

You Actually Did This? - admp
http://steveblank.com/2010/05/06/you-actually-did-this/

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staunch
It's a huge stretch that Dropbox is portrayed as a "Lean Startup" or that
people are claiming they used "Customer Development" methodology.

Dropbox is the classic case of a good idea brilliantly executed, with very
little change or course correction on the product or customer targeting. Three
years later the product is essentially the same as the YC app described it.
It's as close to "build it and they will come" as it gets in practice.

Xobni seems like a much better example, but in their case it's not clear if
they've found a winning strategy. They could still fail to return a profit to
their investors, which means it's early to call them a success story.

Dropbox on the other hand is virtually guaranteed a $100 million+ exit. They
could probably sell today for $100 million. An IPO in the future is not out of
the question.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
I wonder why it isn't more brilliantly executed. The idea is good, but
execution is limited. E.g. I can't tell who has a file open - resulting in
dozens of conflicted files in my dropbox-using-club, with no good way to
reconcile them, and no help from Dropbox. And why am I charged for storage
that belongs to me? and we largely reconcile files P2P so the bandwidth I also
already pay for? In fact we will be leaving Dropbox because one of our members
exceeded 2Gb, and we ALL have to pay and "upgrade" fee to continue - which
comes to more that $1000.00 per year for our club.

~~~
mbrubeck
Dropbox has pretty much nailed "personal storage" (for one person or maybe a
2-4 person family), but it sounds like there's still a market for whoever can
bring true large-group version control to non-programmers.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
We're 11 people. Not too large, still it only takes 3 to hit the problem.

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faramarz
I thought the Xobni deck was incredibly insightful. it's definitely worth the
download [http://www.slideshare.net/brezina/5-stages-of-xobnis-
growth-...](http://www.slideshare.net/brezina/5-stages-of-xobnis-growth-
and-5-pivots-along-the-way)

