{"id":39960,"date":"2023-10-20T15:05:29","date_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:05:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/startupsmart.test\/2023\/10\/20\/how-1-billion-software-giant-dropbox-came-and-conquered-down-under-startupsmart\/"},"modified":"2023-10-20T15:05:29","modified_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:05:29","slug":"how-1-billion-software-giant-dropbox-came-and-conquered-down-under-startupsmart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/uncategorized\/how-1-billion-software-giant-dropbox-came-and-conquered-down-under-startupsmart\/","title":{"rendered":"How $1 billion software giant Dropbox came and conquered Down Under – StartupSmart"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Dropbox<\/div>\n

When a company enters a new market it\u2019s never really certain what will work\u2014and that’s true even when the company is global software giant Dropbox.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe scariest challenge is in the planning phase because when you start you\u2019ve got a blank sheet of paper,\u201d says Dropbox managing director for Australia and New Zealand Charlie Wood when reflecting on the\u00a0early days of bringing\u00a0Dropbox Down Under.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a hell of a lot of unknown that you\u2019ve got to try and get right,\u201d\u00a0Wood tells\u00a0StartupSmart.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Wood joined the cloud-sharing platform two-and-a-half years ago and helped establish its regional headquarters in Sydney in 2014. Since that time, Wood says Australia has become one of the company’s fastest growing markets.<\/p>\n

Globally, Dropbox has recently hit\u00a0$US1 billion ($1.3 billion) in annualised global revenue, and according to\u00a0to MIT Technology Review<\/em><\/a>, the company is acquiring 10 million new users around the world each month.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne in two Australians use Dropbox,\u201d says Wood.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve taken the team from a couple of people to fifty people in a couple of years.\u201d<\/p>\n

Wood says Dropbox’s growth stems from the company’s\u00a0internal culture, brand awareness, and customer engagement, as well as constantly investing in new innovation and products.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll these things are starting to align,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Build a team that scales<\/h3>\n

When recruiting people for your team, Wood says culture, innovation and brand should be strongly aligned with each person. Because\u00a0while it may be \u201creally easy\u201d to have great collaboration and culture in a small team, this can become a challenge as that team grows to 100 people or more.<\/p>\n

To mitigate this, Wood says it\u2019s important for growing businesses to manage collaboration and culture strategically so they\u2019re entrenched in the company\u2014no matter how large it gets.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019ve got to be very deliberate on how you plan that,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201c[And] have a very strong engineering team.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hack new solutions<\/h3>\n

Dropbox’s goal to build \u201cinfinitely scalable hard drive stored in the cloud\u201d is a lofty task and so putting innovation at the forefront of the business has been critical, says Wood.<\/p>\n

Dropbox is constantly releasing new tools and features and some of these evolve out of its \u201chack week\u201d.<\/p>\n

Read more:\u00a0How to follow in the footsteps of Atlassian and Zendesk and run your own hackathon<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

The event gives Dropbox employees a chance to step away from their day-to-day work and play with new ideas, Wood says.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey [can] go deep and build a small team,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we see is a lot of that trickling down into products \u2026 we\u2019re incredibly collaborative.\u201d<\/p>\n

Increase brand awareness with real customer stories<\/h3>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a difficult thing to do to scale a brand and it\u2019s a difficult thing to do to scale it globally,\u201d says Wood.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of my biggest challenges [when Dropbox launched Down Under] was how do we scale that message.\u201d<\/p>\n

The trick, he says, is to ask the people you serve what they really think of your product or service and its value.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople are often very giving of their time if they\u2019re asked for their opinion and it\u2019s done in a genuine way,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

This has helped Dropbox create \u201ccustomer heroes\u201d and \u201cgreat customer stories\u201d, says Wood.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou never have infinite resources,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019ve got to get out there \u2026 it\u2019s important to use local customers and get them to tell the story.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt just takes time to get those stories by industry and sector to permeate.\u201d<\/p>\n

Engage in events<\/h3>\n

In addition to turning customers into brand ambassadors, Wood says participating in public events such as chief innovation officer forums, as well as running Dropbox\u2019s own events, has helped drive brand awareness and engagement.<\/p>\n

Wood says the Australian office recently ran an interest group by randomly inviting users to come and share their opinions of Dropbox. Guests were given free drinks and food and specially made t-shirts, and they watched a live panel talk.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019d be surprised how far that can get you,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Learn from those who\u2019ve done it before<\/h3>\n

When developing plans to launch your startup or take it global, Wood says founders can be faced with big questions like what targets should be set, what type or size of team should be built, and what should be done first.<\/p>\n

Wood says finding people with experience tackling these challenges at similarly paced companies helped him make these big calls.<\/p>\n

\u201cI brought a lot of people into here that have worked at companies like LinkedIn and Salesforce,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe bring lessons from those organisations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Follow StartupSmart on<\/em>\u00a0Facebook<\/a>,<\/em>\u00a0Twitter<\/a>,\u00a0LinkedIn<\/a>\u00a0and iTunes<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When a company enters a new market it\u2019s never really certain what will work\u2014and that’s true even when the company<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":61235,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39960"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39960"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39960\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/61235"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}