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Incidentally, Drew's relationship with the HN community is even older than his relationship with Y Combinator. Two weeks before we interviewed Drew and Arash, D
by jl 8y ago
Incidentally, Drew's relationship with the HN community is even older than his relationship with Y Combinator. Two weeks before we interviewed Drew and Arash, Drew posted Dropbox to HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
- jshap70 8y ago> It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this? lol
- mentos 8y agoI'd love to hear from Drew on what pieces of advice from that ShowHN discussion actually affected their thinking for better/worse.
- zerr 8y agoBut they aren't profitable (and never were), right?
- slg 8y agoI don't think that comment is necessarily unfair. Dropdox does charge for the service if a user wants over 2GB. I think the more questionable comment is that first point: >For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software. That is the epitome of not getting it.
- pashabitz 8y agoMan the comments on this. HN gold.
- Gargoyle 8y agoIt would be a fun experiment to put comments like this as quotes on the "Add Comment" page so you had to read them while typing your own comment. Might make people take a second or two extra to reconsider.
- johndubchak 8y ago+1
- drstewart 8y agoWith the requisite "why would you do this? it's trivial to <insert something incredibly time consuming, annoying, and non-trivial> instead!"
- throwaway84742 8y agoClassic “less space than a Nomad, lame”. That post did not age well. Even today there’s nothing I can deploy on my own server that would be anywhere near as good.
- curun1r 8y agoI think there's another point to be learned from both the Dropbox comment and CmdrTaco's original infamous iPod take. And that's the importance of a really well-designed product that's simple and easy to use. Both Dropbox and the iPod weren't the first to try to solve the problems they were addressing, but they were the most elegant, intuitive solution. Both implementations effectively got out of the way of their users and exposed the underlying function with a little impedance as possible. It's always important to remember that the goal isn't for users to use your product. The goal is for users to get the value your product delivers. That sounds obvious, but a lot of product development teams forget that. Both Dropbox and the original iPod seem to embody that distinction. As for your "nothing I can deploy on my own server" comment, checkout syncthing or Resilio. Both take a bit more doing than a simple Dropbox install, but I've found syncthing to be pretty bulletproof once it's configured and I've heard a lot of people prefer Resilio.
- dingaling 8y agoThere was nothing intuitive about the iPod click-wheel interface; in casual use of other people's iPods I never did determine how to use it before it was superseded by touchscreens.
- mlevental 8y agoI don't believe you. firstly rotate the wheel to adjust a level (i.e. level of menu selection highlight) is literally how volume knobs have always worked. secondly clickwheel was in the iPod for 5 years? 8 years? in all the time you never figured out how to use it?
- GBond 8y agoI remember this post. One of many "show HN" posts that have hit it big. Congrats!
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]