

What happened to Dropbox, and why some startups are in private beta forever? - ardit33

This is a semi-rant that applies to other startups.  I needed a quick solution for a online backup, and thought dropbox would be perfect for it.  I go to their site, and it seems they are still in private beta?<p>I know they are working on it, and made a huge splash few months ago.  But lots of time has passed, and they haven't released it in the wild.   It seems that once you anounce something, maybe a couple of months of "private beta" should be enough, to get something more substantial, then have a more public beta, while you improve it. Why turn customers away?  Early users usually are willing to put up with some functionality missing, as long as they know at some point the features will come.<p>It seems that this trend is among other startups,  anounce something, make a splash,  then nothing.   Guys, don't turn  your customers away.  A two-three months period for a private beta, should be more than enough, then go to a public beta  (gmail was in "beta" for years).
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mdasen
I think you underestimate how difficult scaling is.

So, you want to offer 2GB of redundant storage over the internet to everyone.
Well, first you're going to need 6-10GB for everyone to cover redundancy.
You're also going to need an amazingly high amount of bandwidth to cover it -
especially at the start because new users are the ones likely to decide "oh, I
want to see how well this works so I'll just test upload download random
things for a while" because of the novelty.

So, you assume that you can store 4TB per server at $1,000 per server assuming
you're buying crappy white-box stuff - really scraping the efficiency barrel
here. That means that for every 400 people, you have to spend a grand.

OK, so let's say that only 1 in 10 actually use the product, that's $1,000 for
ever 4,000 people. Still not great. Most importantly though, your staff is
only so large. You're not just allocating more space on S3 - you have to be
installing and configuring these servers - oh, and let's not forget that rack
space isn't cheap. Without bandwidth or power, rack space can go for $1,000
per month for around 40U.

So, let's say they just open it up and 100,000 people sign up for it - not
unreasonable. It would require $25,000 to buy the hardware considering a 10%
usage rate (people only actually storing 200MB rather than the 2GB limit).
Above that, we're talking about installing 25,000 boxes into racks and
configuring them all. Above that, they need to pay for electricity for all
those boxen. Let's assume dirt cheap power at 4 cents per kWh and decently
efficient servers drawing 200 watts (neither of which are going to be true in
real life). That's $200/hr to keep those servers alive. Going monthly, we hit
$144,000! Great way to blow through VC! Oh, bandwidth, how could we forget
about that.

I'm going to stop beating a dead horse right now. It is really hard to provide
what Dropbox is trying to do. It makes a TON of sense to start slowly in their
case. This isn't like a social networking site where it matters how many of
your friends are on nor does it have the luxury of storing very little data.
Most importantly, unlike the Web 2.0 stuff out there, Dropbox's usefulness is
harder to do. While many social apps are highly polished, Dropbox has a much
higher technical barrier. Specifically, you need to buy a lot of iron to run
it. This isn't something where you can use S3 (or a smal MogileFS cluster) to
store/serve icons or some user photos. Do you think someone else is going to
come along and compete with Dropbox? Sure, but not like they would with
something like Twitter.

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jonknee
Your point is valid, but your math is wildly inaccurate.

> Above that, we're talking about installing 25,000 boxes into racks and
> configuring them all.

No, it would mean installing 25 boxes (100,000 people / 4,000 users per server
= 25 servers). And that means your power estimate is off by x1000 as well.

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aston
Yo. If you give me your email address, I can give you an invite.

As for your questions, the short answer is that we're holding back on going
public until we're sure our infrastructure is able to scale, the data-loss-
causing bugs are wiped out, and our feature set makes most people happy.

~~~
adammichaelc
My friend at school turned me on to you guys. I love Dropbox. I'm curious.
What kind of business model are you looking at? Freemium? Something else?

Thanks.

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DenisM
Once you have a splash in the press it's stupid to not let the resulting
potential users in. There, I said it - stupid. There are very many companies
that have lost their only chance to sell me their products this way - they
announce a product, I come over there, can't find the "buy now" button, turn
around and leave. Their story will never be picked up by the same site again,
because it's old news. I will never remember to come back. Bye-bye.

~~~
jamongkad
You know what, initially I was inclined to disagree with you but based on my
own experience that is exactly how I felt for some companies that offer
compelling products but don't offer the following:

a. Online Demo (this is very important for me as I love to test drive
something for a while before I purchase.)

b. Easy way to pay for said product.

The reason being is that if a company cannot do this for me then it is most
likely I will forget about that company in a few days and move on to someone
else that could offer me an easier alternative.

There are a number of things off the top of my head but I'm pretty sleepy at
the moment. But that's all I could think of for now.

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scumola
I kind of agree. I'd rather be able to use a site knowing that it was in beta
(as long as it worked mostly) and if there were any data loss, at least I know
that it's in beta and wouldn't be too pissed if some data was lost. I like to
use new services and I don't tend to put all of my eggs into one basket
anyway, so using dropbox for vital backups is not the greatest idea in the
world since it's still in beta, but as far as using it to sync some machines
with non-vital data, I'd love to be able to use it. (I've already got a beta
account and I love it, BTW). :)

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DenisM
Many smaller startups probably have fear of customers. It's one thing to code,
the other thing to deal with people. PG should write an article about this
subject, this can easily be the biggest failure factor, ever.

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Harkins
JungleDisk does easy online backups: <http://jungledisk.com>

~~~
jkent
Syncplicity does too. I've been using them for a few months, very happy.
<http://www.syncplicity.com/>

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truebosko
I too wish dropbox would open up. Last week I recommended it to a friend
thinking it might be out of beta but then I soon realized it wasn't :/

(P.S if anyone has an invite I would love one :~) )

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subwindow
Some people think it is a great PR strategy. That is because sometimes it is.
The problem is when you fool yourself into thinking that "sometimes" is
"always". Or, at least, "always for me".

~~~
lyime
Definitely not a good PR strategy if people seem to forget about the service.
Especially people here. Not a good sign. Being public about issues or your
service greatly helps the company and the people interested in that service.

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c1sc0
I couldn't care less if they stayed in private 'beta' for another year. Let
them work out the kinks. I appreciate them taking care of existing users
first, then worry about growth. This kind of service needs to be reliable.
Keep up the good work, I'm using getdropbox all the time.

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sysop073
I just got my beta code a few weeks ago and discovered they still don't let
you download the Linux client, so I'm currently waiting patiently. Is there
any kind of timeline on that? They don't say much on the blog other than that
a client exists, and I can't have it

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patrickg-zill
Are you talking about the drop.io service?

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rob
I'm assuming getdropbox.com.

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prakash
ummm...gmail is _still_ in beta.

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pius
right, but not a _private_ beta

~~~
zvikara
right, but it was in private beta for almost 3 years.

