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Drew Houston on the growth hacks Dropbox used to acquire millions of users

October 22, 2025

Dropbox founder Drew Houston reflects the distribution challenge most startups face in the early days:

“You can buy all the AdWords in the world but if nobody’s searching for what you’re making, you have a problem.”

Drew eventually landed on a two-step solution to solve Dropbox’s cold start problem.

Step 1: make a product that people really love to use.

“Good engineering and good design are part of it, but one of the ways I think about it is maximizing the probability that your customer ends up with a solved problem. That’s why Craigslist — which was started in the 1990s and doesn’t appear to have been updated since the 1990s — is by far the most successful business of its kind. You show up at Craigslist and you leave with your concert tickets or your casual encounter or whatever you’re looking for. Even though the design isn’t that great and it isn’t that hard of an engineering problem, it was unbelievably successful . . . [Distribution] starts with a great product and all of the marketing or tricks in the world won’t help you push a rock uphill.”

Step 2: give people tools to spread the word

“Two things drove the vast majority of our signups today. The first was we created this incentive-referral program where if I tell you about Dropbox you get some extra storage and I get some extra storage, which gave us this kind of currency to work with and people were just doing it for its own sake. People weren’t even using the extra space. They were just referring their friends because they got points. We’d now call it a gamification mechanic, even though I’m not sure that word was even around back then.”

Drew continues:

“The other thing we did was create this idea of shared folders where if I’m working on a shared project at work or if I want to share photos with my family, then all these new users are brought into the fold just by using the product . . . Now there’s whole body of art and science on how to do that, how consumer internet companies grow, and how viral growth works, but these things were instrumental to how we got started.”