Growing your user base from scratch is a challenge. Discover one simple
distribution hack from founder and CEO of Dropbox, Drew Houston. This quick
experimental distribution trick grew Dropbox’s waiting list from 5,000 to
75,000 people overnight.

Key Takeaways:

• Don’t underestimate the value of distribution

• Spending heavily on marketing, sales and PR materials, doesn’t always
  guarantee success.

• Thinking outside of the box, remaining human and distributing via
  experimental channels that target your key audience

Transcription

There were a couple things that that were pretty instrumental in the early
years of dropbox. One of them was really figuring out distribution. I think
it’s something that people kind of underestimate the importance of. It was
especially interesting in our case, because we made a couple of mistakes.

We we’re launching this company and we should probably get real and hire PR
and advertising people to do all of these different things like SEO adwords.
So, we bought a lot of Adwords.

We spent a bunch of money and time on this, and the results were just
terrible. It was like five hundred or a thousand dollars to acquire a user
that was going to pay us one hundred bucks. So, it was very clear that it
wasn’t going to work.

We had actually done these more kind of guerrilla things, which was inspired
by reading the book guerrilla marketing, which was actually really
instrumental.

We put this video of Dropbox on dig, a year after we started. What we
managed to do is put all of these little easter eggs in it, and because if
you’re familiar with dig or reddit, they’re kind of these classic internet
communities. They have these little memes and things like that.

It was just this deadpan demo of me talking over a screen, but the files are
all named things like chocolate rain, which was youtube sensation viral video
back in the day. It references office space and Obama and XKCD and all these
things. But, it’s just me narrating how dropbox works and we gave it a link
bait title: “google drive killer coming from MIT
startup”.

From this, things absolutely took off. The video hit the top of dig with
12,000 digs, and hundreds of thousands of people visiting the website. Our
beta waiting list went from 5,000 to 75,000 people overnight. We’d be
wringing our hands about how we could get started. But with that one
light-hearted thing, it ended up working extremely well. In fact, it literally
solved our distribution problem overnight, or at least the getting started
problem.

End

Related: Why some people are years ahead in distribution
strategies.

Transcription by Upscope: ‘See your user’s screen from live chat’