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

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

#31

Post by nickb » Wed, Apr 04, 2007, 10:54 PM UTC

The only problem is that you have to install something. See, it's not the same as USB drive. Most corporate laptops are locked and you can't install anything on them. That's gonna be the problem. Also, another point where your USB comparison fails is that USB works in places where you don't have internet access.

My suggestion is to drop the "Throw away your USB drive" tag line and use something else... it will just muddy your vision.

Kudos for launching it!!! Launching/shipping is extremely hard and you pulled it off! Super!

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

#32

Post by danielha » Wed, Apr 04, 2007, 10:55 PM UTC

Very cool, Drew. I've been meaning to bug you about a beta invite. Good job on the screencast too; it gave me a much better idea of what Dropbox was aiming for than what I had originally thought.

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

#33

Post by jganetsk » Wed, Apr 04, 2007, 11:02 PM UTC

How are you going to scale up your storage to meet the demands of the users? Are you doing something clever, like Google Filesystem? This is not an easy problem, if you aren't prepared for it in advance. If 10,000 users sign up tomorrow... you might be very very hosed, as opposed to very very happy.

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

#34

Post by zach » Wed, Apr 04, 2007, 11:17 PM UTC

rwalker wrote: post #30

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?".

I love that approach (my weblog is called "Story-Driven" after all) because it automatically breaks technical people out of a taxonomic, procedural mindset. So many descriptions of things are on the order of "well, it's a set of pliers with a light on it" instead of "it's how I change fuses in my rusty fusebox in the middle of the night."

You can't emphasize enough to people to tell a story, and the screencast is a great crucible for whether you have a good story to tell. Screencasts aren't appreciated enough for the way they've helped people understand concepts that are a little more technical than they normally would sit still for.

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

#35

Post by ashu » Wed, Apr 04, 2007, 11:48 PM UTC

jganetsk wrote: post #33

How are you going to scale up your storage to meet the demands of the users? Are you doing something clever, like Google Filesystem? This is not an easy problem, if you aren't prepared for it in advance. If 10,000 users sign up tomorrow... you might be very very hosed, as opposed to very very happy.

Amazon S3

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

#36

Post by jkush » Thu, Apr 05, 2007, 12:16 AM UTC

ashu wrote: post #35

jganetsk wrote: post #33

How are you going to scale up your storage to meet the demands of the users? Are you doing something clever, like Google Filesystem? This is not an easy problem, if you aren't prepared for it in advance. If 10,000 users sign up tomorrow... you might be very very hosed, as opposed to very very happy.

Amazon S3

EXACTLY what I was thinking ashu!

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

#37

Post by rokhayakebe » Thu, Apr 05, 2007, 12:25 AM UTC

good stuff man. hope you make it.

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

#38

Post by abstractbill » Thu, Apr 05, 2007, 1:09 AM UTC

This definitely qualifies as Something People Want, and it looks nicely executed. Very cool!

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

#39

Post by jganetsk » Thu, Apr 05, 2007, 1:30 AM UTC

ashu wrote: post #35

jganetsk wrote: post #33

How are you going to scale up your storage to meet the demands of the users? Are you doing something clever, like Google Filesystem? This is not an easy problem, if you aren't prepared for it in advance. If 10,000 users sign up tomorrow... you might be very very hosed, as opposed to very very happy.

Amazon S3

Look at the prices for S3:

$0.15 per GB-Month of storage used. $0.20 per GB of data transferred.

So, that means Dropbox is going to have to resell S3 at a premium for the added value of these nice Coda-like features. Would you pay a premium for these Dropbox features? Maybe, I don't know.

Also, what's the typical use case? How much bandwidth/storage are people going to consume? Because, if I store 100 megabytes... my bill will pennies every month (going on S3 prices). You cannot transact pennies per user per month. If you could, then you've cracked the micropayments problem wide open. Maybe there would be a base fee? Like $5/month or something. Would people pay that much for online storage?

I don't know how other revenue generation models can be applied. Advertising? Selling a user's data to other businesses? (What's the privacy policy?)

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

#40

Post by ph0rque » Thu, Apr 05, 2007, 1:36 AM UTC

You know, your app is something that I've been wishing someone would make for some time now. Congrats!

Here's a suggestion for a future revision: give the ability for office documents to open with online office apps when clicked on in the public folder.