Dropbox: Startup Lessons Learned [ppt]

Greatest insight I got out of this: offering money as a referral commission might not be the most effective.<p>Here he offered additional storage which is (a) cheaper for dropbox to provide probably and (2) closer to what users actually want.<p>I'm anxious to try this out on UniversityTutor.com now. I have a referral program to try and get tutors to refer other tutors, and they get $3/month if their referred tutor upgrades. But not many tutors upgrade. I think I'll try out giving them free job requests for each referral instead, since the free tutor account is limited based on how many job requests they can get. Great insight on dropbox's part here...

My favorite part:<p>VC: "There are a million cloud storage signups!"<p>Drew: "Do you use any of them?"<p>VC: "No"<p>Drew: "..."

My Favorite Quote: "Search is a way to harvest a market, not create it."

Drew, could you share what books you found especially useful, please?<p>The slides mention Steve Blank, and allude to his "4 steps to the epiphany" and (maybe?) 37signals' "Getting Real".

The use of a minimum viable product that wasn't actually the product (a video) was an awesome idea.

"Product-market fit cures many sins of management." Great insight.

I don't get this. How is having 4M users an achievement or success? Isn't the real question how many of the users actually use the paid service? It's interesting how the presentation talks nothing about that unless of course I missed it :)

I love this slide: Typical Dropbox User (Hears about Dropbox from a friend blog, etc. and tries it -&#62; "I didn't realize I needed this" -&#62; "it actually works" -&#62; Unexpectedly happy -&#62;tell friends)

Here's Drew's original submission referenced in the presentation: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863</a>

I assume they've done studies of the monthly subscriptions model versus buying more storage for a single sum? Because the latter option appeals to me a lot more.<p>I like their service a lot, especially since it works on Linux, Mac and Windows but the monthly subscriptions are too expensive.

<i></i>really<i></i> interesting presentation !! Still, one question, even thought there are millions of users, does the majority of the profit is made from ads? And also, it must cost a lot to give a couple of gig freely to each new users..? How do you exactly make profit?<p>Thanks

The impression I got (at the conference yesterday) is that the dropbox guys are extremely smart and hardworking, but there's a huge amount of luck involved in that the timing was just perfect.<p>One thing that I kept thinking throughout a lot of the presentations is that certain product/service offerings are almost inevitable. If it weren't DropBox (or Twitter or Facebook or Google or whatever) then it would have been someone else around the same time with something similar that fit the emergent needs of the market. The market, in a way, designs the products by choosing which of the thousands of new things succeed or fail.

@dhouston - Can you give us more insight as to why a) the affiliate program didn't work and b) the referral program worked / what you mean by "2 sided referral program"?<p>im assuming affiliate is where payment is in the form of $ and to non-users who promoted dropbox and referral is payment of more storage on dropbox (ie- 250 mb per referral more) to actual users. Do you think a mix of the two would have worked well ie- payment of actual $ instead of the 250mb, BUT to actual users.

Is there video or audio of the presentation? It's easier to grasp attitudes than just seeing the slides (good though they are).

I sure hope Drew is not on the Durant trajectory.<p>Great entrepreneurs like him should live on to grow up into great businessmen.

does anyone have a link to the actual video of the presentations at the Startup Lessons Learned conference?

Any chance for a non-login download of this? I do not use Flash and thus have no chance of reading the slides.

the powerpoint and the video aren't working. Anyone have an alternate host or cached version?

PPT link?

Great product and great presentation? fffff life is not fair.<p>(would love to learn more about the details of the 2-sided incentive)