13 ms·

April 5, 2007: "Show HN, Dropbox"

518 points by epa 13y ago

hashtree 13y ago
If there is any thread that might help comfort you about the pessimism sometimes found on HN, this is it.
- Perceptes 13y ago
  It's also amusing that the top comment on this thread is a big rant about one specific customer service incident. Totally unrelated to the linked story, and as usual, not seeing the forest for the trees.
  - singular 13y ago
    I strongly dislike the strain of negativity that seems to be typical of hn these days, but... I don't think it's totally unrelated, as I always very much admired dropbox as a company and technically, and had the sense of them being something of a hacker's company (an hn thread in which the founder is replying to technical issues definitely gives one that impression), and I was very disappointed to have that experience. I rant here because they refuse to listen to me, I have tried to contact them a lot privately but have been ignored. I'm not the only one to have a similar experience - just a tree in the forest of developers who are likely to experience similar if they try to put open source projects in their dropbox.
    - scott_s 13y ago
      Perhaps your use-case is not one they consider important. (As others have pointed out, 300,000 files is a lot for a synced drive.)
      - singular 13y ago
        I don't want to belabour my points, so I'm deciding not to continue too much further in these discussions (I've come to find internet arguing is somewhat pointless regardless of the rights + wrongs of the issue at debate), however as I have repeatedly pointed out, it's very easy to hit a number like that if you store code in dropbox, esp. open source projects. And like I've also pointed out repeatedly, fine don't consider my use-case important, but add a warning or at least don't drop supporting me because I'm too much effort, or if you are, say that's what you're doing. If I had known dropbox wasn't suitable for developers (it having originated from yc with a technical discussion on that original thread suggests otherwise) - I wouldn't have used it in the first place. I had used it as a developer for a long long time before hitting issues, then it become unrecoverable even after a month of patiently trying to fix it, and new work files were getting overwritten by old ones throughout. That's not an acceptable failure mode, nor is then being ignored without warning by support (at least say 'sorry you're too much effort'.)
bstar77 13y ago
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.
- yen223 13y ago
  Representative quote: "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. "
  - broodbucket 13y ago
    His statement is correct, and totally irrelevant when considering consumers.
    - raverbashing 13y ago
      > and totally irrelevant when considering consumers. That's the most important part, and the mostly often ignored in HN discussions It's the same with the difference between the Apple I and Appple II
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
      - k__ 13y ago
        I think the technology and its usability wasn't the problem. The problem was, nobody thought people would be so crazy and store their stuff on the other side of the planet (performance) on the servers of complete strangers (security). But they totally would...
        jiggy2011 13y ago
        Dropbox doesn't really suffer from the first problem since you keep a local copy of everything and people have been trusting complete strangers with their email and bank account details since forever.
fananta 13y ago
I think the top comments there show how sometimes the HN folks can get caught up in the details. I did a show HN today for a restaurant analytics concept and people commented on the ugliness of the launch page and over pixels.
- GuiA 13y ago
  People posting those sort of comments have nothing to give, except for their opinion. Keep getting stuff done, don't let them get you down :)
  - hnha 13y ago
    They give valuable feedback, how is that bad?
    - unsigner 13y ago
      That's the point - not all feedback is valuable.
- yen223 13y ago
  Put it this way, people will always have to point out something. If the only faults they can find are over pixels, you probably did an amazing job.
- grabeh 13y ago
  When all you have is a launch page and no functionality demonstrating the features of the site, the points you mention are what many people are likely to focus on.
- pbhjpbhj 13y ago
  The problem as I see it is a that "show HN" is simply "here what do you think of this". If I - as a sort-of web-designer - look at the page and see a problem with alignments, lack of call to action, poor SEO optimisation or something then I want to offer that up; that's what I think. Generally HN isn't the best forum to offer these more trivial thoughts - you really want to say "what do you think of this concept" or "what do you think about how I've implemented {concept X}". Usually then if there's something that looks wrong but is not appropriate for discussion - like a spelling mistake - I'll take a glance to see if there's a simple contact form and use that instead. Emailing seems too much trouble unless I'm hoping you'll ask me to do some work for you(!). Ugliness of the launch page seems quite important however and as it's subjective it's a point that could be discussed or on which the votes would help gauge the importance of the point. If you feel the details are fine, or don't need work, then ignore the comments. Ditto for this comment.
alokv28 13y ago
Internet archive link to the demo/screencast: https://web.archive.org/web/20070407145348/http://www.getdropbox.com/u/2/screencast.html https://web.archive.org/web/20070407145348/http://www.getdro...
- jason_wang 13y ago
  And here is his YC application: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/27532820/app.html https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/27532820/app.html You have to watch his Dropbox video and read his YC application to really appreciate how articulate, succinct and fluid Drew communicates.
  - Oculus 13y ago
    Really awesome read, thanks for the link!
SwellJoe 13y ago
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). 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. I refer to this pretty frequently to try to remind myself not to be the naysayer in the room: http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/03/how-to-be-right-90-of-time-and-why-id.html http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/03/how-to-be-right-90-...
- dnautics 13y ago
  it may not be of much comfort to you, but sometimes naysayers are important. Even if they are wrong about the overall trajectory, they may in the process of naysaying point out specific weaknesses that the visionaries might have missed, and, thus, ultimately allow for the success of the product.
  - Cyph0n 13y ago
    Excellent point. Criticism is in many cases important.
    - dnautics 13y ago
      even emotional-rage induced, totally irrational criticism can sometimes uncover rough spots in need of patching!
  - sskates 13y ago
    Careful! A lot of would be Drew Houston's end up discouraged by naysayers. As a founder, it took me a while to know who to listen to. One of the toughest things about doing a startup is people telling you you're wrong all the time. One of the things YC (and pg in particular) gets right is that they're very encouraging of potential for success.
sidcool 13y ago
There were so many naysayers. I didn't know HN existed then.
brianbarker 13y ago
"It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating."
- dt3ft 13y ago
  This one was awesome :)
  - seunosewa 13y ago
    Is it income-generating though?
    - brianbarker 13y ago
      Income? yes. Profit? I'm pretty sure, but I'm not that invested in caring.
asperous 13y ago
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. 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.
th3byrdm4n 13y ago
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.
- vvvVVVvvv 13y ago
  Group thinking is not bad, as long as we're defining group : (small) set of people with lot of common characteristics, goals (if applicable). The opposite of the "mass" which usually is a large set of people whom highest common denominator is to be human. The question is whether HN can be considered a group or a small mass =) Plus you have to keep in mind the average pov will be biased in a different way than let's say marketing101.net.
pitchups 13y ago
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 (http://www.paulgraham.com/swan.html http://www.paulgraham.com/swan.html)
- jiggy2011 13y ago
  Let's be fair though, there's a survivor bias here. It's probably more dangerous to blunder on and simply tune out any criticism. If you look at the top rated comment on that thread it is certainly a valid criticism, namely that corporate computers are often locked down and won't allow installation of third party software without getting sign off from IT. In the case of dropbox that managed to sidestep this by mainly targeting smaller businesses and individuals and also have the fall-back of letting users access their files over the web.
- thewarrior 13y ago
  "They laughed at Einstein. But they also laughed at Bozo the clown" - Carl Sagan.
furyofantares 13y ago
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. 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: >the thing about 2gb dropbox >is i carry 6gb on my keychain >and 8gb on my phone >and i don't exactly trust them with important data >also my iphone has shared folders that look just like any other computer on my network >the keychain is kind of a hassle though and i mostly don't use it, i should probably throw it away
kartikkumar 13y ago
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.
- frabcus 13y ago
  When first shown it by a friend, I didn't want to use it because I was ideologically only using open source stuff, and servers I have control over. I carried on using Unison and some dodgy shell scripts. Some years later, I got a free 60Gb Dropbox account with a new Samsung phone. It seemed a good way to sync my music and photos, and to let me access text files on the phone. I'd meanwhile got fed up with my hand made scripts, and tried a few other commercial backup solutions, and got fed up with them all. So Dropbox seemed not a bad part to a backup strategy to use from my desktop as well. I think this year's privacy news on the Internet has shown my original view was correct. And Drew has shown that a mature, usable, cross-platform syncing client is nevertheless something I use!
  - kartikkumar 13y ago
    And therein lies a fascinating fact about Dropbox. Drew made the tradeoff between convenience and security/ownership one that convenience won out, particularly for a lot of people that from the outset were not expecting it. I think Dropbox's adoption in the smartphone world has been one of the most ingenious partnerships. I had pretty much the same experience in that I really only started looking at Dropbox as a serious solution to me when my Samsung phone shipped with a free account (+ I got a whole lotta free space through my university finishing high in the space race). I'm not a daily linux user myself, so what particularly interests me is what Dropbox's adoption rate is like in the linux world. This seems to me to be the toughest nut to crack, since most linux users are power users in the sense that they're savvy enough to setup their own Unison/rsync etc. system. My conclusion after thinking about Dropbox more is that it's a testament to the fact that to the majority of people convenience wins out over most other things (so long as the execution is bang on).
josteink 13y ago
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. Funny how a good enough implementation and good marketing managed to turn that around. I don't remember what was wrong with Microsoft's solution, but I remember not buying into it.
- mkr-hn 13y ago
  > I don't remember what was wrong with Microsoft's solution, but I remember not buying into it. It might be the fact that it's Windows-only. I use Windows exclusively and wouldn't touch SkyDrive because it didn't have clients for other operating systems.
  - Perseids 13y ago
    > I use Windows exclusively and wouldn't touch SkyDrive because it didn't have clients for other operating systems. I don't understand your point. If you only use Windows what is holding you back from using SkyDrive? (Except that it is US hosted and you must assume all that data is public, but Dropbox is no different there.)
    - mkr-hn 13y ago
      It offers nothing over multi-platform options like Copy and Dropbox.
    - jiggy2011 13y ago
      Because you might want to share files with somebody who isn't using Windows or you might want the ability to switch platforms yourself in the future without worrying about having to migrate all of your stuff.
levlandau 13y ago
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 :)
- lmm 13y ago
  Have you any examples of bad ideas that received less sharp criticism? I think it's more that HN looks at every idea critically.
fit2rule 13y ago
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. 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.
- ErsatzVerkehr 13y ago
  Why should OS vendors also supply cloud storage? Who would provide this cloud storage for Linux distributions?
  - hackinthebochs 13y ago
    I think the point is that your computer connected to the internet is your cloud storage. There's no reason why that functionality needs to be farmed off to a third party.
    - vectorjohn 13y ago
      A cloud requires at least 2 computers to be online at the same time. This is not the common case for people.
      - fit2rule 13y ago
        Only because the feature is not in the OS. Were it actually in the OS, people would leave their computers on in order to share things. It makes sense.
    - icebraining 13y ago
      Besides vectorjohn's point, which is completely true, there's also a point about upstream speeds. Considering that most of us have asymmetric connections, sharing a big file with multiple people would be a pain if I had to upload it over and over again, while with a intermediary I can just upload it once and let it push to clients at greater speeds (and in parallel).
e12e 13y ago
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. Interesting how dropbox managed to succeed in an area with so many competitors. Finally, I still think it's complete crap for me. 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. 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).
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
hackinthebochs 13y ago
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? 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. (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)
- nostrademons 13y ago
  "a simple file sharing server on their own PC or a server they own..." I think that's the part you're missing. What fraction of the general population can set up a file-sharing server? What fraction of the population even owns a server? What fraction of the population even knows what a server is? DropBox faced this objection over and over again from the investors they pitched, and Drew's answer was variations on "But how many of them have made it easy enough for your grandma to use?" That was the killer innovation - making filesharing so easy to use that you didn't need to set up anything, just install DropBox and drag your files to a folder. And that's been the killer innovation for many startups - Apple, Google, Amazon, Intuit, etc. all let you do things that many other companies have let you do before, but they made it so easy that even the average Joe can do it.
  - hackinthebochs 13y ago
    That's the thing though, how many "grandmas and grandpas" really need a file sharing service for blobs of data? There already exists "better" solutions to share common file types: flickr/picasa for images, youtube for video, email for word documents, etc. The vast majority of people simply don't need an arbitrary file hosting service. Somehow they've managed to convince people they do. On the other hand, if you give something away for free that seems to have value, people will flock to it regardless of need. I'm curious if dropbox is actually profitable. I know of many people who use dropbox that I wouldn't have thought would even have heard of it. But not a single one of them pays for it. Perhaps what we're attributing to success is simply a company being sustained by the VC bubble. Even in the face of the "success" of dropbox I don't see the service in its current incarnation being self-sustainable.
phreeza 13y ago
Interesting that someone calls this a good competitor to "GDrive", even though google drive was unveiled several years later. Also interesting is the link to Aaron Swartz's blog, where he describes the need for something similar. http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/lazybackup http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/lazybackup
- blowski 13y ago
  IIRC, at the time there were a bunch of third-party solutions offering 'GDrive' by storing files in Gmail with custom labels through IMAP.
poolpool 13y ago
So many people today are still harping on the security aspect (Not ~free~ software, you don't own the servers). How does that matter at all when selling to a large consumer base? How many customers of dropbox know what those words mean? 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.
- benjamincburns 13y ago
  Regarding specifically the "free software" statement, It's a holy war. One where I'm on the side of the religious zealots, for once. The special extra fanatical wingeing about big software like DropBox not being free comes from seeing the founders as smart people who have a base ripe for promoting your (my) view (that free software is just plain better for the world), and if they just saw it our way, maybe things would start to change. So we complain. Well, I try not to outright complain, because I know that's a shitty way to get what you want and that my views are ultimately tangential to their cause, but you get the idea...
  - poolpool 13y ago
    Thats fine and I understand the advantages to open source. But if you're in the business of selling software (especially to end users and not b2b) like many people here claim to be, that isn't a valid concern or argument against a business model.
scrrr 13y ago
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. 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.
netcan 13y ago
The top two comments are critical (though not mean). The first comment is pretty interesting. 'My suggestion is to drop the "Throw away your USB drive" tag line and use something else... it will just muddy your vision.' 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.
Aldo_MX 13y ago
The secret to success: Trust in yourself, nobody else is going to trust in you.
- a3voices 13y ago
  Another secret to success: have good parenting, DNA, education, friends, and an interest in creating things of value (as opposed to the other million things you can do with your time)
  - Aldo_MX 13y ago
    > creating things of value This is extremely subjective, taking the example of dropbox, most of the comments against it at 2007 were dismissive because "it didn't had enough value".
  - nyan_sandwich 13y ago
    Those things are harder to control, so generally less worth thinking about.
    - a3voices 13y ago
      That's a pretty good point.
singular 13y ago
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. 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. 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. 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...) Also throughout this dropbox repeatedly overwrites work files while I'm working on them (thankfully with backups.) 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. 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'. 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.
- 300bps 13y ago
  With 300k files and symlinks, you are probably not considered a typical Dropbox customer.
  - singular 13y ago
    As I said, very easy to achieve as a developer (I hadn't done anything crazy), and the symlinks were working up to that point. Even as a non-typical dropbox user (a developer, then), I think there should have been some kind of a warning a, some ability to recover from the situation b (I was left for nearly a month with a completely non-functional dropbox), and not suddenly getting dropped without warning by support c. If I'd known up front that a deployment of not that unusual amounts of code (especially if you use git) would have led dropbox to irrecoverably fail for me, I wouldn't have used them in the first instance. I don't think even as a 'non-typical' user the very poor, typically big co, experience I had was justified, esp. given that I am a member of the group of people who first started using dropbox.
tzury 13y ago
Here is my personal experience... It is actually took place, later on when there was an announcement regarding Dropbox raising from Sequoia . This was the first time I heard of Dropbox. 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. It was all automatic, built with python, and monitored FS for changes. Supported any number of directories, etc. 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. Given the effort and dreams I built upon my own version, I remembered how I could not use dropbox for quite some time.
tzury 13y ago
Also there is a whole thread regarding its YC Application https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=801503 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=801503 - which sadly, the link itself is no longer available (404). I assume many would be happy to read it though.
- dcarmo 13y ago
  Here: http://web.archive.org/web/20090725120431/http://files.getdropbox.com/u/2/app.html http://web.archive.org/web/20090725120431/http://files.getdr...
Herald_MJ 13y ago
The comments given on HN back then were so much more constructive! I think I started reading HN about a year after this.
dcarmo 13y ago
"What tools will you use to build your product? Python (top to bottom.)" Yes.
soneca 13y ago
FWIW, Dropbox actually DID replace my USB drive (99% of the times at least).
- bluedino 13y ago
  Dropbox doesn't replace USB drives for me. I still use them for sneakernet. Installing the newest version of Ubuntu or OS X. Copying a 2GB file to another computer because downloading it again, even over local wifi, would take too long. What Dropbox replaced for me is the 'My Documents' folder. It allows me to access my files on my work PC, my laptop, my iPad, my iPhone, or anyone else's computer that has an internet connection.
  - BlackDeath3 13y ago
    There certainly are USB use cases which Dropbox flat-out doesn't account for. At one point during the setup of my new gaming PC, I somehow hosed things to the point where I couldn't install Windows (motherboard BIOS update, maybe?). I was getting driver detection failures during the install process, my peripherals (keyboard + mouse) wouldn't work, no NIC functionality, my CD drive was unusable. I ran out to Walmart at 1AM to buy a 16GB USB drive/16GB SD card, tethered my phone (my only functional computer at the time) to my PC, downloaded the required ISO to my phone's new SD card, moved the ISO to a USB via a live instance of Ubuntu running off of another USB, and installed Windows via USB (and things magically worked from there). Dropbox is fantastic, but USBs aren't dead.
- candydance 13y ago
  FWIW, it didn't for me. And that's fine too. What I use dropbox for: Lazy backup system (all my important code is symlinked there, sharing small files (<20mb) over the net What I use USB drives for: Sharing large files (>100mb) between local computers, liveUSBs
nakodari 13y ago
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.
toddmorey 13y ago
I'm reminded of this Quora post on the popularity of Dropbox: "Dropbox: Why is Dropbox more popular than other programs with similar functionality? Well, let's take a step back and think about the sync problem and what the ideal solution for it would do: There would be a folder. You'd put your stuff in it. It would sync. They built that. Why didn't anyone else build that? I have no idea. "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!" No, shut up. People don't use that crap. They just want a folder. A folder that syncs." http://www.quora.com/Dropbox/Why-is-Dropbox-more-popular-than-other-programs-with-similar-functionality http://www.quora.com/Dropbox/Why-is-Dropbox-more-popular-tha...
- rlu 13y ago
  To be fair, in retrospect everything seems obvious. At the time I'm sure the Dropbox team had to make a bunch of hard decisions. For example, without knowing the success they would later have, it doesn't seem super obvious to have "one master sync folder" as opposed to being able to sync various folders around your computer (a la not-so-successful Live Mesh and perhaps other sync solutions)
  - yen223 13y ago
    So a good question would be, what other "obvious" thing are we not doing? And why aren't we doing them?
JanLaussmann 13y ago
I was reading Drew Houston's YC application: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/27532820/app.html https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/27532820/app.html and notices something strange: There is Google Drive's favicon on https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com <link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://docs.google.com/favicon.ico"> http://docs.google.com/favicon.ico"> Edit: Screenshot https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4jNwxVKChpYREZ5ZDZ6Q3Jqb2c/edit https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4jNwxVKChpYREZ5ZDZ6Q3Jqb2c/...
thecoffman 13y ago
Straight from Drew himeself: 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.) 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.
- Osiris 13y ago
  It's possible that encryption would have caused problems with their deduplication code since a single file is deduped across multiple accounts.
  - MichaelGG 13y ago
    Didn't they nix dedupe across accounts, as people realised they could "transfer" files that way, and DropBox didn't want to deal with DMCA issues?
    - Shank 13y ago
      How exactly could you "transfer" files that way? You could just upload something to Dropbox and share your logon credentials and any form of dedup or DMCA won't help.
      - pmorici 13y ago
        See the StakOverflow question for more details but the basics of it is that in order to optimize uploads the DB client calculates the hash of a file before uploading it and if the hash along with other attributes about the file like size etc... match then they assume it is the same. So you used to be able to trick the service into letting you download a file you never actually had if you knew the hash and other attributes. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4767505/exploit-dropbox-file-redundancy-check http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4767505/exploit-dropbox-f... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropship_(software) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropship_(software)
Osiris 13y ago
I loved this comment: > 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. Trivially use three different systems to simulate some type of not quite automatic syncing. 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".
- unavoidable 13y ago
  I suppose you have to come at it from the mindset of those actually using Linux. That is, if it already exists and can be glued together using open tools (as opposed to having to code it yourself), it is "trivial", since it has already been done before.
  - Osiris 13y ago
    Trivial: of little worth or importance; relating to or being the mathematically simplest case Trivial means the simplest case. Dropbox is clearly, in this case, the simplest case when compared to other possible solutions.
  - telephonetemp 13y ago
    Intentionally or not, your comment seems to stereotype "those actually using Linux" as unable to appreciate the value of the time and effort saved by a prepackaged solution. While that certainly happens (and is more common in the Linux community than in many others) it is not universal. The popularity of Linux distributions like RHEL and Ubuntu among developers and IT people speaks to that.
- Geee 13y ago
  Well, I have noticed that Linux users tend to approach problems selfishly, i.e. "How can I solve this problem for myself?" and the solution is trivial in such case. However, the question is actually "How can this problem be solved for all people, including my mom?", and when posed as such, the solution needs to be much simpler.
swalsh 13y ago
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. 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.
- yid 13y ago
  Sounds like your engineer friends just gave you a way to implement your business idea, why aren't you selling it?
- swamp40 13y ago
  > This is why you don't ask engineers for business advice. Too funny! And true. "Show HN" is brutal.
- cylinder 13y ago
  >> 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. This type of response is so typical of an engineer and so out-of-touch. Not to pick on it, but it's just absurd, and shows zero ability to put oneself in the shoes of the layman. And yet these types of responses are all over the tech community. This disconnect is the exact reason someone like Steve Jobs is able to enter product categories very late but still blow away the competition.
  - eevee 13y ago
    The best part is that I'm an engineer, and a Linux user, and I still don't do all that because it's a pain in the ass. (But then, I don't use Dropbox either.)
devx 13y ago
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?
novum 13y ago
Not to be that guy, but since no one else has mentioned it: a file in Dropbox is a file shared with the NSA. 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. Even with the above, I had two specific use-cases that only recently did I resolve: - 1Password Sync. Dropbox is no longer necessary here since 1Password natively supports iCloud sync across Mac and iOS. - 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. It might be time to cancel Dropbox entirely. [0] http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html
- chrislipa 13y ago
  I hate to be that guy, too, but if you're that paranoid, you probably shouldn't be using OS X or iOS, either.
  - _dark_matter_ 13y ago
    I think he's saying that he's replacing his free-tier use with other alternatives. In this case, he doesn't care that it's not safe from the NSA.
_lce0 13y ago
the fact that the their top-post is negative make the history soo cool!!
vlad 13y ago
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. 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. The link was a landing page with a video about "throwing away your USB drive." 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.) 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!
Fundlab 13y ago
This is really inspiring, for the most part; dont let HN comments stump your aspirations.

518 points by epa 13y ago

hashtree 13y ago

If there is any thread that might help comfort you about the pessimism sometimes found on HN, this is it.

Perceptes 13y ago
It's also amusing that the top comment on this thread is a big rant about one specific customer service incident. Totally unrelated to the linked story, and as usual, not seeing the forest for the trees.
- singular 13y ago
  I strongly dislike the strain of negativity that seems to be typical of hn these days, but... I don't think it's totally unrelated, as I always very much admired dropbox as a company and technically, and had the sense of them being something of a hacker's company (an hn thread in which the founder is replying to technical issues definitely gives one that impression), and I was very disappointed to have that experience. I rant here because they refuse to listen to me, I have tried to contact them a lot privately but have been ignored. I'm not the only one to have a similar experience - just a tree in the forest of developers who are likely to experience similar if they try to put open source projects in their dropbox.
  - scott_s 13y ago
    Perhaps your use-case is not one they consider important. (As others have pointed out, 300,000 files is a lot for a synced drive.)
    - singular 13y ago
      I don't want to belabour my points, so I'm deciding not to continue too much further in these discussions (I've come to find internet arguing is somewhat pointless regardless of the rights + wrongs of the issue at debate), however as I have repeatedly pointed out, it's very easy to hit a number like that if you store code in dropbox, esp. open source projects. And like I've also pointed out repeatedly, fine don't consider my use-case important, but add a warning or at least don't drop supporting me because I'm too much effort, or if you are, say that's what you're doing. If I had known dropbox wasn't suitable for developers (it having originated from yc with a technical discussion on that original thread suggests otherwise) - I wouldn't have used it in the first place. I had used it as a developer for a long long time before hitting issues, then it become unrecoverable even after a month of patiently trying to fix it, and new work files were getting overwritten by old ones throughout. That's not an acceptable failure mode, nor is then being ignored without warning by support (at least say 'sorry you're too much effort'.)

bstar77 13y ago

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.

yen223 13y ago
Representative quote: "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. "
- broodbucket 13y ago
  His statement is correct, and totally irrelevant when considering consumers.
  - raverbashing 13y ago
    > and totally irrelevant when considering consumers. That's the most important part, and the mostly often ignored in HN discussions It's the same with the difference between the Apple I and Appple II
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - k__ 13y ago
      I think the technology and its usability wasn't the problem. The problem was, nobody thought people would be so crazy and store their stuff on the other side of the planet (performance) on the servers of complete strangers (security). But they totally would...
      - jiggy2011 13y ago
        Dropbox doesn't really suffer from the first problem since you keep a local copy of everything and people have been trusting complete strangers with their email and bank account details since forever.

fananta 13y ago

I think the top comments there show how sometimes the HN folks can get caught up in the details. I did a show HN today for a restaurant analytics concept and people commented on the ugliness of the launch page and over pixels.

GuiA 13y ago
People posting those sort of comments have nothing to give, except for their opinion. Keep getting stuff done, don't let them get you down :)
- hnha 13y ago
  They give valuable feedback, how is that bad?
  - unsigner 13y ago
    That's the point - not all feedback is valuable.
yen223 13y ago
Put it this way, people will always have to point out something. If the only faults they can find are over pixels, you probably did an amazing job.
grabeh 13y ago
When all you have is a launch page and no functionality demonstrating the features of the site, the points you mention are what many people are likely to focus on.
pbhjpbhj 13y ago
The problem as I see it is a that "show HN" is simply "here what do you think of this". If I - as a sort-of web-designer - look at the page and see a problem with alignments, lack of call to action, poor SEO optimisation or something then I want to offer that up; that's what I think. Generally HN isn't the best forum to offer these more trivial thoughts - you really want to say "what do you think of this concept" or "what do you think about how I've implemented {concept X}". Usually then if there's something that looks wrong but is not appropriate for discussion - like a spelling mistake - I'll take a glance to see if there's a simple contact form and use that instead. Emailing seems too much trouble unless I'm hoping you'll ask me to do some work for you(!). Ugliness of the launch page seems quite important however and as it's subjective it's a point that could be discussed or on which the votes would help gauge the importance of the point. If you feel the details are fine, or don't need work, then ignore the comments. Ditto for this comment.

alokv28 13y ago

Internet archive link to the demo/screencast: https://web.archive.org/web/20070407145348/http://www.getdropbox.com/u/2/screencast.html https://web.archive.org/web/20070407145348/http://www.getdro...

jason_wang 13y ago
And here is his YC application: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/27532820/app.html https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/27532820/app.html You have to watch his Dropbox video and read his YC application to really appreciate how articulate, succinct and fluid Drew communicates.
- Oculus 13y ago
  Really awesome read, thanks for the link!

SwellJoe 13y ago

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). 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. I refer to this pretty frequently to try to remind myself not to be the naysayer in the room: http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/03/how-to-be-right-90-of-time-and-why-id.html http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/03/how-to-be-right-90-...

dnautics 13y ago
it may not be of much comfort to you, but sometimes naysayers are important. Even if they are wrong about the overall trajectory, they may in the process of naysaying point out specific weaknesses that the visionaries might have missed, and, thus, ultimately allow for the success of the product.
- Cyph0n 13y ago
  Excellent point. Criticism is in many cases important.
  - dnautics 13y ago
    even emotional-rage induced, totally irrational criticism can sometimes uncover rough spots in need of patching!
- sskates 13y ago
  Careful! A lot of would be Drew Houston's end up discouraged by naysayers. As a founder, it took me a while to know who to listen to. One of the toughest things about doing a startup is people telling you you're wrong all the time. One of the things YC (and pg in particular) gets right is that they're very encouraging of potential for success.

sidcool 13y ago

There were so many naysayers. I didn't know HN existed then.

brianbarker 13y ago

"It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating."

dt3ft 13y ago
This one was awesome :)
- seunosewa 13y ago
  Is it income-generating though?
  - brianbarker 13y ago
    Income? yes. Profit? I'm pretty sure, but I'm not that invested in caring.

asperous 13y ago

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. 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.

th3byrdm4n 13y ago

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.

vvvVVVvvv 13y ago
Group thinking is not bad, as long as we're defining group : (small) set of people with lot of common characteristics, goals (if applicable). The opposite of the "mass" which usually is a large set of people whom highest common denominator is to be human. The question is whether HN can be considered a group or a small mass =) Plus you have to keep in mind the average pov will be biased in a different way than let's say marketing101.net.

pitchups 13y ago

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 (http://www.paulgraham.com/swan.html http://www.paulgraham.com/swan.html)

jiggy2011 13y ago
Let's be fair though, there's a survivor bias here. It's probably more dangerous to blunder on and simply tune out any criticism. If you look at the top rated comment on that thread it is certainly a valid criticism, namely that corporate computers are often locked down and won't allow installation of third party software without getting sign off from IT. In the case of dropbox that managed to sidestep this by mainly targeting smaller businesses and individuals and also have the fall-back of letting users access their files over the web.
thewarrior 13y ago
"They laughed at Einstein. But they also laughed at Bozo the clown" - Carl Sagan.

furyofantares 13y ago

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. 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: >the thing about 2gb dropbox >is i carry 6gb on my keychain >and 8gb on my phone >and i don't exactly trust them with important data >also my iphone has shared folders that look just like any other computer on my network >the keychain is kind of a hassle though and i mostly don't use it, i should probably throw it away

kartikkumar 13y ago

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.

frabcus 13y ago
When first shown it by a friend, I didn't want to use it because I was ideologically only using open source stuff, and servers I have control over. I carried on using Unison and some dodgy shell scripts. Some years later, I got a free 60Gb Dropbox account with a new Samsung phone. It seemed a good way to sync my music and photos, and to let me access text files on the phone. I'd meanwhile got fed up with my hand made scripts, and tried a few other commercial backup solutions, and got fed up with them all. So Dropbox seemed not a bad part to a backup strategy to use from my desktop as well. I think this year's privacy news on the Internet has shown my original view was correct. And Drew has shown that a mature, usable, cross-platform syncing client is nevertheless something I use!
- kartikkumar 13y ago
  And therein lies a fascinating fact about Dropbox. Drew made the tradeoff between convenience and security/ownership one that convenience won out, particularly for a lot of people that from the outset were not expecting it. I think Dropbox's adoption in the smartphone world has been one of the most ingenious partnerships. I had pretty much the same experience in that I really only started looking at Dropbox as a serious solution to me when my Samsung phone shipped with a free account (+ I got a whole lotta free space through my university finishing high in the space race). I'm not a daily linux user myself, so what particularly interests me is what Dropbox's adoption rate is like in the linux world. This seems to me to be the toughest nut to crack, since most linux users are power users in the sense that they're savvy enough to setup their own Unison/rsync etc. system. My conclusion after thinking about Dropbox more is that it's a testament to the fact that to the majority of people convenience wins out over most other things (so long as the execution is bang on).

josteink 13y ago

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. Funny how a good enough implementation and good marketing managed to turn that around. I don't remember what was wrong with Microsoft's solution, but I remember not buying into it.

mkr-hn 13y ago
> I don't remember what was wrong with Microsoft's solution, but I remember not buying into it. It might be the fact that it's Windows-only. I use Windows exclusively and wouldn't touch SkyDrive because it didn't have clients for other operating systems.
- Perseids 13y ago
  > I use Windows exclusively and wouldn't touch SkyDrive because it didn't have clients for other operating systems. I don't understand your point. If you only use Windows what is holding you back from using SkyDrive? (Except that it is US hosted and you must assume all that data is public, but Dropbox is no different there.)
  - mkr-hn 13y ago
    It offers nothing over multi-platform options like Copy and Dropbox.
  - jiggy2011 13y ago
    Because you might want to share files with somebody who isn't using Windows or you might want the ability to switch platforms yourself in the future without worrying about having to migrate all of your stuff.

levlandau 13y ago

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 :)

lmm 13y ago
Have you any examples of bad ideas that received less sharp criticism? I think it's more that HN looks at every idea critically.

fit2rule 13y ago

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. 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.

ErsatzVerkehr 13y ago
Why should OS vendors also supply cloud storage? Who would provide this cloud storage for Linux distributions?
- hackinthebochs 13y ago
  I think the point is that your computer connected to the internet is your cloud storage. There's no reason why that functionality needs to be farmed off to a third party.
  - vectorjohn 13y ago
    A cloud requires at least 2 computers to be online at the same time. This is not the common case for people.
    - fit2rule 13y ago
      Only because the feature is not in the OS. Were it actually in the OS, people would leave their computers on in order to share things. It makes sense.
  - icebraining 13y ago
    Besides vectorjohn's point, which is completely true, there's also a point about upstream speeds. Considering that most of us have asymmetric connections, sharing a big file with multiple people would be a pain if I had to upload it over and over again, while with a intermediary I can just upload it once and let it push to clients at greater speeds (and in parallel).

e12e 13y ago

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. Interesting how dropbox managed to succeed in an area with so many competitors. Finally, I still think it's complete crap for me. 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. 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).

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

hackinthebochs 13y ago

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? 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. (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)

nostrademons 13y ago
"a simple file sharing server on their own PC or a server they own..." I think that's the part you're missing. What fraction of the general population can set up a file-sharing server? What fraction of the population even owns a server? What fraction of the population even knows what a server is? DropBox faced this objection over and over again from the investors they pitched, and Drew's answer was variations on "But how many of them have made it easy enough for your grandma to use?" That was the killer innovation - making filesharing so easy to use that you didn't need to set up anything, just install DropBox and drag your files to a folder. And that's been the killer innovation for many startups - Apple, Google, Amazon, Intuit, etc. all let you do things that many other companies have let you do before, but they made it so easy that even the average Joe can do it.
- hackinthebochs 13y ago
  That's the thing though, how many "grandmas and grandpas" really need a file sharing service for blobs of data? There already exists "better" solutions to share common file types: flickr/picasa for images, youtube for video, email for word documents, etc. The vast majority of people simply don't need an arbitrary file hosting service. Somehow they've managed to convince people they do. On the other hand, if you give something away for free that seems to have value, people will flock to it regardless of need. I'm curious if dropbox is actually profitable. I know of many people who use dropbox that I wouldn't have thought would even have heard of it. But not a single one of them pays for it. Perhaps what we're attributing to success is simply a company being sustained by the VC bubble. Even in the face of the "success" of dropbox I don't see the service in its current incarnation being self-sustainable.

phreeza 13y ago

Interesting that someone calls this a good competitor to "GDrive", even though google drive was unveiled several years later. Also interesting is the link to Aaron Swartz's blog, where he describes the need for something similar. http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/lazybackup http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/lazybackup

blowski 13y ago
IIRC, at the time there were a bunch of third-party solutions offering 'GDrive' by storing files in Gmail with custom labels through IMAP.

poolpool 13y ago

So many people today are still harping on the security aspect (Not ~free~ software, you don't own the servers). How does that matter at all when selling to a large consumer base? How many customers of dropbox know what those words mean? 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.

benjamincburns 13y ago
Regarding specifically the "free software" statement, It's a holy war. One where I'm on the side of the religious zealots, for once. The special extra fanatical wingeing about big software like DropBox not being free comes from seeing the founders as smart people who have a base ripe for promoting your (my) view (that free software is just plain better for the world), and if they just saw it our way, maybe things would start to change. So we complain. Well, I try not to outright complain, because I know that's a shitty way to get what you want and that my views are ultimately tangential to their cause, but you get the idea...
- poolpool 13y ago
  Thats fine and I understand the advantages to open source. But if you're in the business of selling software (especially to end users and not b2b) like many people here claim to be, that isn't a valid concern or argument against a business model.

scrrr 13y ago

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. 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.

netcan 13y ago

The top two comments are critical (though not mean). The first comment is pretty interesting. 'My suggestion is to drop the "Throw away your USB drive" tag line and use something else... it will just muddy your vision.' 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.

Aldo_MX 13y ago

The secret to success: Trust in yourself, nobody else is going to trust in you.

a3voices 13y ago
Another secret to success: have good parenting, DNA, education, friends, and an interest in creating things of value (as opposed to the other million things you can do with your time)
- Aldo_MX 13y ago
  > creating things of value This is extremely subjective, taking the example of dropbox, most of the comments against it at 2007 were dismissive because "it didn't had enough value".
- nyan_sandwich 13y ago
  Those things are harder to control, so generally less worth thinking about.
  - a3voices 13y ago
    That's a pretty good point.

singular 13y ago

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. 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. 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. 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...) Also throughout this dropbox repeatedly overwrites work files while I'm working on them (thankfully with backups.) 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. 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'. 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.

300bps 13y ago
With 300k files and symlinks, you are probably not considered a typical Dropbox customer.
- singular 13y ago
  As I said, very easy to achieve as a developer (I hadn't done anything crazy), and the symlinks were working up to that point. Even as a non-typical dropbox user (a developer, then), I think there should have been some kind of a warning a, some ability to recover from the situation b (I was left for nearly a month with a completely non-functional dropbox), and not suddenly getting dropped without warning by support c. If I'd known up front that a deployment of not that unusual amounts of code (especially if you use git) would have led dropbox to irrecoverably fail for me, I wouldn't have used them in the first instance. I don't think even as a 'non-typical' user the very poor, typically big co, experience I had was justified, esp. given that I am a member of the group of people who first started using dropbox.

tzury 13y ago

Here is my personal experience... It is actually took place, later on when there was an announcement regarding Dropbox raising from Sequoia . This was the first time I heard of Dropbox. 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. It was all automatic, built with python, and monitored FS for changes. Supported any number of directories, etc. 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. Given the effort and dreams I built upon my own version, I remembered how I could not use dropbox for quite some time.

tzury 13y ago

Also there is a whole thread regarding its YC Application https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=801503 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=801503 - which sadly, the link itself is no longer available (404). I assume many would be happy to read it though.

dcarmo 13y ago
Here: http://web.archive.org/web/20090725120431/http://files.getdropbox.com/u/2/app.html http://web.archive.org/web/20090725120431/http://files.getdr...

Herald_MJ 13y ago

The comments given on HN back then were so much more constructive! I think I started reading HN about a year after this.

dcarmo 13y ago

"What tools will you use to build your product? Python (top to bottom.)" Yes.

soneca 13y ago

FWIW, Dropbox actually DID replace my USB drive (99% of the times at least).

bluedino 13y ago
Dropbox doesn't replace USB drives for me. I still use them for sneakernet. Installing the newest version of Ubuntu or OS X. Copying a 2GB file to another computer because downloading it again, even over local wifi, would take too long. What Dropbox replaced for me is the 'My Documents' folder. It allows me to access my files on my work PC, my laptop, my iPad, my iPhone, or anyone else's computer that has an internet connection.
- BlackDeath3 13y ago
  There certainly are USB use cases which Dropbox flat-out doesn't account for. At one point during the setup of my new gaming PC, I somehow hosed things to the point where I couldn't install Windows (motherboard BIOS update, maybe?). I was getting driver detection failures during the install process, my peripherals (keyboard + mouse) wouldn't work, no NIC functionality, my CD drive was unusable. I ran out to Walmart at 1AM to buy a 16GB USB drive/16GB SD card, tethered my phone (my only functional computer at the time) to my PC, downloaded the required ISO to my phone's new SD card, moved the ISO to a USB via a live instance of Ubuntu running off of another USB, and installed Windows via USB (and things magically worked from there). Dropbox is fantastic, but USBs aren't dead.
candydance 13y ago
FWIW, it didn't for me. And that's fine too. What I use dropbox for: Lazy backup system (all my important code is symlinked there, sharing small files (<20mb) over the net What I use USB drives for: Sharing large files (>100mb) between local computers, liveUSBs

nakodari 13y ago

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.

toddmorey 13y ago

I'm reminded of this Quora post on the popularity of Dropbox: "Dropbox: Why is Dropbox more popular than other programs with similar functionality? Well, let's take a step back and think about the sync problem and what the ideal solution for it would do: There would be a folder. You'd put your stuff in it. It would sync. They built that. Why didn't anyone else build that? I have no idea. "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!" No, shut up. People don't use that crap. They just want a folder. A folder that syncs." http://www.quora.com/Dropbox/Why-is-Dropbox-more-popular-than-other-programs-with-similar-functionality http://www.quora.com/Dropbox/Why-is-Dropbox-more-popular-tha...

rlu 13y ago
To be fair, in retrospect everything seems obvious. At the time I'm sure the Dropbox team had to make a bunch of hard decisions. For example, without knowing the success they would later have, it doesn't seem super obvious to have "one master sync folder" as opposed to being able to sync various folders around your computer (a la not-so-successful Live Mesh and perhaps other sync solutions)
- yen223 13y ago
  So a good question would be, what other "obvious" thing are we not doing? And why aren't we doing them?

JanLaussmann 13y ago

I was reading Drew Houston's YC application: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/27532820/app.html https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/27532820/app.html and notices something strange: There is Google Drive's favicon on https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com <link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://docs.google.com/favicon.ico"> http://docs.google.com/favicon.ico"> Edit: Screenshot https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4jNwxVKChpYREZ5ZDZ6Q3Jqb2c/edit https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B4jNwxVKChpYREZ5ZDZ6Q3Jqb2c/...

thecoffman 13y ago

Straight from Drew himeself: 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.) 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.

Osiris 13y ago
It's possible that encryption would have caused problems with their deduplication code since a single file is deduped across multiple accounts.
- MichaelGG 13y ago
  Didn't they nix dedupe across accounts, as people realised they could "transfer" files that way, and DropBox didn't want to deal with DMCA issues?
  - Shank 13y ago
    How exactly could you "transfer" files that way? You could just upload something to Dropbox and share your logon credentials and any form of dedup or DMCA won't help.
    - pmorici 13y ago
      See the StakOverflow question for more details but the basics of it is that in order to optimize uploads the DB client calculates the hash of a file before uploading it and if the hash along with other attributes about the file like size etc... match then they assume it is the same. So you used to be able to trick the service into letting you download a file you never actually had if you knew the hash and other attributes. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4767505/exploit-dropbox-file-redundancy-check http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4767505/exploit-dropbox-f... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropship_(software) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropship_(software)

Osiris 13y ago

I loved this comment: > 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. Trivially use three different systems to simulate some type of not quite automatic syncing. 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".

unavoidable 13y ago
I suppose you have to come at it from the mindset of those actually using Linux. That is, if it already exists and can be glued together using open tools (as opposed to having to code it yourself), it is "trivial", since it has already been done before.
- Osiris 13y ago
  Trivial: of little worth or importance; relating to or being the mathematically simplest case Trivial means the simplest case. Dropbox is clearly, in this case, the simplest case when compared to other possible solutions.
- telephonetemp 13y ago
  Intentionally or not, your comment seems to stereotype "those actually using Linux" as unable to appreciate the value of the time and effort saved by a prepackaged solution. While that certainly happens (and is more common in the Linux community than in many others) it is not universal. The popularity of Linux distributions like RHEL and Ubuntu among developers and IT people speaks to that.
Geee 13y ago
Well, I have noticed that Linux users tend to approach problems selfishly, i.e. "How can I solve this problem for myself?" and the solution is trivial in such case. However, the question is actually "How can this problem be solved for all people, including my mom?", and when posed as such, the solution needs to be much simpler.

swalsh 13y ago

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. 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.

yid 13y ago
Sounds like your engineer friends just gave you a way to implement your business idea, why aren't you selling it?
swamp40 13y ago
> This is why you don't ask engineers for business advice. Too funny! And true. "Show HN" is brutal.
cylinder 13y ago
>> 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. This type of response is so typical of an engineer and so out-of-touch. Not to pick on it, but it's just absurd, and shows zero ability to put oneself in the shoes of the layman. And yet these types of responses are all over the tech community. This disconnect is the exact reason someone like Steve Jobs is able to enter product categories very late but still blow away the competition.
- eevee 13y ago
  The best part is that I'm an engineer, and a Linux user, and I still don't do all that because it's a pain in the ass. (But then, I don't use Dropbox either.)

devx 13y ago

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?

novum 13y ago

Not to be that guy, but since no one else has mentioned it: a file in Dropbox is a file shared with the NSA. 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. Even with the above, I had two specific use-cases that only recently did I resolve: - 1Password Sync. Dropbox is no longer necessary here since 1Password natively supports iCloud sync across Mac and iOS. - 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. It might be time to cancel Dropbox entirely. [0] http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html http://labs.bittorrent.com/experiments/sync.html

chrislipa 13y ago
I hate to be that guy, too, but if you're that paranoid, you probably shouldn't be using OS X or iOS, either.
- _dark_matter_ 13y ago
  I think he's saying that he's replacing his free-tier use with other alternatives. In this case, he doesn't care that it's not safe from the NSA.

_lce0 13y ago

the fact that the their top-post is negative make the history soo cool!!

vlad 13y ago

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. 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. The link was a landing page with a video about "throwing away your USB drive." 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.) 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!

Fundlab 13y ago

This is really inspiring, for the most part; dont let HN comments stump your aspirations.