

Ask HN: Review our webapp: AirDropper - jesselamb

Hi everyone! My co-founder and I just finished our second pass at our new app and we were hoping to get some feedback from the HN community.<p>https://www.airdropper.com<p>AirDropper is a Dropbox companion app for requesting files from anyone with an email address. You just authorize your Dropbox account, make a request, and we put the file the person uploads into your Dropbox. Everything's secure in transit, we can handle larger files than most email services, and it's really easy for the person sending the file.<p>To provide some context, I started my own law firm this year, and I immediately ran into some friction in trying to securely get files from clients. Many clients were uncomfortable sending sensitive documents as email attachments. I walked a few clients through signing up with Dropbox and sharing a folder, but that caused a lot of back and forth with creating an account, setting sharing permissions, etc. I talked through the issue with my perennial side-project partner and AirDropper is what we came up with as a solution. We made a "two week" version a little while ago and we got some great feedback, especially from designer friends who need to get files from clients that are too big to email. Today's version incorporates their feedback, along with some improvements we've stumbled into along the way.<p>What do you think?
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jacobian
Slick. I can see myself using this frequently.

I have a couple questions/comments:

\- It's not exactly "secure", right? AirDropper has access to my file while
it's "in transit" so AirDropper's really only "secure" if I trust AirDropper.
You could, for example, be keeping a copy of everyone's files. So who are you,
and why should I trust you?

\- When I linked my Dropbox account I just gave you full access to my whole
Dropbox. Ugh. Is there a way you can just get access to the directory in
question?

These seem like obvious new user questions so you might want to add an FAQ,
perhaps.

~~~
jesselamb
I understand the concern. All traffic from your computer to AirDropper and
from AirDropper to Dropbox is SSLed. We actually don't have full access to
your Dropbox account, just a sandboxed folder we create called AirDropper. We
don't plan on expanding beyond sandbox access. We don't keep any copies of
files you send or receive, though we do technically have access to them as
long as their stored in the AirDropper folder in your Dropbox. You can
deauthorize the app anytime on Dropbox.com.

As far as who's behind AirDropper, my name is Jesse Lamb and my co-founder is
Nick Stamas. I'm a Florida attorney that works with tech companies on business
formations, contracts, and intellectual property. I also blog at
<http://www.notmylawyer.com>, which has been on the front page of HN a few
times. Nick is a designer/developer who just moved to NYC. We've known each
other our whole lives and we've been on various teams together for the past 6
years. The name of our company is Gruntverk, LLC. We don't have a site for the
company yet, but our information is on file with Florida's Division of
Corporations.

A FAQ is a great idea, and I really appreciate you bringing these issues up.

Thanks!

~~~
jacobian
Thanks a bunch, Jesse -- I really appreciate you taking the time to answer in
such detail!

Like I said, it's slick app and I totally see myself using it, so this is just
icing on the cake.

~~~
jesselamb
Of course! Your feedback is gold. Thank you so much for it.

------
acepelon
I think this is a great idea for me- I work technical support and often have
to get large files from customers/ partners who do not have the ability to
send them in a secure manner. Also I work on about 4 different computers
during the day and it is helpful that it stores into Dropbox by default so
that I automatically get the file on each computer that I have that account
on. If worried about the secureness of your Dropbox, you can create a free new
account that only stores your airdropper folder and share that folder with
your primary account. That way no email addy or Dropbox is exposed, only the
info. As stated already, if you encrypt the info, there should be little
exposure. It is not necessary for everyone, but for someone like me who has to
get files securely very often from folks with restricted firewalls, it seems a
great solution. The file size would be the only limitation that might require
me to find another method- sometimes even 50 MB isn't big enough which is I
assume what you've said you have tested up to.

------
trustfundbaby
I went directly to your site from the link, without reading your post in its
entirety and couldn't see the use of this until I read your post and the
comments...

I think you need to take the time to explain who would use this and why on
your front page a lot better from the beginning. I also don't think the
diagrams are descriptive enough, for example I didn't really understand how
exactly steps 2 and 3 worked until I read your post in detail.

So in closing ... market this more explicitly to devs/graphic
designers/lawyers etc (folks who need to get files from non-technical people)
and do a better job of explaining _exactly_ how the product works and it could
turn into a nice stream of passive income.

PS: An idea would be to allow your subscribers brand the upload page with
their logo and colors then use their domain/subdomain names for it. This would
make their clients even more comfortable with uploading sensitive information.

------
exline
Looks good. I like diagram on the front page explaining things, but change the
font for the text. It looks a bit sloppy. Also increase the font size a bit to
optimize the size for the boxes.

One thing I don't see is a price list. How do you plan on making a business
out of this? Monthly subscription on top of dropbox?

~~~
jesselamb
Thanks for the feedback. We haven't built the billing piece yet, but we're
planning a freemium model based on number of requests per week.

------
javery
<http://www.airdropper.com>

~~~
jesselamb
Thanks for the clickable link.

------
photon_off
Couldn't this work without dropbox? You're limiting your set of potential
customers by mandating they use dropbox. You're also missing out on some easy
cash for hosting that users would be happy to spend if it meant easy access to
files they need. If I can hook up my dropbox... Fine. But if I can access an
organized online directory of requested files, by client, date, size, and any
parameters I entered at time of request... That'd be pretty sweet. You might
be able to take cash that would otherwise go to dropbox.

~~~
jesselamb
That's true, there might be opportunities beyond just supplementing Dropbox's
service. Thanks!

------
barmstrong
Seems like a good, although niche, idea.

Out of curiosity - were the files you needed from clients PDFs that required
signatures? That seems to be the primary use case. There are some interesting
startups around this area, but I haven't seen someone nail it 100% yet.

~~~
jesselamb
Yeah, sometimes it's signed documents but I also get client materials that are
particularly sensitive.

I've been thinking through the signed documents problem, but I'm not sure the
market is ready yet. We've had legislation in the U.S. that legitimizing
electronic signature for about a decade, but there's a comfort to a signed
physical copy that is hard for people to give up for big contracts. I'm
wondering what user affordance will finally break through that mental barrier,
but I haven't come up with anything yet.

------
harpastum
Looks really nice, but as helpful as the four-paned image is, I think it would
be really useful if you had a link somewhere to a (semi-)technical overview of
what's actually going on.

Like a page of screenshots of the actual service UI and some details as to how
everything is set up (for example, I initially thought that the uploader would
also need a dropbox acount. After looking again, I'm pretty sure that's not
the case).

It just seems rather jarring that the only thing you can do from the home page
is give airdropper access to your dropbox.

That said, it looks like an awesome service; I'm sure I'll be using it.

~~~
jesselamb
Great idea. Yeah, we definitely need to make more obvious that the sender
doesn't need a Dropbox account. That's a big value point.

Sceenshots and maybe a screencast is a great idea. I think we'll start with a
FAQ since the implementation cost is so much cheaper and go from there.

Thanks for the feedback!

------
ams6110
I genuinely wish you the best, but this does not seem to solve any problem
that I can see.

If I want a file from someone, the easiest thing is for me to email him and
say "send me file X" and he will reply with file X attached.

If he's hesitant to send file X because it contains sensitive information, he
can encrypt it first.

If the file is sensitive, I have to decide whether I trust the person asking
for it, but assuming I do, I also have to decide if I trust AirDropper and
Dropbox? If I don't, then I encrypt the file anyway, at which point I might as
well just email it directly.

~~~
jesselamb
You make a fair point. I'd say though, putting the important issue of trust
aside for a second, it's not that we don't solve any problem, but that we
solve a problem for which there are already other solutions. And in practice
those solutions have disadvantages.

Taking file encryption as an example, you can certainly encrypt a file before
sending it, but that depends on the sophistication of the sender. They may not
be familiar with how to encrypt a file. And if they are, it's kind of a hassle
dealing with encrypted files on both ends. You have to transmit the password
in some separate medium from the file itself, and now you have to decide
whether to keep both the encrypted and unencrypted versions. It's friction
that our solution obviates.

Likewise, you can send an email attachment for non-sensitive files, but every
email provider has differing file size caps. We're still testing the limits of
our service, but we've already successfully handled files more than double
Gmail's size caps, which are among the highest in the industry. Right now most
of the alternatives to attachments require a fair amount of setup for the
sender. Ours just requires they visit a page and upload the file.

Coming back to the issue of trust, that's definitely going to be a challenge
for us as a company just starting out. If you have any ideas about how we can
develop that trust I'd welcome them.

Thanks for the awesome feedback. :)

------
freshfey
More like a minor point, but I'd like to see that envelope more white-ish, the
home page is really beautiful but the envelope takes a little eye-candy from
it. :)

Good luck with your project!

------
brosephius
this is superficial, but that font looks terrible, at least on my screen.
honestly, it looks like an amateur's first attempt at making a font. otherwise
it's a cool product idea :)

~~~
nickstamas
Nothing is superficial, we always appreciate feedback. Can you tell me what
browser you're using? Most of the site is set in Goudy Bookletter 1911, by The
League of Moveable Type. Is this what it looks like in your browser?
<http://bit.ly/2oH1TM>

~~~
qeorge
Same problem for me:

<http://i.imgur.com/isg5H.png>

Firefox 3.6.8, Windows 7.

Otherwise, great design and idea.

~~~
jesselamb
Thanks, we're looking into it.

------
timae
I actually gave my dropbox username/password to someone just hours ago to
login to my dropbox and upload a couple large files. This is definitely a
better way. Thanks!

------
thiele
One feature that seems to be missing is allowing recipients (uploaders) to
send multiple files.

Currently, uploaders can't use the same request link twice so the requester
would need to send 3 requests if they wanted 3 files.

It seems like the solution might be to have a "send another file" link, after
the uploader has chosen their first file.

All in all, really slick tool.

Cheers!

~~~
jesselamb
Yeah, we need to work on implementing multiple file support really soon. I
like the idea of a "send another file" link. Maybe add an "allow multiple
files" option to the request form. I'll see if I can convince my co-founder,
he's stingy with form elements. :)

Thanks!

------
jsulak
My father, an accountant, was talking to me about this very problem a few
weeks ago, and I thought it was a good business opportunity. Congrats on
taking a shot at it.

One question: Have you given any consideration for sending files the other way
- in other words, from you to a less-sophisticated client? That's the other
side of this equation.

~~~
jesselamb
We're definitely considering that once we're satisfied with how the current
flow works.

------
DavidPP
Would it be possible to get a unique url so that I don't have to send an email
? (ex : if I want to send it by GTalk)

~~~
nickstamas
Yep, there is a checkbox on the form that allows you to skip sending the
email. Instead, on the confirmation page, you'll be given a unique URL and a
password that you can send however you'd like.

~~~
DavidPP
Oh I see. It's work but you have a bug and one or two minor "irritant" :

\- If I check the checkbox, I have to input a valid email or I get a something
went wrong error. (bug) \- The person received an email even if the checkbox
was checked (bug) \- I have to input a description of the file requested (not
needed)

~~~
nickstamas
Thanks, you found our first production bug! Should be fixed now :)

We still will require the file description, because in our opinion, the page
that allows someone to upload the file should have some sort of reminder as to
what file they are supposed to be uploading is (even if it is very brief).

------
aw3c2
Just from visiting the site I did not understand what "requesting" is. Would I
browse some other dropbox user's filelist and ask him to send me one of the
files? Reading above it rather sounds like "Provide a place for someone to
upload a file and then find it in your dropbox".

~~~
jesselamb
I see what you mean. The vocabulary has been tricky for us so far. We'll keep
working on it. Thanks!

------
cont4gious
very nice idea and execution.

might want to make it clearer that the person you're trying to get the file
from doesn't need a dropbox account, as that seems to be the big idea behind
this.

~~~
jesselamb
good point, we'll try to make that more obvious. Thanks!

------
bickfordb
It seems like you will put a lot of bike messengers out of work!

~~~
jesselamb
Ha, thanks! Yeah, we're hoping to expand so that you can send files too, but
we haven't finished thinking through how we can improve that workflow.

------
jmbentley
Tried this out, very nice seemless integration with my dropbox

~~~
jesselamb
Thanks!

------
OoTheNigerian
Really slick UI and wonderful idea. But I think you are filling a hole in
Dropbox.

~~~
jesselamb
Thanks. Yeah, we are definitely filling a gap, the same way a Twitter client
supplements the Twitter platform or an email program supplements the email
protocol. Dropbox has strong potential as a platform player over the next
couple of years. It's the best cloud storage system there is, and we're hoping
apps like ours and the efforts Dropbox is putting into mobile will make it
more useful to more people.

~~~
blacksmythe
I think the meaning was your service becomes obsolete once Dropbox decides to
implement a similar function.

(Nice idea by the way.)

~~~
jesselamb
That's certainly a risk, but it seems like a lot of Dropbox's resources are
going into mobile, at least for the time being. We'll see though.

