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0 pointsiamcalledrob1mo ago0 comments

Another issue: Paper was tied to your Dropbox account.

From Dropbox's perspective, this sounds great. Accounts become more useful and valuable. The addressable market of a Dropbox account grows! Plus, everyone has a Dropbox account already, right?

Unfortunately, it turns out that business customers generally don't deploy Dropbox wall-to-wall. It's expensive. Not all employees need file sync.

A Dropbox account ends up being an obstacle to adoption.

And a distraction: a common account creates an irresistible urge to spend a lot of time finding ways to tie this new product into the old one.

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price23d ago

I'm not sure I ultimately buy that Dropbox is expensive - for one thing, Notion now charges basically the same as Dropbox, and you don't even get file sync in the deal.

I can definitely believe that that was an objection customers had, though. I just suspect that what it really meant was another way of expressing that there wasn't PMF - if the PMF were there, they'd have willingly paid, just like they do now for Notion or Slab or what have you.

And yeah, there was definitely some energy going into trying to tie the products together more (putting Paper docs in your Dropbox folders) - and when that finally shipped it sadly made the Paper experience worse, not better.

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