Logical Philosopher

Why Dropbox Succeeded and Syncplicity Didn’t

In a re­sponse to a ques­tion on Quora ti­tled “Why is Drop­box more pop­u­lar than other tools with sim­i­lar func­tion­al­ity?”, Isaac Hall, co-founder of Sync­plic­ity, a com­pet­ing ser­vice you’ve prob­a­bly never heard of, ex­plains:

In the end, it re­ally came down to one in­cred­i­bly ge­nius idea: Drop­box lim­ited its fea­ture set on pur­pose. It had one folder and that folder al­ways synced with­out any is­sues – it was magic. Sync­plic­ity could sync every folder on your com­puter until you hit our quota. (Un­for­tu­nately, that fea­ture was used to syn­chro­nize C:\Win­dows\ for dozens of users – doh!) Our com­pany had too many fea­tures and this cre­ated con­fu­sion amongst our cus­tomer base. This in turn led to enough cus­tomer sup­port is­sues that we couldn’t in­no­vate on the prod­uct, we were too busy fix­ing things.

He then goes on to pro­vide some great ad­vice:

If you’re start­ing a new com­pany, the best thing you can do is keep your fea­ture set small and fo­cused. Do one thing as best as you pos­si­bly can. Your users will beg and beg for more func­tion­al­ity. They will tell you their prob­lems and ask you to fix it. My phi­los­o­phy is that they’re right if their fea­ture re­quest is right only if it works for 80% of your cus­tomers. Until you have a lot of re­sources, stay fo­cused on your core com­pe­tency.