Drew Houston: Customer Requests and Engineering Trade-offs

So the question is, are there things that seemed like a promising path that we decided not to do? There are all kinds of great. I mean, that is almost the essence of what makes the job difficult is there's these thousands of things that we could go do and all these shiny objects and usually most of the things we look back on and like, that was a dead end, a lot of them. We tried to get Dropbox sort of Pre installed on PCs and all these different things and do deals very early on. And the problem was this sort of classic negotiation. We had no leverage, so they were just going to push us around. They made all these ridiculous demands and they were kind of. It's like harpooning this whale and they're just taking you all over the place. And now it's a completely different story. We have a big audience and a brand and all these different things. But yeah, I'll give you an example. The number one thing our users, more power users ask for, which is the ability to watch multiple folders with your Dropbox. And they're like, why? You guys can see it on Votebox, which is our way that we let our users vote on different features that they want and make requests. Why the hell haven't you guys let me. Why don't you let me watch multiple folders? Because I want to watch my documents. I want to watch or map all these different things. And the reason is. Well, the initial reason was we built something simple because we didn't have time to build something complicated. So it was more technically complicated. There's a lot of UI code, there's all this different stuff that I would have gone and had to have built, and we just didn't have time to build it because we wanted to get something out the door. But then we realized there's this great benefit to the simplicity of the model where your Dropbox will look the same on your phone as it does on your computer. And it's pretty easy to explain to people that you have this magic folder and anything you save in here saves everywhere and all these different benefits. And conversely, playing with the other products is sort of like, well, welcome to this and please configure your folder mapping. And. And some people love that, and that's great. But most people are very, very confused. And if you're already skeptical enough that here's this new thing that you've never seen before, and now they're asking you about folder mappings and you don't spend your time worrying about folders and files and things like that, then you're going to be pretty turned off. We would find when we did usability tests that people couldn't even figure out how to install Dropbox to begin with. They would. We brought five people in literally off the street. And zero of five, we kept tally of all these things. Zero of five people even discovered that there was a tray icon or a little menu bar icon. If you don't know that, then you're going to have a lot of trouble getting back to your Dropbox folder and all kinds of other things. You're not going to have a good experience. And we're like, wow, ok, zero percent. All right. Because we would get these emails, we get these emails to our feedback alias and one would be like, oh my God, Dropbox is amazing. I love it. And the next one would be like, I don't understand how you MIT nerds have. I need a PhD in physics, even understand this thing. And they're just like, it's a diatribe. And they're like one right after the other. And we're like, that's interesting. And so, so we brought people in off the street and then we started seeing all these things like, okay, people are clicking the screenshots in the tour because they think it's their computer people. Well, you know, you laugh, but it's actually our problem, right? These are people that, you know, that would be paying us if they actually had a good experience and all kinds of things. They would click on Internet Explorer and it would obscure the download window or they couldn't figure out where the download actually went. I mean, list of dozens and dozens and dozens of things. And we just sanded them down. We're just like, okay, well we're going to get to thing number 71 today. Now, if you actually install Dropbox, you see this big bouncing green arrow whenever you. It's like, hey, this is the icon you have to click on to get to your Dropbox. And so kind of long answer to it's amazing. Even just like 10% more friction might cut your audience in half and it's exponential. So we decided that it just was not worth the complexity to build that and just wasn't worth the engineering trade off.