Drew Houston explains how he built Dropbox with the AARRR! Framework

A lot of competitors who built things that probably were reasonably functional, but they didn't get distribution right and they didn't get virality right. Dave McClure had a great model called Startup Metrics for Pirates. AARRR Acquisition activation, revenue retention and referral. That becomes like, this was how we manage the company. Users come in, oh my God. 4 out of 5 who sign up don't put a file in their Dropbox, don't install the client. What is going on? We actually brought people in off of Craigslist and watched them install the product. We're like, hey, just sit down. Here's Dropbox. Go from here to sharing a file. Zero of the five people succeeded. Zero of five even came close. But really paying attention to all the activation is just one example. But all the steps and the viral engine tuning that as much as possible. Coming up with things like the referral program, which had this two side incentive where if I tell you about Dropbox, you get free space, I get free space. That drove like 30% of our signups for a while. Sure. Folder's inherently viral, another 20%. So half of our signups were viral. And that was something that was like a new. That was something that wasn't well understood before that time. And it was inspired by some of the stuff I saw in the late 90s, like PayPal or maybe early 2000s. PayPal had an incentive referral bonus. I had the idea for the Dig in Reddit video because based on a book called Guerrilla Marketing, which is like, how do you do marketing get users when you have no money? And so a lot of these things came together at that time, 2007, 2008, where a lot of the dots were connected from things that I had read over the last several years.