I was among the naysayers. I first met Drew at pg's house just before Dropbox did YC. I listened as he explained Dropbox, and I immediately thought of a dozen reasons why it would be very difficult and probably fail (I'd recently worked on something very similar for a month or so just to figure out whether it was a direction I wanted to go with my own company, so had some familiarity with the scale of the problem...I also knew the allure of the simple parts of the problem).<p>I don't recall a whole lot about the conversation; I thought Drew was smart, and he seemed to have a pretty good understanding of all the problems he was going to have to solve. But, I still had my doubts, and walked away assuming Dropbox would not be one of the success stories out of that upcoming YC batch. We see who from that conversation is now a billionaire (or will be in the coming years)...so, it seems I was wrong. Or, at least, overly pessimistic about Drew's understanding of the problems and his ability to resolve them.<p>I refer to this pretty frequently to try to remind myself not to be the naysayer in the room: <a href="http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/03/how-to-be-right-90-of-time-and-why-id.html" rel="nofollow">http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/03/how-to-be-right-90-...</a>
I'm reminded of this Quora post on the popularity of Dropbox:<p>"Dropbox: Why is Dropbox more popular than other programs with similar functionality?<p>Well, let's take a step back and think about the sync problem and what the ideal solution for it would do:<p>There would be a folder.
You'd put your stuff in it.
It would sync.<p>They built that.<p>Why didn't anyone else build that? I have no idea.<p>"But," you may ask, "so much more you could do! What about task management, calendaring, customized dashboards, virtual white boarding. More than just folders and files!"<p>No, shut up. People don't use that crap. They just want a folder. A folder that syncs."<p><a href="http://www.quora.com/Dropbox/Why-is-Dropbox-more-popular-than-other-programs-with-similar-functionality" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/Dropbox/Why-is-Dropbox-more-popular-tha...</a>
Read the comments there. Now come back. This is why you don't ask engineers for business advice. I can't tell you how many times I've come up with an idea I think is great, go to work, and talk to my buddies in firmware. The first thing almost all the time out of their mouth is basically "why don't use solution x, in addition to y, which will basically give you the same thing" where x and y are great technologies, but kind of hack to accomplish what you're doing. It kind of always kills my energy.<p>Giving advice is cheap, and deceptively easy to make sound wise. I've found when you want to bounce an idea, you need someone smart, who will tell you what you're missing... but also be open to new ideas. A lot of people lean on either side of that line. Engineers for some reason tend to lean on the pessimistic side.
Dropbox is definitely a case where a single person's vision was required to create a revolutionary product. Judging by the comments, leaving it to HNers as a group would have just resulted in a faster usb drive.
Though they have been very successful, it's a pity that in my experience they have turned into something of a big co in the way they deal with customers and quite sneakily hide important technical limitations from hackers who might want to use them.<p>After a year or two of happy premium-paying use, I noticed dropbox was using 100% of my CPU. Some googling suggested this was due to having too many files. Ok, fair enough, perhaps there are technical limitations meaning indexing >300k files is tough (very easy to get to that count if you're keeping open source codebases on DB), so I move files out of dropbox and clear its cache. After a week of constant 24/7 100% CPU usage and dropbox failing to update anything, I contact customer support and get sent copy + pasted boilerplate telling me to do what I've already done.<p>After more than one email to say 'I've done that, what next?' I get told it's due to symlinks in my dropbox folder. I have several in node_modules folders, and have never had a problem with them before, so I find this weird but remove all symlinks from my dropbox folder. No change after several days.<p>I try deleting files on the web interface - it refuses to do so for a folder with a large number of files in, and tells me to use the desktop interface (great...)<p>Also throughout this dropbox repeatedly overwrites work files while I'm working on them (thankfully with backups.)<p>At this point the customer support tells me how to delete my account if I'm not happy and they simply stop replying to my (polite) emails.<p>Googling around it appears this issue has existed for at least a year and a half, and yet there is very little mention of it (there's a bulletpoint hidden away on their website) nor does the interface warn you about it at any point. How hard would it be to at least add a notification like 'looks like you're adding a lot of files, please don't add too many more or I might stop working'.<p>I used to hold up dropbox as a great example of a YC company that was technically innovative and something of a hacker's company, but this experience has left me quite massively disappointed.
I loved this comment:<p>> 1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.<p><i>Trivially</i> use three different systems to simulate some type of not quite automatic syncing.<p>Why do Linux users often claim something is "trivial" and then go on to list obscure commands and software packages that have to be tied together in just the right way? To me that's "possible to do", not "trivial to do".
Straight from Drew himeself:<p><pre><code> data's stored on s3, and encrypted before storage -- there'll be another
option to enter in an additional passphrase (or private key) when installing
in order to encrypt your data before it leaves your computer (kind of like
what mozy does.)
</code></pre>
It is sad to me that this never came to pass. I guess the desire to offer a web interface overrode the idea of encrypting the files before they left your computer. Not that you can't use your own encryption, but having it built in would have been great.
I think that if pg can't even tell for sure what's going to be successful and what's not, really how surprised can you be that the common HN commented couldn't tell what's going to be big.<p>If you're a startup and you're pretty sure there's a market for your product, people telling you their gut feeling really doesn't matter imo.
I wasn't on HN at the time but I do remember being an early user of Dropbox, and I remember being totally blown away on first use.<p>So I looked into my email to see when I signed up, it was 14 months after this post. I also found a gtalk chat log with the friend that recommended it, and it looks like my memory is quite wrong, I was just as skeptical as much of the linked HN thread:<p>>the thing about 2gb dropbox<p>>is i carry 6gb on my keychain<p>>and 8gb on my phone<p>>and i don't exactly trust them with important data<p>>also my iphone has shared folders that look just like any other computer on my network<p>>the keychain is kind of a hassle though and i mostly don't use it, i should probably throw it away
Here is my personal experience...<p>It is actually took place, later on when there was an announcement regarding Dropbox raising from Sequoia .<p>This was the first time I heard of Dropbox.<p>Those days building a product which did similar to what dropbox were doing, except that mine used any distributed version control it could find on a computer (I had it supporting git, mercurial and bazzar) and push to servers with SSH.<p>It was all automatic, built with python, and monitored FS for changes. Supported any number of directories, etc.<p>So I felt I have this great prototype which I considered starting working on this full-time, till that morning when I read the TC article and I realized it simply been done, and by people who now have $6M in their pocket to make it even more awesome.<p>Given the effort and dreams I built upon my own version, I remembered how I could not use dropbox for quite some time.
Honestly, I still think the idea of dropbox is ludicrous. There are many ways to share files, and sending them to a third party to host for you is the worst one of them all. Aside from the few people that really need to multiply their bandwith by many orders of magnitude, a simple file sharing server on their own PC or a server they own would do the job just fine. Besides, dropbox was just yet another iteration of online file hosting (I'm pretty sure rapidshare and megaupload predated dropbox by years), so if file sharing was going to blow up, it would have already, right?<p>And therein lies the true genius of dropbox. The technology itself had already been done to death; the key was to convince a critical mass of people that this was the solution to their problems. Or even better, convince them of a problem they didn't realize they had. Yet again we see that many times success comes down to the better marketer than truly game-changing technology.<p>(to be completely fair, their syncing mechanism was the best up until then, plus their add-free freemium model was likely the missing key to success in this space)
I think the top comments there show how sometimes the HN folks can get caught up in the details.<p>I did a show HN today for a restaurant analytics concept and people commented on the ugliness of the launch page and over pixels.
Not to be that guy, but since no one else has mentioned it: a file in Dropbox is a file shared with the NSA.<p>I was a happy paying Dropbox customer since 2008 but downgraded my account to the free tier a few months ago. I no longer consider Dropbox trustworthy for anything except (1) trivial files and (2) files encrypted client-side before they're put into Dropbox.<p>Even with the above, I had two specific use-cases that only recently did I resolve:<p>- 1Password Sync. Dropbox is no longer necessary here since 1Password natively supports iCloud sync across Mac and iOS.<p>- Arbitrary file-sharing between Mac and iOS. Dropbox is no longer necessary here ever since I've been running BTSync[0], which has worked flawlessly in my experience.<p>It might be time to cancel Dropbox entirely.<p>[0] <a href="http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html" rel="nofollow">http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html</a>
Internet archive link to the demo/screencast: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20070407145348/http://www.getdropbox.com/u/2/screencast.html" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20070407145348/http://www.getdro...</a>
This is a perfect example of why you should ignore the naysayers and "experts" on HN when you first pitch your idea or product. Also, a great example of why the best startup ideas look initially like bad ideas (<a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/swan.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/swan.html</a>)
I remember being sceptical at the time (lots of people were). The consensus here on HN seemed to be that Dropbox was trying to solve a problem Microsoft had already tried to solve a million times (file-sync) and the fact that Microsoft had never been able to sell it and get a decent user-base for their service was proof that this wasn't something people actually wanted.<p>Funny how a <i>good enough</i> implementation and good marketing managed to turn that around.<p>I don't remember what was wrong with Microsoft's solution, but I remember not buying into it.
I love this flashback, thanks for sharing. Between being a reminder that group thinking isn't the best thinking, no matter the quality of the group - and encouraging me to get out there - fail and be criticized. . . Great.
There's people who try everything that is new and enjoy innovation, and there's people who tend to be skeptical at first. The first kind is busy trying out the software while the others are busy expressing their negativity on a website.<p>And there's of course those who find it a big shame, that Dropbox and other cloud services have become completely unusable thanks to the host country's government.
The top two comments are critical (though not mean).<p>The first comment is pretty interesting.<p><i>'My suggestion is to drop the "Throw away your USB drive" tag line and use something else... it will just muddy your vision.'</i><p>He's more or less correct. 'Like a USB' is a bad analogy. Dropbox only replaces some of a USB's use cases and does lot of things that a USB doesn't. OTOH, he's wrong because there is no other 3 word sentence that could have done a better job. 'Like a USB' is probably the best starting point even if it only gets across 25% of the message because 25% is better than nothing. 25% (assuming it's the right 25%) might get the user to install it. Then they might get to know the backup, file sharing/sending, versioning, or whatever subset of functions they use.
The comments here are a clear proof why founders should take feedback from different sub-set of users. For example, HN audience is build up of programmers, their feedback alone is not what founders should focus on. Dropbox is used by almost everyone I know because of the convenience it provides and the problem it solves. Most of the what commenters here are saying is not something layman users care about; they don't have any technical skills or time to learn to build their own custom sync-systems.
I wonder how many people that initially thought/said that they wouldn't need/want/use Dropbox are actually using it now. Would be particularly interesting to know what reasons convinced people who didn't believe it would work to end up using it themselves. Particularly, would be cool to know if it was due to lack of understanding of the product, lack of a clear enough pitch, or something else that established the wrong expectations.
Maybe the most remarkable thing is how short the comment thread is -- but I suspect that is more an artefact of how much smaller the hn community was back then, than anything else.<p>Interesting how dropbox managed to succeed in an area with so many competitors.<p>Finally, I still think it's complete crap <i>for me</i>. But I also see how it's a great packaging and reselling of s3 -- and I'm certainly not surprised it took of (Not saying I necessarily would've bet on dropbox in 2007 -- but the sorry state of webdav in in windows left the market open for anything that offered user-friendly, secure cloud storage, and dropbox ticked (the most commercially important) two of those boxes.<p>edit: Ok, complete crap is too strong -- but it's a product I have extremely limited use for. While it is easy to migrate away from in the sense that it just stores files, it's not Free software (important for me for anything I use to store my files) and it has no privacy and questionable security (although dropbox+encfs patches up some of that). Still surprising that people didn't seem to see the commercial value -- I absolutely see that (much as I see how people would pay for google apps even if I never would).
Thank you for posting this. Having launched my own landing page yesterday (as Drew did in 2007), I thought that I should explain the positive feedback I left for Drew on Hacker News in 2007.<p>Launch posts were full of naysayers, even back in 2007 when Hacker News was called Startup News. I had done my own startup for 3.5 years at the time, so I wanted to give members of Hacker News useful, insightful, and positive feedback about their project.<p>The link was a landing page with a video about "throwing away your USB drive."<p>In my Hacker News comment, I proposed a list of ways to replace "throw away your USB drive" with a non-technical metaphor that people of all ages could understand (a personal secretary who automatically makes duplicates of anything you create for safekeeping, stored the way you want and accessible from anywhere.)<p>I've observed that newer Dropbox videos started to incorporate my feedback more and more. It's really been awesome to see Drew and the rest of the guys kick butt!
Interesting that someone calls this a good competitor to "GDrive", even though google drive was unveiled several years later.<p>Also interesting is the link to Aaron Swartz's blog, where he describes the need for something similar. <a href="http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/lazybackup" rel="nofollow">http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/lazybackup</a>
I was reading Drew Houston's YC application: <a href="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/27532820/app.html" rel="nofollow">https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/27532820/app.html</a>
and notices something strange: There is Google Drive's favicon on <a href="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com" rel="nofollow">https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com</a>
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="<a href="http://docs.google.com/favicon.ico">" rel="nofollow">http://docs.google.com/favicon.ico"></a><p>Edit: Screenshot
<a href="https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4jNwxVKChpYREZ5ZDZ6Q3Jqb2c/edit" rel="nofollow">https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4jNwxVKChpYREZ5ZDZ6Q3Jqb2c/...</a>
Sharp criticism from know-it-alls is often a sign that an idea is good. It's amazing to me how, even though this is common knowledge, good ideas continue to polarize. I'd hate for you guys to convince everyone to be so nice that we skew this long-trusted signal :)
So many people today are still harping on the security aspect (Not ~<i>free</i>~ software, you don't own the servers).<p>How does that matter at all when selling to a large consumer base? How many customers of dropbox know what those words mean?<p>Like so many commercial offerings you could built it from source and get some hacky scripts going on your own but 99% of the world isn't going to do that.
Also there is a whole thread regarding its YC Application <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=801503" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=801503</a> - which sadly, the link itself is no longer available (404).<p>I assume many would be happy to read it though.
Why would you want to keep your data "in the cloud", if the government uses the argument that as long as your data is on a 3rd party's servers, then it's not yours?
I'm still not using Dropbox. I absolutely detest the idea that I'm relying on a 3rd party for a feature that I consider should be built into every modern Operating System. At the point when OS vendors relinquished to the Web 2.0 Cult their responsibilities for such features as easy filesharing, the world lost something.<p>Absolutely, its great that people can share files this way. But absolutely, its terrible that it requires fragments of an OS feature to be distributed among multiple, external, unreliable entities.