How Dropbox Achieved Product-Market Fit... Overnight!

One of my favourite stories from the book, The Lean Startup, is how Drew Houston, the founder of Dropbox, validated his file-sharing app idea before spending £££ on development work.

Drew knew his product wasn’t ready for a public launch yet, but wanted to gauge whether it solved real problems for real people.

So… Drew recorded a video prototype to demonstrate Dropbox's main features, use cases, and how easy it was for people to share files across their devices.

Here's the original video prototype from 2007:

The video went viral! It drove hundreds of thousands of potential customers to the Dropbox website, and their beta waiting list jumped from 5,000 to 75,000 overnight.

And here’s the kicker… Dropbox wasn’t even a working product. It was just a video!

BUT it was the market validation Drew needed.

And the rest is history… They’ve since turned down an Apple acquisition, have over 700 million users, and are now valued at around $10 billion.

Dropbox is an excellent example for any startup in the early stages of building a digital product. The number one goal is to learn what your customers want (and are willing to pay for) as quickly as possible.

At mmtm, we're fully invested in this Lean MVP methodology with all of our clients. To maximise your chances of long-term success, it's essential to launch quickly, get customer feedback and iterate.