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Houston says Dropbox has secured a new agreement with HTC, where it “is going to be baked into tens-of-millions of [Android] phones” and like Facebook, Dropbox plans to stamp its product on everything. “In 18-months you are going to see little Dropbox buttons everywhere.”
But will Dropbox’s strategy be strong enough to fend off popular sites like Instagram and Twitter, which also store digital content submitted by large user communities? Or put more bluntly “five years from now, will I even need Dropbox?” asks Schonfeld.
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Awesome. We built a POC that did the same thing a little over a year ago. We got our moms to use it and they loved it for updating their own sites. There's definitely a good business model there.
Back then we did it the hard way basically making our own Dropbox API. We had a Windows server running with the Dropbox client installed. You would share a folder with our Dropbox username and our script would auto accept it, and then we ran rsync to sync up the Windows folders with our web servers. Back then getting the Linux client to run was a bit of a pain which is why we went the windows route for that part of the site.
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I wouldn’t be surprised if a version of Dropbox that plays nicely with the Cloud Drive is one of the first Cloud Drive apps on the scene. It makes a great deal of sense. Instead of paying Dropbox for storage and syncing, we could just pay them for syncing.
It seems rather unlikely to me that people would pay dropbox for their syncing service to store things on someone else's paid storage. I would think that the dropbox software exists to drive people to their relatively high margin de-duplicated cloud storage subscriptions.
In a similar fashion it seems likely to me that Cloud Drive exists to drive adoption & volume to Amazon digital music, a market that dwarfs the size of the online storage game.
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Somebody should create a simple little app on top of S3 that runs on all your devices and creates an automatically synced folder. They should make it free for the first couple GB too.
Then Cloud Drive would seem kind of lame.
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When embarking on a new venture, your goal isn’t to implement any specific idea in the best way possible, but to iterate as fast as you can, till someone is passionate about whatever product you’ll eventually converge on. Don’t worry about being scalable or cross-platform. So what if IE6 users can’t use your app - you’ve yet to find anyone that wants to use your useless app anyway. Anything that reduces your speed of iteration is poison to your startup at this point.
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Pretend I have a machine where you insert a quarter and, a year later, a dollar pops out. Do you a) insert the quarter you have in your pocket, wait a year, and then put all four quarters back in or b) go to the bank, borrow as much money as they'll give you, get it changed into quarters, and start stuffing the machine?
A freemium startup which has a good idea of what customer lifetime value is and what customer acquisition costs are is, essentially, a quarter-into-dollar machine.
This factor becomes particularly acute when the ultimate goal of the startup is to sell their quarter-into-dollar machine for some multiple of the number of dollars it has produced in the most recent year.
[Edited in response to the above post going grey: Please do not downvote the post above me. He isn't being malicious. The big picture strategic view is non-obvious and many smart people need to have it explained a few times for it to sink in. If you wish to correct the misconception, either explain it or upvote an explanation.]
[Edited to add: P.S. The expert on "(LTV > COCA) + source of capital => blow the doors off" is Dharmesh Shah. He has been banging the drum for a few years now. Example:
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