Dropbox Startup Lessons Learned

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Startup Lessons Learned Drew Houston @drewhouston

Background <ul><li>Cofounder & CEO, Dropbox </li></ul><ul><li>Earlier: MIT comp sci (‘05), started online SAT prep co, eng...

Some context <ul><li>100,000  many millions of users in 18 months since launch </li></ul><ul><li>No advertising spend <...

How we applied lean startup principles at Dropbox (sometimes on purpose, sometimes by accident)

Paul Graham: Early and often Joel Spolsky: When it doesn’t completely suck (avoid “Marimba Phenomenon”) When to Launch?

2006: Dozens and dozens of cloud storage companies

VC: “There are a million cloud storage startups!” Drew: “Do you use any of them?” VC: “No” Drew: “…”

Building a bulletproof, scalable, cross-platform cloud storage architecture is hard

<ul><li>"[product] ended up turning all my Word docs and half my Excel Spreadsheets into 0 byte files. Needless to sa...

Learn early, learn often

Dropbox’s minimum viable product: 3 min screencast on Hacker News (Apr 07): Lots of immediate, high-quality feedback

Simple landing page: capture interest/email address

Private beta launch video  12,000 diggs; beta waiting list jumps from 5,000 to 75,000 in one day (Mar 2008)

What we learned <ul><li>Biggest risk: making something no one wants </li></ul><ul><li>Not launching  painful, but not l...

When “best practices” aren’t best

Public launch (Sep 2008): Time to get real

Public launch (Sep 2008): Time to get real <ul><li>Our Web 2.0 Marketing Plan </li></ul><ul><li>Big launch at TechCrunch50...

Experiment: Paid search <ul><li>Hired experienced SEM & affiliate marketing guy ($$) </li></ul><ul><li>Picked out keywords...

Cost per acquisition: $233-$388

Cost per acquisition: $233-$388 For a $99 product. Fail.

Experiments failing left and right <ul><li>Problem: Most obvious keywords bidded way up </li></ul><ul><ul><li>Probably by...

But we were still doing well…? <ul><li>Reached 1mm users 7 months after launch </li></ul><ul><li>Beloved by our community ...

What we learned <ul><li>Lots of pressure (or guilt) to do things the traditional way. But think first principles </li></ul...

What we learned <ul><li>Mostly ignored (or woefully mishandled): </li></ul><ul><ul><li>hiring non-engineers </li></ul></u...

Fourteen Months to the Epiphany

Why were conventional techniques failing, yet we were still succeeding?

AdWords wasn’t the problem <ul><li>Nobody wakes up in the morning wishing they didn’t have to carry a USB drive, email the...

Typical Dropbox User

Steve Blank & Market Type <ul><li>Existing Market </li></ul><ul><li>Resegmented Market </li></ul><ul><li>New Market </li><...

New strategy: encourage WOM, viral <ul><li>Give users better tools to spread the love </li></ul><ul><li>Referral program w...

Trailing 30 days (Apr 2010) : users sent 2.8 million direct referral invites

Results <ul><li>September 2008: 100,000 registered users </li></ul><ul><li>January 2010 (15 mos later): 4,000,000 </li></u...

Wrapping up <ul><li>Learn early, learn often </li></ul><ul><li>Best practices aren’t always best </li></ul><ul><li>Know yo...

Thank you! Questions? @drewhouston

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