theragax
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 9 months, 2012–2024
4:39 · 674K views · Sep 15, 2008
The original five-minute Dropbox demo video, which presented the product's features before a finished product existed. It was aimed at technical early adopters and became famous as a launch strategy.
HN cites it as the classic example of validating a product idea with a demo video, and many recall how compelling it was.
10 comments from Hacker News
DropBox is one of the most useful products to come out in the last decade. I still remember seeing the original 5 minute demo (1). My jaw was on the floor, I instantly needed it. And it's still the best, even at a premium price (marked in cost of GB of storage). The article has several interesting points, but the takeaway for me remains "[Solve] a worthy problem." (1) this video
For anyone who hasn't watched it, checkout the original demo videos made by Drew himself. Video1 (Probably earlier version) [LINK] Video2 (Better than Video1, more witty and well made.) this video It's pretty impressive and the product then looked pretty polished (though minimalistic as it is even today) that even after 11 years, it hasn't gone through much changes. One thing that is interesting is that many people use Dropbox as a poster child of MVPs and Lean methodology, but given the possible effort and polish that Drew had put into the product, I am not sure we can call the beta version as an MVP.
What was the logic in the name Dewhale? Maybe a better method to showcase would be a walkthrough demo video. If you haven't seen the original dropbox video, it's great format, and really worked for them. this video
Not sure about the code, but here's the original Demo Video Drew had on their getdropbox.com landing page. It presents the features in a very entertaining way :) [ Sep 15th 2008 ] DropBox Demo this video
This is a brilliant idea. Wishing you well. I'm a .com user so I can't use this (though I'd like to), but here's a walkthrough of all my thoughts as I interacted with your page, and some notes about how you might improve the site given my experience. To others reading, if you'd like a more formalized version of this type of feedback for your own products, including split testing recommendations designed to help validate the hypotheses, I'm available for consulting and my email's in my profile. Cheers! --------- "wow, this is a great idea" At this point, I fundamentally misunderstood what your product was. Here's what I thought it was, that it seemingly isn't: I maintain a local dropdown folder full of markdown files. At an interval or when one changes, there's a hook that automatically updates the content of my site. (similar to the way a static site can be made to rebuild and deploy on push). I assumed the one time pricing was because this was a desktop software that handled that process. I looked around the page for extra info about installation and how it works – I wanted to avoid having to watch a fluffy howto video. This didn't work, and I gave in and watched the video. I was happy to see it's only :57 – you might call this out on the page, it would have made me more likely to click, knowing it's short. With that said, the video was illuminating but had some major issues. It starts too slow (slides) and promptly gets WAY too fast (screencap). "Sync your blog posts with d