

From Zero to a Million Users - Dropbox and Xobni Lessons Learned - dhouston
http://blog.adamsmith.cc/2010/05/from-zero-to-a-million-users-dropbox-and-xobni-lessons-learned.html

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Sukotto
Surprisingly engaging considering that it's just the slides from their talk.
Does anyone have a link to a video (or even just audio)?

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10ren
Here's video for a different talk, by Drew (Dropbox). There's a fair bit of
overlap: <http://www.justin.tv/startuplessonslearned/b/262672510> (story here
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1290303>)

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kadavy
Slide 57 is a good one (Netflix):

Total Lifetime Value of a user: $6/mo x 22 mo. lifetime = $132

Acquisition Cost of user: $40 affiliate or advertising

Lifetime gross profit of user: $92

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Mongoose
Seems like a great complement to Drew's other lessons learned deck:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1290303>

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myth_drannon
How Dropbox is different from hundreds of "storage in the cloud" companies ?
All of what I saw in the slideshow I might assume was more or less done by the
other companies. General marketing fluff that is quite obvious.( Nothing
against Dropbox, since I'm a happy user). Luck played a certain part(big
part?). I want to see the slideshows of companies that took years to get to
100,000 users :) Then I might think they had less luck and their lessons would
apply to your average startup. Patrick McKenzie for example (no offence), I
don't think he was lucky it just lots and lots of work and I get real gems
from his talks/blogs...

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pg
The same way Google was different from the crowd of search engines that
already existed when they started: better execution.

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mixmax
Interesting to note from a success story how little tech and how much
marketing was involved.

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mikeryan
I think this kind of thing gets overlooked a lot on HN considering the tech
heavy role most have here. Personally I'm not surprised at all.

But never underestimate marketing. Building the best widget in the world means
nothing if no one knows it exists.

(that being said having the best widget in the world is, in itself, a great
marketing tool)

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jakarta
At the same time though, their products so good that it wasn't really
necessary for them to hire some stellar biz dev/sales whiz, they were instead
able to use these methods to attract users. I don't think these methods would
work as well if the product was not up to par.

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pstevensza
Great slideshow. I voted with my wallet for DropBox after buying my iPhone and
finding them in the AppStore. I don't really need 50GB worth of storage, but
it's an awesome app that I'll make daily use of, so it seemed a shame to stick
to the free account and not say thanks by subscribing.

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amatriain
Is this Xobni really comparable to Dropbox? I mean, I hadn't heard of Xobni
until just now.

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harshpotatoes
I don't know what xobni's advertising was like in other cities, but I was very
surprised with the amount of advertising they had here in Seattle. Just a few
weeks ago, when Microsoft released Office 2010, Xobni had this gigantic
advertising campaign. I don't think I've ever seen so much advertising for a
simple app.

Advertising I saw: Tons of teens dancing with Xobni signs around the edges of
the Microsoft campus. Planes circling Seattle, with signs trailing behind
them. Radio ads. Bus ads. TV commercials. Tons of shit plastering Bellevue.

It was impressive to say the least. I'm probably one of the most difficult
consumers to advertise to, and I nearly wanted to try the product after seeing
that advertisement campaign.

Anyways, nothing for me to say about the product, just the advertising.

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mikeryan
That's just you ;-)

<http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/202911.asp>

They seem to be courting Redmond.

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brezina
We are courting msft employees to use Xobni again. At one point we had 16k
msft employees using Xobni. Then they started beta testing Outlook 2010
internally and we weren't compatible, so we lost all but 1,000. Our seattle
campaign was designed to let them all know we are now compatible with Outlook
2010. When MSFT buys a Xobni Enterprise license for their employees, they will
easily pay back the cost of our advertising campaign :)

And despite some media theories, No we didn't do this to get MSFT to acquire
us.

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dchs
Awesome slides - inspiring stuff!

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scott_s
Funny timing, since I just got spam [1] from Dropbox.

[1] It was an email from an address I don't recognize using a first name that
no one I know has.

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wildmXranat
I think users get more storage if you use their referral link. Could be a
sleazy way of trolling for storage.

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staunch
Which they should crack down _very_ hard on. The recipient of an affiliate's
spam can't tell the difference between them and the actual company. A quick
way to a tarnished reputation.

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grep
Nice slides.

