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My YC app: Dropbox - Throw away your USB drive

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

#41

Post by ph0rque »

jganetsk wrote: post #39
ashu wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How about making up to X GB free, and come up with a tiered charging plan for more than X?

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

#43

Post by BrandonM »

nefele wrote: post #13

Drew, I saw your short demo at BarCamp and I must say Dropbox looks great! Are you planning on having a Linux port as well, or is too early to talk about that? Also, as another SFP applicant I have to tell you that I really hope you get the funding - you deserve it.

You might want to check out FUSE for Linux. There are various programs built on top of it which allow remote filesystems to look exactly like local ones. Two that I use are curlftpfs and sshfs. It's really nice to be able to perform any of my computer's programs on these remote files, and it looks very similar to what Dropbox accomplishes. Of course, you would need to have an FTP or SSH login somewhere, but you can get free FTP access from e.g. Lycos, so that shouldn't be an issue.

In short, I guess I'm curious what separates Dropbox from using a free FTP service which is connected either through Windows' built-in Network Places or Linux's curlftpfs. There are obvious differences, but are they enough to warrant fees?

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

#44

Post by jganetsk »

budu3 wrote: post #19

Wow dude! This looks like a good competitor for Google"s "GDrive". I hope you get accepted.

Well there doesn't seem to be a GDrive at the moment... but there are many other similar online storage solutions.

Techcrunch had an article with 13 of them... http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/01/31/the-online-storage-gang/

It's a pretty crowded space. And XDrive gets you 5 GB for free, 50 GB for $9.95 a month. I can't expect Dropbox to charge those prices, given S3 as a backend. The margin just isn't really there, especially given the number of uses that will want free storage. And I think competitors can duplicate Dropbox's nice front end. In fact, here's an open source front end to SVN which is similar to Dropbox's:

http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/

Sorry for all the negativity, I guess I'm trying to play devil's advocate here. It's a wonderful product you got going there, but I think you will have to work really hard.

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

#45

Post by jganetsk »

jganetsk wrote: post #44
budu3 wrote: post #19

Wow dude! This looks like a good competitor for Google"s "GDrive". I hope you get accepted.

Well there doesn't seem to be a GDrive at the moment... but there are many other similar online storage solutions. Techcrunch had an article with 13 of them... http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/01/31/the-online-storage-gang/ It's a pretty crowded space. And XDrive gets you 5 GB for free, 50 GB for $9.95 a month. I can't expect Dropbox to charge those prices, given S3 as a backend. The margin just isn't really there, esp…

I'm going to respond to my own post, and add that... for the initial phase where you don't expect to make money... you have chosen a great setup. S3 is a robust , reliable, and easy way to handle the intial ramp up should hoards of users sign up, a concern I raised in another post. You probably have plans to get onto your own backend in the long-run.

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

#46

Post by sumantra2 »

ph0rque wrote: post #40

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.

cool demo !!! But I must agree that this is coda stuff.

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

#47

Post by chandrab »

Nice Application...the question I have is on the marketing side- how are you going to attract users? and how are you going to differentiate yourself from the hordes of other online storage vendors, esp. to the newbie users who can't tell them apart easy? (so you have to have a simple, compelling story for them)

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

#48

Post by zkinion »

It looks great man. I know you'll be accepted. The writing is on the wall. Posting your video here just seals the deal, and puts yourself out there. I didn't apply to YC, but if I did, I'd be putting my stuff up here as well. I'm surprized nobody else has posted like you did. That takes some balls and self-belief.

I didn't agree with some of the things you've said before, like IP rules, etc. but you've earned my respect. Best of luck to you. :)

-Zak Kinion

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

#49

Post by blakeross »

dhouston wrote: post #17
nefele wrote: post #13

Drew, I saw your short demo at BarCamp and I must say Dropbox looks great! Are you planning on having a Linux port as well, or is too early to talk about that? Also, as another SFP applicant I have to tell you that I really hope you get the funding - you deserve it.

thanks :) a linux port is doable (mac will come first) -- everything's written in python and was designed from the outset to be portable. although this isn't the initial focus of dropbox, a linux port would be interesting for maintaining small web sites or web apps -- instead of using scp/sftp or equivalent you could just modify the files on your desktop and have them synced to your web host.

All written in Python? I'd love to know a bit more about what you're doing if you can share. I put together a similar tool last year for myself (Windows-only) using NTFS' USN journal, but it sounds like you're doing something different.

The app looks great.

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

#50

Post by Sam_Odio »

dhouston wrote: post #17
nefele wrote: post #13

Drew, I saw your short demo at BarCamp and I must say Dropbox looks great! Are you planning on having a Linux port as well, or is too early to talk about that? Also, as another SFP applicant I have to tell you that I really hope you get the funding - you deserve it.

thanks :) a linux port is doable (mac will come first) -- everything's written in python and was designed from the outset to be portable. although this isn't the initial focus of dropbox, a linux port would be interesting for maintaining small web sites or web apps -- instead of using scp/sftp or equivalent you could just modify the files on your desktop and have them synced to your web host.

Hey Drew,

Congrats on a great product. A linux port would be great for servers - I'm always rsyncing stuff between my linux boxes.

For those who don't have shell access though, it would be cool if you integrated the service with (S)FTP. I don't even think you'd need to sync to the server.

Just giving the user the ability push his/her dropbox public folder to a server using (S)FTP would give your software several new use cases.

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