Comments on: Dropbox-style Two-sided Sharing Incentives

By: Listen to Dropbox-style Two-sided Sharing Incentives - MicroISV on a Shoestring - Hear a Blog

Wed, 12 May 2010 04:22:02 +0000

[...] Last weekend, among a whole schedule of other great presentations at the Startup Lessons Learned conference (you can watch the video here), the folks behind Dropbox had a presentation (video) about how they went about growing their business. Apparently search ads were too expensive for them (due to bidding up by other venture-funded firms in [...] Original post [...]

By: Jonathan Street

Jonathan Street — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 13:25:51 +0000

>One obvious thing which I will probably not do is to ask folks for their webmail login details, grab their contact lists, and assist them in selecting folks to receive emails. That would be stupidly effective, but it teaches bad Internet practices (do not give your Gmail details to random websites!)

Completely agree with you on this one. To my shame I went through a period several years ago now creating scripts for this (http://torrentialwebdev.com/scripts/). I stopped supporting them some time ago and as far as I know they are no longer functional.

There is now a better way though. Microsoft, Google and Yahoo all have OAuth or OAuth-like api’s which allow you to fetch contacts without requesting login credentials. I did some work with the Microsoft api about a year ago. I’ve not checked the code recently but assume it still works. It’s written in PHP so would need to be reworked for your site but I’m happy to forward it on if you would be interested.

By: Dan Quellhorst

Dan Quellhorst — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 01:40:43 +0000

Dropbox is so sticky that after I allowed one of my html coders to use it instead of git, I can’t pry him away from it. It works fine even though the coder uses Windows 7 and I deploy to Linux from OS X.

Do you have to have users confirm their emails when you add them to mailchimp? What are you using for your regular email notifications to users? If you are using gmail for your domain are you close to hitting the 500/day send limit?

-Dan

By: Brian Armstrong

Brian Armstrong — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 22:13:59 +0000

Nice work Patrick, and funny because I actually just did the same thing on UniversityTutor.com after seeing the Dropbox slides from the conference

http://www.startbreakingfree.com/1504/how-to-get-your-customers-to-refer-their-friends/

Great minds think alike! We’ll have to chat sometime.

By: Improving Dual-Incentive Tell-a-Friend Marketing at Scott Porad

Improving Dual-Incentive Tell-a-Friend Marketing at Scott Porad — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 21:07:11 +0000

[...] comments Patrick McKenzie, creator of Bingo Card Creator, writes about how he was inspired by how Dropbox uses “two-sided incentives” to drive [...]

By: Eric

Eric — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 20:30:51 +0000

Agreed, I’ve always been impressed with Dropbox’s affiliate program – it’s one of the very few invite-a-friend features I’ve used. That’s partly because Dropbox seems very unlikely to let my friend down, and partly because that little bonus on the free account adds up to a real benefit.

Thanks for breaking down your implementation. I’d be really interested to see how effective it was in a followup post, once you have some results. I’ve been thinking about adding something similar to my site.