The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 24 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Swanick: GrowSumo Used Fake Logos Like Dropbox to Gain Early Traction
“So they saw that there was nothing on our page, so we threw up fake logos, like, Zenefits was huge at the time, Dropbox, you know, those kinds of companies.”
Budman: Backblaze stores about half as much data as Dropbox
“And at this point we are storing about half as much data as Dropbox.”
Ellis: Dropbox was the fastest SaaS business to hit $1B ARR
“They're the fastest company, fastest SaaS business to ever get to the one billion dollar revenue run rate”
Latka: Dropbox drove growth by gifting free storage instead of discounts
“Dropbox, they give away their utility value, not dollars discounts. They give away free storage.”
Slack And Asana Sell Company Licenses Upfront Unlike Single-User SaaS Tools
“The advantage that like Asana and Slack has, or even like an intercom, you pay for your company straight up. You always buy a company license from the get-go, even if you self-served. Whereas with a product like Dropbox, you might just be using it on your own.…”
Decugis: A healthy freemium model likely requires 40 million users
“You really have to have very strong numbers and four million is good, but you know, to have a very healthy freemium model would probably would need to be 40.”
Rusenko: Freemium fails if paywalls feel like artificial constraints
“Your model has to resonate with your customers in a way that they understand why they have to pay more for something, or they just won't do it. If it comes off as sort of fake, comes off as this like artificial constraint, it's not going to work.”
Accel and Sequoia have co-invested in only 8 to 12 companies worldwide
“No, no, they, there are a very few I mean, there are like I don't know, eight or 10 or 12 companies in the world that they have both invested in Dropbox being one of them, Clevertabs being another one.”
Ellis: Dropbox had strong referrals before launching its referral program
“Referrals were strong before the referral program went in place. People love the product. We're spreading the word about the product.”
Ellis: Scaling to $1B Requires Integrated Teams, Not Isolated Growth Hacks
“You can't scale to that level on just clever growth hacks that one or two people are doing. You need to have a very integrated, coordinated team, and the best time to build that into your business is early when the culture is still malleable to do it.”
Caruso: Cash discounts fail to incentivize SaaS user virality and referrals
“They initially were giving dollar discounts to users to do a referral, and they found out that that wasn't working at all, and we've had the exact same experience. You know, if we said, oh, we'll give you five dollars off if you refer someone, that didn't real…”
Nelson: Building a large self-serve SaaS at low ARPU is insanely hard
“When I launched, that's, you know, it was all self-serve. It was, you know, 29 bucks a month or 49 bucks a month, and it's just, it's insanely hard to build something large without, I mean, Dropbox has done it, but very few have.”
FileCloud targets regulated sectors like military and government for data control
“We have a very unique differentiation where we provide solutions for specific, you know, areas and industries where they need complete data control and privacy. You can imagine organizations like You know, the military intelligence forces, insurance and other …”
Detectify co-founders hacked Google, Facebook, and Dropbox before starting company
“My co-founders that are some really, some of the world's best white hat hackers, they have more or less, as part of this responsible disclosure scene, they have hacked, you know, Google and Facebook and Dropbox. They hacked Facebook with the help of Dropbox, e…”
Ellis: Dropbox built its famous referral program with under 10 employees
“There was less than 10 of us at the company at the time. I was the only non-engineer at the company”
Ellis: Ring founder Jamie Siminoff's PhoneTag inspired Dropbox referral program
“Jamie Siminoff, the guy that runs Ring, the super hot video doorbell company now, but he you know, prior to that, he had a company called PhoneTag, where he had basically done a ton of testing and came up with this double-sided incentive as being really effect…”
Foo: Employees at Dropbox, Twitter, and Airbnb independently adopted Polymail
“We have multiple users at Dropbox, Twitter, Airbnb where a lot of the users there have just adopted the product on their own.”
MatterMade's creative team manages design work for Dropbox and Yelp
“We have this amazing design team. Like they're doing design for Dropbox and Yelp and like really high profile clients of ours.”
Milich: Skiff monetizes easily on storage because users expect linear pricing
“So one of the things we can monetize pretty easily is storage space. People are probably paying for storage space in their life already, whether it's on Google or it's on Dropbox or something else. And so that's something that's pretty common. Also it's, you k…”
Sisson: Yaza plans to charge $5 to $7 per month for subscriptions
“We'll do subscriptions. I mean for people who have a lot of video and they want the advanced camera. Just think of it as like Dropbox model will charge, you know, five, seven dollars a month for extra memory, and then you'll get a more powerful camera for edit…”
Hendrickx: HQ.app centralizes search and organization across third-party work apps
“Basically the idea is to replace the way people currently organize, like, bookmarks and files in their typical places. So you connect your apps Google Drive, Dropbox, Slack, Gmail, et cetera and you get this central search engine you type, you find stuff, and …”
Brown: Orangedox ranks number one for 'track my Dropbox files'
“To grab a, you know, if you look at track my Dropbox files, we come up with like number one on that list now.”
Chad Brown: Orangedox customers pay an average of $25 to $30 monthly
“We definitely are more on the personal use to date mainly because, you know, we're attached to things like Dropbox and Google Drive, but we have I would say probably an average, each customer is paying between 25 to 30 dollars a month.”