Dropbox Case - Invest or Not

Would you invest in Dropbox?

DROPBOX

After having analyzed the case of Dropbox, I came to the conclusion that I definitely would have invested in it.

Let’s start by taking a closer look to the founding team . Both, Drew Houston and his co-founder were young and passionate computer scientists, with a lot of skills and working experience in the software industry. They showed immediate commitment to the project since the problem they intended to solve was a real need they faced while in university or at work. I also liked the way they approached the startup phase of the project, starting immediately with a lean mentality, reducing unnecessary costs by keeping the development team small and doing all in-house. One complaint could be, that they didn’t had a person specialised or with more experience in the business and marketing sector. In fact, they hadn’t a clear vision at the beginning on how to promote the product and attract customers. But after some failing strategy they found the right path as a proof on how determined they were.

The resources wasn’t a big issue for them, since they developed everything by themselves. They also managed to keep the costs for the servers low, by opting for Amazon’s web services. They were also able to validate in an early phase the potential customers by creating a promo video that emulated the functionalities of Dropbox.

Finally, the most important part for my decision to invest in Dropbox is for sure the opportunity . We see a clear and good value proposition of the product, i.e. provide an easy-to-use solution for file synchronization and backup that just works. Considering the window of opportunity, we see that many small competitors were already trying to emerge from the ground with possible solutions to the cloud sharing problem. But none of them really succeeded. Also big companies like