Being a primarily consumer focused brand in an infrastructure dominated market put Dropbox in a tough position - the real money was in the enterprise, and Dropbox wasn’t able to close those deals quite yet. Growth was steady until it was explosive: in 2008, Dropbox’s (now famous) referral program took off, leading to 3900% growth in 15 months.īut profitability remained out of reach. MIT students Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi founded Dropbox in 2007. Over time, Dropbox put in the hard work and developed the features that made their product tenable to those enterprise customers so they were able to go from a few engaged users at a Fortune 500 to a signed contract with the big decision makers. These features, like authentication, access controls, and audit trails, won’t be the most exciting things on your roadmap––but they might create the most impact. These users have special requirements and without the features to fulfill them, even the most rockstar salesperson in the world won’t be able to close.
You can’t generate enterprise sales just by hiring an enterprise sales team. This strategy, however, depends on the company’s ability to develop features that these enterprise users actually need.
Instead of going top down and selling to IT Admins, Dropbox gets people to actually use the product - and once teams are getting value out of Dropbox, it’s a much easier sell to the higher ups. Today, we call this land-and-expand: a company sells to developers and business users first, builds engagement from the bottom up, and, ultimately, forces companies to adopt the technology. It was a classic case of shadow IT - and while it’s really annoying to IT admins, it’s actually a big part of Dropbox’s strategy.
Imagine that you’re at work, and need an easy way to share and sync files – so you sign up for Dropbox quickly without telling the IT team.
IT administrators had reason to hate Dropbox.īack in 2013, a Spiceworks study found that 93% of respondents who used file-sharing services not approved by their IT administrator were using Dropbox.
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