It probably couldn’t support more than dozens of users at once. It worked only on Windows, and Drew Houston hadn’t developed a Mac port yet. This Dropbox MVP was simple and not ready for public use. Why was this a Minimum Viable Product? In the Lean Startup framework, this video ‘product’ tested the value hypothesis – that people actually faced a file sync problem, and Dropbox was the solution to that problem. He released his Dropbox explainer video MVP to Hacker News on April 5, 2007, as part of his application to Y Combinator.Īt the bottom of the video was a form to join the waiting list for the private beta.
So Drew recorded a video of his prototype, demonstrating its main features and use cases. Drew knew his product prototype wasn’t ready for a public launch yet, but he still wanted to gauge whether his product solved problems for other people. He had built an early prototype, but it was from seamless and bug-free. On this bus ride, he started building the first version of Dropbox. Famously, he forget to take his USB drive on a long bus ride, depriving of the files he needed to work. Over a decade ago, when Drew Houston founded Dropbox in 2007, he knew the file sync problem was a problem he faced intimately, and suspected others faced as well. This is a very complex product to build, requires technical wizardry to integrate into the operating system, handle large files, deal with file conflicts, and more, all packed in a seamless user experience. If you then edit the doc on your phone, the saved changes will show up in your computer’s version too. If you upload a Word doc to your Dropbox folder on your laptop, you can then access the same doc on your phone. If you haven’t heard of it yet, Dropbox syncs your files across all your devices. If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, be emboldened by the idea that Dropbox started with just about as much as you have right now. Back to Dropbox’s original Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
So let’s go back to the beginning, before Dropbox had a polished product and thousands of employees. It’s a very complex product, honed over a decade of development and hundreds of millions of dollars of investment.īut Dropbox didn’t start with the slick, seamless product you use today. ĭropbox is now a technology giant, valued at $10 billion in a 2014 funding round. Like this article? Sign up for a free trial here. Shortform has the world's best summaries of books you should be reading. This article is an excerpt from the Shortform summary of "The Lean Startup" by Eric Ries.
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