We don't even know if the valuation is $100 million. "Well-over" $50 million could be $60 million. I'd reserve my judgement until the final number is confirmed. Maybe the final number is $100 million. Maybe not. When a reporter says "And we’ve heard" you can translate that to they heard a rumor.
Is it some sort of tax evasion scheme? Are you intentionally throwing out absurdities?
In a certain light, this acquisition might make sense from a strategic, rather than ROI, point of view: my guess is that Dropbox thinks Mailbox will be the email app for mobile, just as Gmail became the the email web service for Google. Gmail doesn't really turn any significant profit AFAIK, yet Gmail makes sense because it strategically anchors Google's entire ecosystem. In that sense, Mailbox might become part of an ecosystem of productivity/collaboration tools that Dropbox creates.
> "You say that as if $60 million would be any less absurd?"
I find neither price absurd. It is clear that Dropbox has not bought Mailbox for the purposes of selling copies of Mailbox - making $100mm back that way is, of course, insanity.
Dropbox right now is having its core feature (online storage) attacked by competitors with far-reaching and deeply integrated stacks. See: iCloud, Google, etc, where the cloud storage is deeply integrated specific content on your device. Photos, documents, email, etc.
It would seem like they're trying to develop this stack for themselves and take on Google and Apple directly. Whether or not this is the right strategy I cannot say, but a cloud email service with a best-of-breed UI will certainly help them cement the market share they need.
And having seen Mailbox, it's very competitive with what is IMO the next-best mobile email client, GMail, and takes iOS's Mail.app out back and shoots it.
I expect the next moves to be either developing or acquiring media sharing (photos, videos, etc) apps. This is the sort of ecosystem they need to create to hope to sell Dropbox as the "your data, everywhere, without lock-in" value proposition.
Mailbox isn't just a half-decent email UI, it is the best email UI we've seen in ages, in a field where there is no shortage of competition. Even vaunted Apple's email app pales in comparison.
Mailbox isn't just a half-decent email UI, it is the best email UI we've seen in ages
I acknowledge that. And I know they didn't just buy the app, but also the brand, the userbase, the marketing headstart, the team, the momentum.
But still. It boils down to a mobile app that could be cloned, bit-for-bit, for way under $5 million. Dropbox has a pretty strong brand of its own already. For instance: Almost everyone I know uses Dropbox. In contrast I have never heard of mailbox.app before. And I'm a nerd, I read Hacker News, I tend to know most of the fancy things before everyone else.
Ok, let's ignore that. Let's assume mailbox.app utterly dominates the (iphone?) market. What would it help them if Dropbox went against them with their clone?
Users are not exactly loyal when there's no network effect. I can't imagine mailbox.app would fare all that well against a (near identical) dropboxmail.app that comes bundled with whatever goodies Dropbox has planned to take it up with Google.
Sorry, I understand your angle (and your proposed strategy sounds plausible to me), but I just can't get over that number. Framing it as a long-term strategy for Dropbox makes it only more batshit insane to me, because even in my wildest imagination I can't see what mailbox.app brings to the table that Dropbox couldn't replicate for a fraction of the money in a very short timespan. And "fraction of money" means a difference of tens of millions of dollars here.
I expect the next moves to be either developing or acquiring media sharing (photos, videos, etc) apps
By that logic their next move will be to pull another Color.app?
> But still. It boils down to a mobile app that could be cloned, bit-for-bit, for way under $5 million.
Anyone can clone Mailbox v1.0. Then Mailbox come out with v2.0 and it's better than anything on the market, again, until that gets cloned too. Then out comes v3.0. (A valid comparison: the iPhone itself.)
Dropbox want to buy the Mailbox team's UX talent so that they're the ones running ahead of the curve, instead of constantly playing catch-up. They can then put it to work on all their other products, too.
> Let's assume mailbox.app utterly dominates the (iphone?) market.
There are two reasons I would potentially want Dropbox on my phone. 1: For photos. 2: I need to email someone a file on the run. If the app that I'm using for email plays nicely with Dropbox, this is suddenly much easier. At least that's the main benefit I've thought of, and it strikes me as pretty powerful.
As far as a big player cloning an app to take out a dominating startup, can't you argue that's what Microsoft, Apple, Google are trying against Dropbox now?
> I expect the next moves to be either developing or acquiring media sharing (photos, videos, etc) apps
It's not too big of a secret that they're doing this...check out their New Grad job description.
> "But still. It boils down to a mobile app that could be cloned, bit-for-bit, for way under $5 million."
I had an argument about this yesterday with someone. I do not think this statement is true.
Mailbox is an app that, usability, design, and technology-wise is two standard deviations away from the mean iPhone app. It is anything but commodity.
If you assembled a team of pretty-decent devs and designers, you probably couldn't clone Mailbox. To be blunt, the quality of Mailbox's app is beyond the capabilities of almost every mobile engineering team I've ever come across, and I write mobile apps for a living.
You could try cloning Mailbox, but it's contingent on first building a truly world-class design and mobile development team - and I mean world-class literally, you need to build a mobile team two standard deviations away from what every startup has. Assembling a team at this level is really friggin' hard. Mailbox has somehow done it - there's no guarantee that Dropbox could do it independently.
It might seem a bit hyperbolic, but apps like Mailbox are sort of like the mobile equivalent of Google - there's a magic sauce and team there that makes it non-trivial to clone. We're not talking about an app that bolts together standard UI components and pours some fresh paint on top, this is something that's at the very extreme end of UX quality.
> "Dropbox has a pretty strong brand of its own already."
I highly doubt Dropbox gives a shit about the Mailbox brand as it stands. The idea is to have the absolute best email client money can buy - and that competitors will have a hell of a time trying to clone. The whole idea is to be able to go "Sign up for Dropbox, make email way easier than blech! iPhone email. And way easier than even GMail!"
> "I can't imagine mailbox.app would fare all that well against a (near identical) dropboxmail.app"
This rests on the assumption that Dropbox can clone Mailbox. Having used the Dropbox app extensively, this is a really unsafe assumption. Dropbox's mobile app quality right now is pretty middling - not bad, but not great. For them to even start approaching the ability to clone Mailbox they'd first have to build a brand new team at a level few companies have been able to achieve.
And even if they did, an app like Mailbox is not something a few people can bang out in a couple of months. IMO Dropbox would be easily at least a year behind Mailbox. All the while other cloud competitors are looking for the leg up and willing to acquire Mailbox also.
> "By that logic their next move will be to pull another Color.app?"
If people ever gave a shit about Color.app. Color was a flop right out of the gate. Mailbox has received rave reviews from just about everyone who's touched it, and the demand continues to be furious.
If Dropbox will acquire a photo sharing app, it will have to hit that bar - i.e., absolute best in class experience, existing buzz, and not a pointless app no one knows what to do with.
So, after this flaming endorsement I just had to install mailbox.app. I gave it a whirl and... well, it's nice.
But can you give an example of the parts that you deem "unclone-able"?
That seems a pretty wild claim. It's not made of pixie dust. And I'm frankly a little underwhelmed. It's certainly nice, but (to me) not nearly as earth shattering as you make it sound.
I'll give you that assembling a team to maintain such a standard (and extend it) is non-trivial. But do you seriously think iOS top-talent wouldn't jump when dropbox puts, say, one million dollars per nose on the table?
Get a team of five and have them dedicate their life to making the best mail-client ever. That'll be $5 million dollars, not $100MM.
This whole prospective is of course a little surreal. But so is paying a hundred million dollars for a mobile mail client...
Except if, uhhh, they have made too many assumption on Gmail features being available, so that from the backend to the UI layer, it needs a good, over-through, rewrite to work with anything more standard.
Gmail has spent a lot of time making it work well with web mail clients, be fast etc. Other people have not done this much in general, they would probably have to buy someone.
>You say that as if $60 million would be any less absurd?
Well, if you are used to McDonalds salaries it might be a lot of cash.
But in the world of startup acquisitions it's neither here, nor there.
It depends on the strategic vision for the app.
For perspective, an iPhone $1 dollar game can make $20 million dollar per year if it's on the top ten. And even in the top 50 it can still make a sweet million per year (or more).
For a popular top-five paid app, the sky's the limit. Especially if it can also migrate to the Mac, Android, and even Windows (which Dropbox does cover).
> my guess is that Dropbox thinks Mailbox will be the email app for mobile
I hate to pile on with the normal negative-nancy comments on HN, but I have a hard time seeing this happen. What does Mailbox offer that makes it compelling? The slide left/right mechanic is kind of neat, and I replaced my default Mail.app's location because of that, but the need for sync-on-open almost kills it for me.
Don't get me wrong - it's a very pretty app, but I'd be hard pressed to pay more than $0.99 for it (I suppose the same goes for Sparrow - I paid money for that, and even if it wasn't consumed by Google I'm not sure if I would have paid it again). iOS's environment does not lend itself well to 3rd party mail clients. Maybe Dropbox sees that changing in the future?
There was talk of Dropbox being valued in the billions, if the majority of the sale price is stock (say, $90 million?) would that be a high amount of stock for Dropbox to use on an acquisition ($4 billion valuation, $90 million = ~2%?) or does that sound reasonable for something they're expecting to be important in the future?
Can someone please explain the economics behind this deal? Congrats to those involved...but at the end of the day, this just doesn't make much sense (to an outsider at least).
I'm a Dropbox member. I pay $100 a year for the privilege. I use it because it integrates well with my desktop OS and several apps I use on my mobile devices. I'm still on the waiting list for Mailbox, but I'll happily fork over another $100 a year to use it.
A portion of Dropbox's customers have grown accustomed to paying for the service. I believe those are Mailbox's future customers. Mailbox should be a premium add-on to Dropbox.
Even if the Mailbox add-on is priced at $50 a year, if only 1 million of Dropbox's customers subscribe and they stay with the plan for two years, Dropbox will have recouped its investment.
I believe that providing features like this add to the Dropbox brand. It's about adding infrastructure that the OSes are leaving at the wayside. In the same vein, I would like Dropbox to add RSS & and photo/video/music sharing backends that client apps could tie into.
Dropbox's goal seems to be killing the local filesystem on iOS. Email, being a big part of using an iPhone and the associated file-transfering, is their one big problem; you can't attach things to emails from dropbox, or save them to it from the default app. Here, they get a high-quality email app for their users, and it gives them the opportunity to do things like send attachments as links to dropbox files (great for lock-in), and give users a positive brand experience, to prevent the commoditization of the space.
I don't know about 100M, but I can definitely see how Mailbox is worth a lot of money to Dropbox.
Dropbox has always been a company that stood on the quality of its product. It doesn't have the most features (that's probably SkyDrive or Google Drive) and it's not the cheapest, but it works insanely well and it works everywhere you want it to. That, and the headstart they had, is what put Dropbox where it is right now.
Mailbox is a quality-first mail app that fits with Dropbox's quality standards, and it allows them to take their first step into the "feature-rich web storage" field without trying to build out an office suit like MS Office or Google Docs that they clearly can't catch up to. This was a chance to buy their way into the mail game, with what some people would consider the best mobile mail app in the business.
This seems to be a the type of comment that is catchy, but in truth mostly vacuous. How does one have a 'Draw Something' of email? There is no sticking power to most games. There are high switching costs (in terms of time, productivity, etc.) when it comes to e-mail. Hell, I used Yahoo Mail for years after Gmail came out because I wasn't used to its interface. If Mailbox has managed to get people to switch to their app, it is likely that they will continue to use the app... Not drop it in three months like people did with Draw Something.
Anecdotal evidence. 2 out of three people who initially installed Mailbox and waited in line with me have gone back to the regular Mail app. I am likely to do so as well soon. Why? While Mailbox is nice, it only adds a single feature: the ability to defer dealing with email till later date. However, its drawback is that it only does GMail. My world also includes Exchange and Yahoo mail. I don't want to have to use separate apps to access my mail.
If they add other types of accounts, great, will talk. But for now, I can see why the OP is calling it 'Draw Something' of email.
Mail had too much hype from day #1; something like RIP Airtime on steroids. Usually when it happens it means the board/owners/executive managment is very deeply connected to the media world (like with Color). For that reason alone, it doesn't surprise me they sold it to a large player. Such a quick sale may mean they were dissapointed with their growth but thats speculation. I could be a favor from one exec to another; something like board members of both FB and Instagram selling one to another.
I wouldn't be surprised if Mail will share the faith of Color, Airtime or many others...
Personally, the hype was what pushed me past the Ambivalence Tipping Point. The last time anyone really tried to get me excited about email was when Google had a mysterious beta webmail that was invite only. It was a good five years before there was anything in the market that gave me any second thought on switching away from gmail as my email browser.
That said, Mailbox is sleek but gimmicky, and I have doubts about its long-term value.
Finally getting accepted for Mailbox was exciting. I wouldn't want everyone to do the same thing, but I'm glad that they did.
It is a very high number, but people aren't getting that they didn't buy the codebase or the team. They bought the waiting list. If Dropbox had been wanting to get into the email game, a waiting list of 1M people is a pretty good way to start. Sure they could have emailed out a blast to all their users and gotten a ton of traction that way, but they can _still_ do that.
Not to mention, the name Mailbox is a pretty perfect match for Dropbox.
I know that many here are saying that valuation/cost is too big but I'm convinced that this "cloud" is much bigger than people think. And I for one want Dropbox version of email (and cut crappy gmail) - something that is simple and just works.
Well, for one, you could build it and buy a million users for $100 a piece for about the same price. Granted you can't do that with inflated stock, but still...
Are they gonna bump the price to $10 and hope to sell 10 million copies?
Do they hope adding a mail client to Dropbox will bring them.. um.. how many million new customers?
Is it some sort of tax evasion scheme? Or do they plan to flip it to the next bigger idiot for $200mio? Or what, the hell, is the idea here?
I'd really like to understand the rationale behind these kind of deals. Who profits from doing that?