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What happened to Dropbox, and why some startups are in private beta forever?
This is a semi-rant that applies to other startups. I needed a quick solution for a online backup, and thought dropbox would be perfect for it. I go to their site, and it seems they are still in private beta?
I know they are working on it, and made a huge splash few months ago. But lots of time has passed, and they haven't released it in the wild. It seems that once you anounce something, maybe a couple of months of "private beta" should be enough, to get something more substantial, then have a more public beta, while you improve it. Why turn customers away? Early users usually are willing to put up with some functionality missing, as long as they know at some point the features will come.
It seems that this trend is among other startups, anounce something, make a splash, then nothing. Guys, don't turn your customers away. A two-three months period for a private beta, should be more than enough, then go to a public beta (gmail was in "beta" for years).
- truebosko 18y agoI too wish dropbox would open up. Last week I recommended it to a friend thinking it might be out of beta but then I soon realized it wasn't :/ (P.S if anyone has an invite I would love one :~) )
- aston 18y agoYo. If you give me your email address, I can give you an invite. As for your questions, the short answer is that we're holding back on going public until we're sure our infrastructure is able to scale, the data-loss-causing bugs are wiped out, and our feature set makes most people happy.
- staticshock 18y agokeep up the good work, guys. i use dropbox all the time and it works great for me.
- adammichaelc 18y agoMy friend at school turned me on to you guys. I love Dropbox. I'm curious. What kind of business model are you looking at? Freemium? Something else? Thanks.
- prakash 18y agoummm...gmail is still in beta.
- subwindow 18y agoSome people think it is a great PR strategy. That is because sometimes it is. The problem is when you fool yourself into thinking that "sometimes" is "always". Or, at least, "always for me".
- lyime 18y agoDefinitely not a good PR strategy if people seem to forget about the service. Especially people here. Not a good sign. Being public about issues or your service greatly helps the company and the people interested in that service.
- scumola 18y agoI kind of agree. I'd rather be able to use a site knowing that it was in beta (as long as it worked mostly) and if there were any data loss, at least I know that it's in beta and wouldn't be too pissed if some data was lost. I like to use new services and I don't tend to put all of my eggs into one basket anyway, so using dropbox for vital backups is not the greatest idea in the world since it's still in beta, but as far as using it to sync some machines with non-vital data, I'd love to be able to use it. (I've already got a beta account and I love it, BTW). :)
- patrickg-zill 18y agoAre you talking about the drop.io service?
- rob 18y agoI'm assuming getdropbox.com.
- Harkins 18y agoJungleDisk does easy online backups: http://jungledisk.com http://jungledisk.com
- jkent 18y agoSyncplicity does too. I've been using them for a few months, very happy. http://www.syncplicity.com/ http://www.syncplicity.com/
- sysop073 18y agoI just got my beta code a few weeks ago and discovered they still don't let you download the Linux client, so I'm currently waiting patiently. Is there any kind of timeline on that? They don't say much on the blog other than that a client exists, and I can't have it
- DenisM 18y agoOnce you have a splash in the press it's stupid to not let the resulting potential users in. There, I said it - stupid. There are very many companies that have lost their only chance to sell me their products this way - they announce a product, I come over there, can't find the "buy now" button, turn around and leave. Their story will never be picked up by the same site again, because it's old news. I will never remember to come back. Bye-bye.
- jamongkad 18y agoYou know what, initially I was inclined to disagree with you but based on my own experience that is exactly how I felt for some companies that offer compelling products but don't offer the following: a. Online Demo (this is very important for me as I love to test drive something for a while before I purchase.) b. Easy way to pay for said product. The reason being is that if a company cannot do this for me then it is most likely I will forget about that company in a few days and move on to someone else that could offer me an easier alternative. There are a number of things off the top of my head but I'm pretty sleepy at the moment. But that's all I could think of for now.
- DenisM 18y agoMany smaller startups probably have fear of customers. It's one thing to code, the other thing to deal with people. PG should write an article about this subject, this can easily be the biggest failure factor, ever.
- mdasen 18y agoI think you underestimate how difficult scaling is. So, you want to offer 2GB of redundant storage over the internet to everyone. Well, first you're going to need 6-10GB for everyone to cover redundancy. You're also going to need an amazingly high amount of bandwidth to cover it - especially at the start because new users are the ones likely to decide "oh, I want to see how well this works so I'll just test upload download random things for a while" because of the novelty. So, you assume that you can store 4TB per server at $1,000 per server assuming you're buying crappy white-box stuff - really scraping the efficiency barrel here. That means that for every 400 people, you have to spend a grand. OK, so let's say that only 1 in 10 actually use the product, that's $1,000 for ever 4,000 people. Still not great. Most importantly though, your staff is only so large. You're not just allocating more space on S3 - you have to be installing and configuring these servers - oh, and let's not forget that rack space isn't cheap. Without bandwidth or power, rack space can go for $1,000 per month for around 40U. So, let's say they just open it up and 100,000 people sign up for it - not unreasonable. It would require $25,000 to buy the hardware considering a 10% usage rate (people only actually storing 200MB rather than the 2GB limit). Above that, we're talking about installing 25,000 boxes into racks and configuring them all. Above that, they need to pay for electricity for all those boxen. Let's assume dirt cheap power at 4 cents per kWh and decently efficient servers drawing 200 watts (neither of which are going to be true in real life). That's $200/hr to keep those servers alive. Going monthly, we hit $144,000! Great way to blow through VC! Oh, bandwidth, how could we forget about that. I'm going to stop beating a dead horse right now. It is really hard to provide what Dropbox is trying to do. It makes a TON of sense to start slowly in their case. This isn't like a social networking site where it matters how many of your friends are on nor does it have the luxury of storing very little data. Most importantly, unlike the Web 2.0 stuff out there, Dropbox's usefulness is harder to do. While many social apps are highly polished, Dropbox has a much higher technical barrier. Specifically, you need to buy a lot of iron to run it. This isn't something where you can use S3 (or a smal MogileFS cluster) to store/serve icons or some user photos. Do you think someone else is going to come along and compete with Dropbox? Sure, but not like they would with something like Twitter.
- jonknee 18y agoYour point is valid, but your math is wildly inaccurate. > Above that, we're talking about installing 25,000 boxes into racks and configuring them all. No, it would mean installing 25 boxes (100,000 people / 4,000 users per server = 25 servers). And that means your power estimate is off by x1000 as well.
- c1sc0 18y agoI couldn't care less if they stayed in private 'beta' for another year. Let them work out the kinks. I appreciate them taking care of existing users first, then worry about growth. This kind of service needs to be reliable. Keep up the good work, I'm using getdropbox all the time.