then you've cracked the micropayments problem wide open. Maybe
there would be a base fee? Like $5/month or something. Would people pay that
much for online storage?

I don't know how other revenue generation models can be applied. Advertising?
Selling a user's data to other businesses? (What's the privacy policy?)

~~~
noisemaker
I think the larger issue is about getting user adoption. It is actually great
case to have a situation where users overwhelm your service in a way that it
outgrows a system such as this. If he ever gets that large, obviously there
will be plenty of people looking to help him figure out how to make the
storage portion feasible.

More interesting is the user experience. Creating something users can enjoy,
agree with, and possibly part money for is a much more difficult problem to
solve than figuring out to make large scale storage cost effective.

~~~
jganetsk
I think user experience can and will be duplicated. I did post a link to an
SVN front-end that has a very similar interface. Maybe the competitors are
locked-in to some bad design decisions and can't quite recreate the same user
experience... but that's a little optimistic.

Anyway you slice it, you need to have a profit margin. And with a commodity
like storage (and the soon-to-be commodity of online storage), you have to be
competitve with market prices. The reason that most YC startups can worry
about user adoption is because they aren't tied down to this problem. They
aren't really making commodities and the cost of makign the product isn't so
suffocating.

That's why Dropbox needs to plan for moving off S3. There is so much
innovation in storage backends... so much research to read. Think of Google
Filesystem. It makes storage very very very cheap.

Here's a good plan for Dropbox. Use S3 as a secondary solution. The primary
storage should be local to them (servers running a filesystem that takes
advantage of unique properties of the workload... like Google does). When it
fills up, traffic thereafter is handled by S3 instead. Then, they can relax in
worrying about and scaling local storage. They can take their time buying more
hardware, and rolling out software changes to the storage system. They can
migrate the data from S3 to local storage at will. And now, their customers
can be charged a flexible price, because they control their own expenses. In
other words, think of S3 as "datacenter outsourcing".

But this might be too long-term... it might be something to worry about post-
YC.

But I think it might be easy to build a storage implementation that runs local
and exposes the same exact interface as S3. And, poof, we just abstract the
whole backend away, and just flip a switch when we want to go one way or the
other. And it reduces latency. Then you go after zero-downtime data migration
from S3 to your local systems... which can be done I think... and I think you
would be happy.

------
nefele
Drew,

I saw your short demo at BarCamp and I must say Dropbox looks great! Are you
planning on having a Linux port as well, or is too early to talk about that?

Also, as another SFP applicant I have to tell you that I really hope you get
the funding - you deserve it.

~~~
dhouston
thanks :)

a linux port is doable (mac will come first) -- everything's written in python
and was designed from the outset to be portable. although this isn't the
initial focus of dropbox, a linux port would be interesting for maintaining
small web sites or web apps -- instead of using scp/sftp or equivalent you
could just modify the files on your desktop and have them synced to your web
host.

~~~
Sam_Odio
Hey Drew,

Congrats on a great product. A linux port would be great for servers - I'm
always rsyncing stuff between my linux boxes.

For those who don't have shell access though, it would be cool if you
integrated the service with (S)FTP. I don't even think you'd need to sync to
the server.

Just giving the user the ability push his/her dropbox public folder to a
server using (S)FTP would give your software several new use cases.

~~~
vlad
+1 on being able to specify a folder inside the dropbox as a "server" folder,
which means it has it's own ftp address, user, and password settings. Anything
dragged there is automatically synched with that account. I thought of this as
well as soon as I read that post about Linux support, as this would work with
shared hosting without expecting hosts to install dropbox on their linux
boxes. And the data would be backed up as well automatically in a third place
(the drop box.) And, you'd have access to retrieve an older version of a file.
This basically replaces the need for FTP clients if you also add a way to
chmod the folders inside the "server" folder. Sam is 100% right.

------
markovich
It's pretty nice, and I was thinking to myself - hey cool, I could make an
online backup of my code. Then it occured to me - who the hell is this guy,
and why should I trust my code to be on his server!?

That's a huge issue you should consider. Why would people feel comfortable
leaving their valuable stuff on "Drews" server?

~~~
dhouston
data's stored on s3, and encrypted before storage -- there'll be another
option to enter in an additional passphrase (or private key) when installing
in order to encrypt your data before it leaves your computer (kind of like
what mozy does.)

~~~
Tichy
Maybe, but the encryption is entirely in the hands of the client application
that dropbox provides (I suppose it is not open source), so it is still a
matter of faith.

------
zaidf
This has great potential!

Only suggestion I would have is go slower on the demo. I know you lost me very
early into it switching between windows.

If you are looking for a wider audience than those who already know the
context of dropbox, make a video where you lay out the case for use of dropbox
using simple examples from user point of view(think a college student) and
then in the demo show just the basic features. I got the feeling you tried to
show too many features too quickly.

In general, I have realized it is much better to launch with something that
does a few things REALLY well rather than a lot of things with little focus.
When you launch with whole lot of features people assume you are competing
with the big companies. When you launch small and do it well, it is easier to
attract a user-base and THEN keep feeding it more advance features in form of
updates.

Good luck! Looks slick from the UI.

~~~
rwalker
Looks like a great product, and I will second the parent comment.

One thing they teach at YC, and in one of pg's essays
(<http://www.paulgraham.com/investors.html),> is to present a story instead of
a list of features. That way you answer the question of "Why would I use this
product?" simultaneously to answering "What does this product do?".

~~~
zach
I love that approach (my weblog is called "Story-Driven" after all) because it
automatically breaks technical people out of a taxonomic, procedural mindset.
So many descriptions of things are on the order of "well, it's a set of pliers
with a light on it" instead of "it's how I change fuses in my rusty fusebox in
the middle of the night."

You can't emphasize enough to people to tell a story, and the screencast is a
great crucible for whether you have a good story to tell. Screencasts aren't
appreciated enough for the way they've helped people understand concepts that
are a little more technical than they normally would sit still for.

------
jganetsk
I've seen this before. It's called Coda.

<http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/>

Great work bringing this to the web, and integrating it with Windows!

------
JMiao
Was Dropbox your first idea, or did you start from another point of
inspiration? How long did it take to get to a workable demo?

Great job, Drew!

~~~
dhouston
nope. informally came up with and tossed around 6 or 7 ideas at the same time
-- not so much coding as investigating/talking to potential customers and
bouncing them off other friends and entrepreneurs. this was crucial -- ideas
don't really fall out of the sky, they evolve.

there were several times where i'd get really excited about one idea -- like
pacing in my living room at 5:30am excited -- and then 5 days later find out
(via a different set of search terms or something) there were 3 other people
doing the same thing, with a head start and more money.

ultimately they say scratch your own itch -- this was a problem (syncing a 3gb
file across several computers efficiently) i routinely had working on a prior
company i had started and i was frustrated that no one had solved it well, and
it turned out to be more promising than my original company :)

~~~
JMiao
Thanks for sharing great insight!

------
ph0rque
You know, your app is something that I've been wishing someone would make for
some time now. Congrats!

Here's a suggestion for a future revision: give the ability for office
documents to open with online office apps when clicked on in the public
folder.

~~~
sumantra2
cool demo !!! But I must agree that this is coda stuff.

------
mukund
Cool stuff indeed. I would give 5 stars for such an useful application. I dont
know if users can have administrative rights installing this features on some
random computers, cant u incorporate something like web based interface?

~~~
dhouston
it should degrade gracefully and work without admin rights; in addition you
can download (and soon, upload) via the web interface if you're not at one of
your computers.

~~~
mukund
Then u would win this YC for sure as i can see potential in this. Good luck
mate :)

------
bls
This is an interesting application. But, your demo video does not do it
justice: (a) It is too long; (b) your folders that you use in the video have
too many files in them; you say about 10x more words than necessary; and (d)
your voice, combined with the bad microphone input, make the explanation
sounds pad.

Your main competition is not USB drives: it is HotMail, GMail, and Yahoo!
Mail. Once people are taught the "email it to yourself" trick, they love to
use it--I think because it is not so intuitive for people, yet it is so
simple, that they are proud that they are doing something so clever.

------
zkinion
It looks great man. I know you'll be accepted. The writing is on the wall.
Posting your video here just seals the deal, and puts yourself out there. I
didn't apply to YC, but if I did, I'd be putting my stuff up here as well. I'm
surprized nobody else has posted like you did. That takes some balls and self-
belief.

I didn't agree with some of the things you've said before, like IP rules, etc.
but you've earned my respect. Best of luck to you. :)

-Zak Kinion 

~~~
vlad
I don't know if he applied; he has tried before and was rejected. Way to
represent the lone rangers!

~~~
zkinion
I'm guessing he did, though I may be wrong. The thread title was "...YC
app..." something like that.

I don't see how after that video and that post how he wouldn't be accepted
unless the YC people have some pre-existing opinions about the future of
online storage.

~~~
vlad
I totally missed that. I just know he was interviewed for this past winter
session, and it came up that he was a single founder. I sure hope he gets in,
because it shows that you don't always need a team if you can invision,
design, draw, code, and test your idea yourself. Too many cooks can spoil the
broth, sometimes. Plus, I believe when leading a product that you need to have
one leader, not a committee. And, the other thing I believe is that a leader
must be willing to do, by himself, anything he asks of others.

~~~
dhouston
couple of clarifications :)

1) i have other people working with me on this. i did prototype it alone, but
i don't intend to be a single founder. i won't belabor it here, but it's
really a good idea to get other people on board and the reasons yc and
everyone have for not encouraging single founders are valid. your odds are
much worse, and playing superman gets old after a while when you're trying to
do everything -- and it's more fun to have more people involved and excited
about the idea anyway.

2) re: applying: i am applying for this round, but actually didn't apply for
funding for the last wfp. however, i did apply 2 years ago (with a cofounder)
with another idea and wasn't selected.

------
chandrab
Nice Application...the question I have is on the marketing side- how are you
going to attract users? and how are you going to differentiate yourself from
the hordes of other online storage vendors, esp. to the newbie users who can't
tell them apart easy? (so you have to have a simple, compelling story for
them)

~~~
andreyf
I'd also love to see how you answered the "Whom do you fear the most" and
"What makes this hard to replicate" questions on the app...

------
dhouston
oh, and a mac port is coming :)

~~~
vlad
Drew, this is awesome! All of the features you mentioned are exactly what
people need.

------
iamwil
Kudos from myself as well. In fact, just today I was having problems with ftp
and samba, and was wishing for a more graphical rsync. Perhaps it is true that
a good way to do a web app is to implement a unix command. :) Good job. can't
wait until it's out for the rest of us.

------
tyohn
I like the app; but instead of telling people to throw away their USB drive
maybe you could incorporate a sync feature that would allow users to work on
their files offline. Sometimes you just dont have internet access. Just a
thought.

~~~
dhouston
yup -- i didn't get to mention it, but a big piece of dropbox is that it's a
local/"normal" folder that's synced in the background -- you can work on your
files offline (that, among other things, drove me nuts about typical online
drives) and get local IO speeds (good for photoshop, film, etc.)

------
danielha
Very cool, Drew. I've been meaning to bug you about a beta invite. Good job on
the screencast too; it gave me a much better idea of what Dropbox was aiming
for than what I had originally thought.

------
danw
Looks wonderful. You might want to check on the trademark 'dropbox'. I know
dropsend used to be called dropbox but had to change due to trademark
difficulties. Otherwise excellent work.

------
eugenejen
Nice job! I was thinking something like this for a while and wonder why no one
did it. It looks like dropbox just scratches the right itches for me.

------
aaroniba
Sweet! I especially like the right-click, "copy link location" feature: really
useful and should help user adoption.

------
noisemaker
Great job guys, hope to see you get picked up in the next session. Keep me
posted for the mac version.

------
abstractbill
This definitely qualifies as Something People Want, and it looks nicely
executed. Very cool!

------
budu3
Wow dude! This looks like a good competitor for Google"s "GDrive". I hope you
get accepted.

~~~
jganetsk
Well there doesn't seem to be a GDrive at the moment... but there are many
other similar online storage solutions.

Techcrunch had an article with 13 of them...
<http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/01/31/the-online-storage-gang/>

It's a pretty crowded space. And XDrive gets you 5 GB for free, 50 GB for
$9.95 a month. I can't expect Dropbox to charge those prices, given S3 as a
backend. The margin just isn't really there, especially given the number of
uses that will want free storage. And I think competitors can duplicate
Dropbox's nice front end. In fact, here's an open source front end to SVN
which is similar to Dropbox's:

<http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/>

Sorry for all the negativity, I guess I'm trying to play devil's advocate
here. It's a wonderful product you got going there, but I think you will have
to work really hard.

~~~
budu3
Well, the fact that GDrive is not materialising makes this idea a great
aquisition target. Then again Google might squash it like it did Kiko if/when
it rolls out GDrive.

------
amichail
Somewhat related:

<http://www.tubesnow.com/>

------
zach
Great demo, great product, great business, well done.

------
richcollins
Nice work Drew! Lets see it on the mac now ;)

------
Readmore
That's hot!

------
nostrademons
I'm impressed.

------
rokhayakebe
good stuff man. hope you make it.

------
daliso
brilliant!

------
palish
How are conflicts handled? If you take your laptop offline, modify your image,
then modify the same image on your desktop, then plug your laptop back in,
what happens?

Great job by the way.

~~~
jganetsk
The Coda guys asked this question nearly 20 years ago.

<http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/>

Sorry for being a Coda troll.

