Drew Houston: Distribution and Growing Your User Base

Then there were a couple other things that were pretty instrumental in our. In the early years of Dropbox, and one of them was really figuring out distribution. And I think that's something that people kind of. People kind of underestimate the importance of that. And it was especially interesting in our case because we made a couple mistakes. One was like, we're like, all right, well, we're launching this company and we should probably get real and hire PR people and advertise and do all these different things and SEO and buy AdWords and all this stuff. And so we bought a lot of AdWords. We spent a bunch of money and time on this, and the results were just terrible. It cost us like 500 or $1,000 to acquire a user that was going to pay us 100 bucks. And so very clear that wasn't going to work. But. But we had actually done these more kind of guerrilla things, which was inspired by reading the book Guerrilla Marketing, which was actually really instrumental in thinking about this, where we put this video of Dropbox on Digg in 2007, sorry, March 2008, about a year after we started. And what we managed to do is we put all these little Easter eggs in it. If you're familiar with Digg or Reddit, they're kind of these classic Internet communities and they have these little memes and things like that. And it was just this deadpan demo of me talking over sort of a screen. But the files are all name things named after, like Chocolate Rain, which was like a YouTube sensation, or it's like YouTube, one of these viral videos back in the day, and, you know, references to office space and Obama and XKCD and all these things. But it's just me kind of deadpan narrating, oh, this is how Dropbox works. And the thing just like. And we gave it kind of a little bit of a link bait title. I think it was Google Drive Killer, coming from MIT startup. So go big. And so the thing just like absolutely took off. It hit the top of Dig. It was like 12,000 digs. Hundreds of thousands of people visited the drop getdropbox.com which is our first domain name. That's a whole other story. But anyway, all these people visited the website and our beta waiting list went from 5,000 to 75,000 people overnight, which is because we'd been wringing our hands about this kind of critical mouse problem. And how do we get started? And just that one kind of ghetto thing that we did ended up working extremely well. In fact, nothing. Well, it solved literally overnight. Our distribution problem. Or at least the getting started problem.