

Dropbox (YC S07) Announces 4 Million Users, Hires A VP From Salesforce - edw519
http://www.techcrunch.com/2010/01/20/dropbox-4-million-user/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=My+Yahoo

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whereareyou
I Love Dropbox. I got in as an early beta tester and have been a paying
customer since the day the option was offered.

Dropbox helped me convince my old boss that I could work from home.

I use Dropbox to back up my iTunes music library...for some reason I used to
lose a lot of my music every time I got a new computer.

All my work and personal files can be accessed and emailed right from my
iPhone.

I sync 4 computers: work laptop, home laptop, a dell zino for my tv and my
iPhone. I never have to worry about a thing... Dropbox just works.

~~~
kolya3
"Dropbox helped me convince my old boss that I could work from home."

Can you talk more about this? How do you use Dropbox for telecommuting and how
did you convince your boss it was an effective tool for telecommuting?

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whereareyou
Before Dropbox our files were stored on our individual desktop computers. My
work had to be done at the office because we did not have laptops. With
Dropbox, I could work on all the same stuff from home I just had to install
the software on my home computer. There are obviously other solutions...like a
laptop...but for us, dropbox was simple and worked well.

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lecha
Prediction: Dropbox will enter a cloud platform race with a set of APIs in a
bid to become a File System of the Web.

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ryanwaggoner
Wouldn't this place them in competition with S3? I think that would be a
pretty stupid move, actually. That's a razor-thin margin business, and will
only be more so when Google and Microsoft inevitably jump into the fray.

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tumult
S3 is not really a file system. It's more like a key/value store for arbitrary
data. If you wanted a filesystem-like interface, you'd need something in front
of it.

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joshu
Congrats to Dropbox! I wish I hadn't flubbed on investing in them.

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rms
Me too!

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mtoledo
I think its worth of note how most of the comments they get on techcrunch are
people just coming in to say they love the service. A trend I've seen on
dropbox that I can't say I've seen with too many other services in the past.

I, for one, am one very happy paying customer too, and have said it more than
once.

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axod
What's the definition of "user" here?

edit: Not sure why the downvote. "4 million users" can mean pretty much
anything.

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jackowayed
When someone wants to use dropbox, they fill out an HTML form to create an
account. Once 4M people do that (or a little more since some people delete
accounts), they have 4M users.

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axod
Thanks. So this is 'total users since records began', rather than any type of
'active user' count. That's what I figured, but wasn't sure.

Just wish articles would quantify what 'user' means when they say "X has Y
users".

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jackowayed
Well, it's not like I know that for a fact, but I don't know why they would
make their user count seem less impressive than it is. If they were just
counting active users, they'd almost certainly say "4 million active users"
very clearly.

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dlib
The competition for Dropbox will be fierce I expect. I love how easy it is to
work with and that it works on Windows, OS X and Linux but it lacks proper in-
document search on the web interface and no editing capabilities. Also, Google
Docs has an excellent PDF viewer. Nonetheless, great app.

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netcan
I would love to see Dropbox and Google Docs work well together. Overall, I
don't want to change my habits to much. That's why I like dropbox. I want to
keep using the office programs that I've been using up till now, save them
normally, access them normally via the OS file system.

The web access is great but marginal, for me. It would be a lot better if the
default experience was that clicking a spreadsheet or powerpoint opened it in
Google Docs (or similar) rather then downloading it.

A web experience on the web and a desktop experience on the desktop.

I think the problem with things like Google Docs (or Zoho, for example) is
that they are trying to get you off the desktop. MS wants to keep you on the
Desktop. Google might not be highly motivated to sync your spreedsheet to your
PC for easy access via excel.

Dropbox might pull off a serious coup if they became the platform agnostic
glue. Log in to Zoho, all your dropbox files are available to you. You edit
them, they are still available to you via open office, Google Docs, MS Office,
whatever.

Google, I suspect, might want the filesystem to be with them though.

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modoc
After a few months of struggling to find a use for it personally (I have good
backups, Mac.com synced web accessible storage, etc...) we started using it
for our small business's file. Now we all have access to all the in-process
documents, contracts, etc... and can access things as needed on our iPhones,
etc... Seems like a really great solution for small business file management.

~~~
JacobAldridge
Similar situation - I've been following the Dropbox story as I have other YC
companies, but never had a compelling personal use.

I assumed a new global role with my company this month, and the second task I
was assigned was 'Register for Dropbox and tell us how we can use it for our
160+ people'. That it was specifically 'Dropbox' shows how a clean and simple
service that works easily can make massive inroads.

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revorad
Does anyone have an idea of how many paying customers they have?

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fjabre
Freemium models usually have a low percentage of paying accounts, i.e. between
5%-15% paid subscriptions.

Short of polling a random sampling of users we probably have to hear from
dropbox for those numbers.

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shafqat
That's sounds high. Isn't it closer to 2-3%?

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drusenko
1-5% is the norm, usually towards the low end

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bshep
I dropped my account due to lack of read/only file sharing capabilities.

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zzleeper
I'm an avid user.. but stuff like that is also hurting me..

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jbert
> I'm an avid user.. but stuff like that is also hurting me..

Disclaimer: I work for <http://www.humyo.com/>

Humyo is not as well-known as dropbox (especially in the US) but we have a
significant userbase (>500k) and are I think fairly feature-rich. (e.g. We've
got a number of the top-requested features on dropbox-votebox already
implemented, have Zoho integration, versioning, recyclebin, WebDAV access).
Have you considered and discounted us or have we not made ourselves known to
you?

There are two schools of thought - "more features == better" and "fewer
features == better focus on important features == better". I'd appreciate
others' thoughts on this. Is the humyo featureset: 'good' or 'too confusing'?
(or is there some other turn-off on the humyo site/signup process)?

(I've held off commenting on other dropbox threads since I don't want to spam
HN with what might be seen as an advert, but since this sub-thread is about
featureset I'm interested in the comparison.)

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bshep
I hadn't heard about the company you work for. I will be checking it out
shortly.

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jbert
Thanks. If you have any specific comments please reply or email me (address in
profile).

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sadiq
It's a shame their API seems to be taking an eternity. I gave up waiting about
two months ago.

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brlewis
Don't wait. Do what I did and hack something together with a Linux CLI install
of Dropbox on a server. I did that months ago and users love it, even though
setup isn't as smooth as it would be if I had an API to work with.

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revorad
That's a great idea. Would you be willing to share more details on your hack?

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brlewis
I have a script that receives email from dropbox re shared folders and pulls
the email address and folder name. This info gets put in a table. A cron job
looks in this table and notices when the folder appears. It sends an email to
the user who has to do a final confirmation step to protect against fake
emails. Once that's done the cron job checks every minute for new files,
processes them as it would files uploaded through the web, then deletes them.

Hackish parts: 1. The email format could change. 2. If the folder name isn't
unique the email contains the non-unique name. Eg "ourdoings" in email, then
when I accept, the folder is named "ourdoings (28)". I have to change the
folder by hand. 3. They have to use the same email for dropbox and ourdoings
signup. 4. Often people make subfolders of their "Photos" folder which doesn't
fit the workflow.

There are changes I could make to help address these issues. It just hasn't
been a high priority. The system works great once setup is done. I'm really
glad I implemented it rather than just wait for an api. There's no more
convenient way to upload photos.

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revorad
Thanks Bruce.

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strooltz
We use DB as a "file server" in our small office. I also use it to collaborate
with other designers/developers for sharing comps, files, and other content.

I currently use git for versioning but i've though about trying to do a build
for mediatemple to use that for deployment and updating some of our smaller
web clients where git is overkill.

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nobosh
Dropbox has just touched the surface of what they are setup to accomplish.
Very exciting!

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fjabre
Care to elaborate?

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grinich
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1065488>

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savrajsingh
YC S07

