My YC app: Dropbox - Throw away your USB drive • Hacker News Board

Re: My YC app: Dropbox - Throw away your USB drive

#21

Post by eugenejen » Wed, Apr 04, 2007, 8:46 PM UTC

Nice job! I was thinking something like this for a while and wonder why no one did it. It looks like dropbox just scratches the right itches for me.

Re: My YC app: Dropbox - Throw away your USB drive

#22

Post by zach » Wed, Apr 04, 2007, 8:52 PM UTC

Great demo, great product, great business, well done.

Re: My YC app: Dropbox - Throw away your USB drive

#23

Post by JMiao » Wed, Apr 04, 2007, 8:55 PM UTC

Was Dropbox your first idea, or did you start from another point of inspiration? How long did it take to get to a workable demo?

Great job, Drew!

Re: My YC app: Dropbox - Throw away your USB drive

#24

Post by brett » Wed, Apr 04, 2007, 9:48 PM UTC

This is genius. It's is problem everyone is having, and everyone knew it (http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/lazybackup ). If it really works as well as it looks in that demo then they nailed it. I'm both envious and inspired. I'll be surprised if YC does not fund them.

Re: My YC app: Dropbox - Throw away your USB drive

#25

Post by aaroniba » Wed, Apr 04, 2007, 10:15 PM UTC

Sweet! I especially like the right-click, "copy link location" feature: really useful and should help user adoption.

Re: My YC app: Dropbox - Throw away your USB drive

#26

Post by daliso » Wed, Apr 04, 2007, 10:28 PM UTC

brilliant!

Re: My YC app: Dropbox - Throw away your USB drive

#27

Post by jganetsk » Wed, Apr 04, 2007, 10:35 PM UTC

I've seen this before. It's called Coda.

http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/

Great work bringing this to the web, and integrating it with Windows!

Re: My YC app: Dropbox - Throw away your USB drive

#28

Post by palish » Wed, Apr 04, 2007, 10:41 PM UTC

How are conflicts handled? If you take your laptop offline, modify your image, then modify the same image on your desktop, then plug your laptop back in, what happens?

Great job by the way.

Re: My YC app: Dropbox - Throw away your USB drive

#29

Post by jganetsk » Wed, Apr 04, 2007, 10:46 PM UTC

palish wrote: post #28

How are conflicts handled? If you take your laptop offline, modify your image, then modify the same image on your desktop, then plug your laptop back in, what happens? Great job by the way.

The Coda guys asked this question nearly 20 years ago.

http://www.coda.cs.cmu.edu/

Sorry for being a Coda troll.

Re: My YC app: Dropbox - Throw away your USB drive

#30

Post by rwalker » Wed, Apr 04, 2007, 10:50 PM UTC

zaidf wrote: post #3

This has great potential! Only suggestion I would have is go slower on the demo. I know you lost me very early into it switching between windows. If you are looking for a wider audience than those who already know the context of dropbox, make a video where you lay out the case for use of dropbox using simple examples from user point of view(think a college student) and then in the demo show just the basic features. I…

Looks like a great product, and I will second the parent comment.

One thing they teach at YC, and in one of pg's essays (http://www.paulgraham.com/investors.html), is to present a story instead of a list of features. That way you answer the question of "Why would I use this product?" simultaneously to answering "What does this product do?".