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.
What I wonder about Dropbox is how profitable it actually is.
Assuming five million users and each only uses half their available space, so 1GB.
We assume they're at the top plan on Amazon S3 and people are transfering maybe 100-200mb a month. All in all about 7c/user/month for storage and bandwidth.
If we take similar numbers from Evernote (maybe a stretch?) and say 2% of their users subscribe at the lowest price plan ($99/year or $8.25/month), that's about 17c/month/user revenue.
So over five million, we have about $500k/month in gross profit.
Of course, we're ignoring the cost of providing the upgraded plans.
Not bad though, especially if their free/subscriber ratio is higher.
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.
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.
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.