I just read Paul de Barros' post on GTM and how the business school class he lectured at was studying Dropbox versus Box. It got be thinking about the comparison again.
Two very different products, positioning and markets.
I don't like to be overly critical, but honestly in being objective, I am so surprised that Dropbox is still around. As an investor, certainly not anything I would buy stock in. After working there, my summary is:
- Lack of a dedicated strategy team results in their priorities shifting and changing before ever having completed prior priorities successfully.
- Product team leads all innovation with literally zero work put into to evaluating SAM/TAM revenue potential or assessing market opportunities in advance of just developing stuff. Google can afford the 'hit or miss' model; trying 30 things in the hope one is a home runs. A really bad idea for most other smaller companies where being prudent about where you place your bets is critical to success.
- Dropbox has never figured out nor invested in a B2B sales motion or product feature set. There sort of make efforts there, but don't take it seriously. They struggle in the B2B space. Dropbox is clearly a PLG (Product-Led Growth) driven company versus SLG, but even with PLG, there is always opportunities to up sell businesses to paid multi-user enterprise plans. B2B sales teams often feel like second-class citizens there without direction.
- Founders continue to drive passion projects. Some Founders are great operators (Bezos at Amazon and Whitman at eBay for example) and others really need to know when to bow out or head up a specific department area, and bring in other more experienced CEOs to scale the business. It's really time for Dropbox's Board to consider this.
- Dropbox had (but missed) a complete home run killer app with Dropbox Paper well ahead of its competitors as a collaborative authoring system, and could never complete the user interface or functionality to successfully bring it to market. It got totally usurped by Monday.com, Notion, Asana, Google docs, Microsoft and others.
- The lack of an overall strategy at Dropbox prevented it from moving passed being a FSS (File Sync and Share) solution into a more modern content business. FSS was deemed outdated and a commoditized capability by Gartner in 2015. Other comparative analysis call Dropbox and Box "file sharing apps". If that is how either company is viewed by customers and all they are thought of as being, then that company is in trouble.
- Dropbox has a ton of knowledge about content, but has not yet seized upon the opportunity there. Which is: understand what projects people are working on and help them organize, manage, share and improve the content and productivity around those projects. When you create a new Folder in Dropbox, everything Dropbox does should be based on knowing explicitly or implying via the content, tagging or AI, what personal project or work effort that folder supports. And then offer you capabilities around that effort.
Right now, my only real personal use case for Dropbox is how it lets me upload photos from the closed operating system of my Apple iPhone. Other than that, Google Drive and Google Suite does everything else I need around file and content management but without paying for it.
A good exercise: Ask anyone at Dropbox how they are differentiated or have unique capabilities not available in Google Suite or Microsoft 365?
Box on the other hand has exclusively in a focused way gone after the B2B space. It has owned that space since its inception over Dropbox. Their positioning as the "Content Cloud for business" gives them a distinct vision, differentiated positioning and helps direct how their company invests.
The Dropbox and Box case studies are good examples of how to drive a purposeful GTM and frankly, how not to. Sorry DBX.
#Dropbox #Box #Filesharing #ContentManagement #Monday.com #Asana #Trello #Notion
