This is a great real world customer development case study. If you’re a startup, or in any organization doing new product development, it’s worth watching the entire 23 minutes:
As you probably know, Dropbox has about 3 million users (last I checked) and has been experiencing 15% to 20% month on month growth rates (or 600% + CAGR) since launch.
A couple of highlights:
- Their minimal viable product was a 3 minute screencast they dropped on Hacker News. That puts MVP in a whole new light.
- Their initial timeline was 8 weeks. The reality was more like 18 months. Founders are always optimistic.
- I liked their Paid search experiment. I liked that it was an experiment, and that they knew what lessons to draw from it. Too often, the sales model is an afterthought – “we’ll use paid search, we’ll put out a lot of PR, we’ll use facebook … ” when the search for a repeatable sales model should be one of the two key activities of the startup.
- I thought their bi-directional referral rewards program was brilliant (and obviously effective for them.) This is worth considering – getting benefits to the person getting the recommendation as well as the recommender makes it seem less “cheesy” – I’m less likely to think “Oh, they’re just doing it for their own benefit.”
- I also liked their “votebox” concept – a digg like approach for feature requests, where everyone gets 10 votes, and paying users (customers) get more. A great way of collecting info in a freemium model.
- They did a lot of measurement, didn’t they.
