How Dropbox Got Its First 10 Million Users(techcrunch.com)
techcrunch.com
How Dropbox Got Its First 10 Million Users
http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/01/founder-storie-how-dropbox-got-its-first-10-million-users/
5 comments
Yes, they have lots of users (and the article doesn't mention how they used network incentives to increase the user count), but more interesting would be the rate of conversion to paying customer, typical time to conversion (also, segments: do some buy right away or use for years, then buy), etc.
I would like to see time to conversion. I have a hunch the majority of the users haven't capped out their dropboxes yet. When that starts to happen, it will be interesting what the conversion rate will be.
As a data point: At SpiderOak, 50% of customers purchase paid storage within the first 4 days of opening an account. Of course there's still a long tail of events after.
I don't really understand how this video in any way explains how they got their first 10 million users. Seems like a the standard straightforward plug for a ycombinator company on TC that we have gotten used to.
I'm reading the article as validation for viral marketing, as targeted towards the big link-sharing sites. I don't remember the last time a startup hit the front page of Reddit. Surely it's happened, but I thought it would happen more than it has, since that site is about sharing links to things on the Web.
Minus hit frontpage of Reddit recently but the typical front page content isn't very much startup focused on Reddit
Not to bee too pedantic, but using "Why Combinator" in the article? I kinda looked down on the article after the first paragraph. Good great grammers, an awareness of what you're talking about, and proper spelling go a long way towards establishing proper voice. (sea what I did there)
LiveDrive got lots of users used to having working and functional virtual drives, including me.
LiveDrive closed the beta and got users searching for a replacement. I found Dropbox in a post about LiveDrive alternatives.
LiveDrive could have been Dropbox, but they 'monetized' too fast and killed the product.
And still some people side with Saverin in the Social Network movie...