Dropbox Startup Lessons Learned

Dropbox: ~80% 12-month customer retention

Dropbox is the Twitter of cloud storage. It stumbled into product/market-fit very early (maybe too early) and then basically stopped improving.

Part of the founding legend of Dropbox is that Drew Houston told people what he wanted to do, and everyone said ‘there are hundreds of these already’ and he replied ‘yes, but which one do you use?’ That’s what Zoom did - video calls are nothing new, but Zoom solved a lot of the small pieces of friction that made it fiddly to get into a call.

I compared Zoom with Dropbox and Skype, but another useful comparison is with photo sharing. There have always been hundreds of things that did this, but we saw a succession of companies that worked out something new around user experience and psychology that took them beyond ‘photos’ to some deeper insight - first Flickr, then Facebook and Instagr... See more

The pre-filled template reflects the real challenges and priorities I faced when I first joined DataStax in 2011. Create a copy and take a rough pass at filling out each the Go-To-Market, Product, and People categories for your company.