Dropbox's Identity Gap
When we're not just about [SaaS tool], we're actually about [fulfilling your dreams]!
I started this writing project to study product development at tech companies who live in the shadow of massive ecosystem players.
Few companies have had a front-row seat to that journey like Dropbox.
Dropbox has spent most of its existence trying to stay ahead of much larger companies that could afford to take its key innovation — seamless file syncing and storage – and give it away for free.
Dropbox Dash — an AI-powered universal search product for teams — is their latest gambit.
And Dash is a great case study in the ways that a tech company can, in attempting to innovate, expose a massive gulf between how users view that company vs how the company views itself.
Product-led identity vs Concept-led identity
You, dear reader, probably think of Dropbox as “the company that's really good at file syncing”. And maybe at collaborative stuff you’d do around files, too.
This is a product-led identity, rooted in what the company actually, you know, makes. It’s how the most people think about most companies.
But that's not how Dropbox cofounder and CEO Drew Houston sees it. As he described in an April 2024 podcast with the Verge:
We're solving the 2024 version of the problem we started with back in 2007. When I started Dropbox, I started because I kept forgetting my thumb drive, emailing myself files, all the things we used to have to do, but that was really under this bigger problem I had of: “My stuff is everywhere; I can’t find it.”
In this telling, Dropbox is not a file storage company – it’s a company that helps you organize, share, and secure your most important information in a safe and reliable way.
This is a concept-led identity. One that’s much broader than the product-led identity.
This evolution is natural as a startup grows. “We're not just about tangible product X, we're actually about fuzzy concept Y", which then drives a move into product line Z.1
It makes sense for a startup to tack this direction once it gets massive success and larger ecosystem players start to notice… and decide that maybe they’d like a piece of that market too. Or lacking that, to turn the product into a commodity by giving it away for free.2 A looser conceptual identity gives the startup a lot more flexibility to react to these moves.
But what it can also do is create a gap between the company’s external customers and internal product culture (which align around the product-led identity) vs the company’s overall strategy and senior leadership (which align around the concept-led identity.)
Now, as long as both identities still lead to basically the same product decisions, then this distinction doesn't really matter.
For most of Dropbox’s existence, the conceptual idea of needing to manage a lot of work files was in line with Dropbox’s actual product experience of… working on files. Product development focused on capturing new workflows around the files you already stored with Dropbox (collaboration, signing, sharing, etc.)
But the emergence of LLMs convinced senior leadership that there a more radical product approach to the existing problem of work fragmentation — a kind of horizontal abstraction layer that sits across across all a company’s services, and makes sense of them all.
Which led to Dropbox Dash’s launch last month. And all of a sudden, this identity gap matters. A lot.
What is Dropbox Dash?
Since Dash is clearly a labor of love for Drew Houston, it’s useful to see how he himself pitched the product at launch via excerpts of his tweets. [all emphases mine]
Today we’re introducing @Dropbox Dash for Business! Dash lets you search across all your work apps from one place, combining AI-powered universal search and organization with universal access control.
The Dash start page gives you universal search, stacks, shortcuts to recent work, and context on your meetings, making it easier to navigate your day.
In a vacuum, this an interesting new product in a very crowded space.
But this isn’t a vacuum, it’s Dropbox! And they’re releasing a product that not only has no tie to what they’re best known for, the launch messaging specifically calls out the fact that Dash doesn’t require you to use their file storage at all.
With Dash's universal search, you can find files and content across all your work apps from a single search box. No more remembering where that important document was stored or shared. (Dash is also a standalone product — you don’t need files stored on Dropbox to use it.)
So Dash only makes sense if you take a concept-led view of what Dropbox is.
I first started Dropbox because I kept forgetting my thumb drive. But the question I was really asking was: "Why is it so hard to find, organize, share, and secure my stuff?” With Dash, we're solving the 2024 version of these same problems.
You might be wondering: is this just another AI thing? Don’t other companies do this? Well, Dropbox wasn’t the first product to sync your files. But over the last decade, hundreds of millions of you trusted Dropbox because it’s easy to use and it just works.
I’m less interested in analyzing this from a strategic perspective, and more interested in the implications for what urgently needs to happen within their internal product development.
Because sometimes a big, visible gap opens up between an aspirational concept-led identity and a current product-led identity. And while a company’s product, marketing, and growth teams aren’t the ones who create this kind of gap, ultimately it’s their job to figure out how close it.
In my experience, there is a specific form of internal innovation needed to do this, and it requires creative execution around at least three challenges:
You lose many of your natural advantages: Conceptual advantages may be true ("we understand fragmentation better than anyone"), but tactical advantages (distribution, technical capabilities, content moats, etc.) are tied to concrete products, and you abandon a lot of those advantages when you move away from your established product.
Transferring earned trust is not an automatic: Most users don’t reflect on how you solve their broad conceptual problem. They trust you because you solved some specific problem really well — and it wasn’t this new problem. It's hard to make your existing customers even aware of the new problem, much less try your solution.
You have to navigate anxiety until you’re proven right: Maybe you can win in a crowded space by leveraging past learnings into the best execution. But it takes a long time to prove out that thesis, and in the meantime the confusion and anxiety (from employees, customers, and shareholders) is a constant challenge to overcome.
Reconciling Dropbox’s identity gap
In the best-case scenario, the gap between broad concept and the current product is relatively small. Like Netflix’s shift to streaming original content, which — while a major execution lift — could leverage many behaviors, expectations, and algorithms that Netflix already established when shifting users from ordering DVDs into streaming licensed content.
At launch, unfortunately, Dropbox looks like far from the best-case scenario.
The loss of natural advantages: Dropbox is deliberately moving away from these, and probably more by circumstance than by choice. This is essentially a brand new product, starting over from scratch.
Trust transfer: This is the strongest area. Dropbox is betting heavily in the messaging that "you trusted us to make files 'just work', now trust us to make work 'just work'." And the initial GTM appears to target enterprise decision-makers who already trust Dropbox and would appreciate Dash’s security and organization features. The bet is that admins will install it throughout the enterprise, thus getting it into the hands of end-users who will love it.
Navigating anxiety until you’re right: This has the longest road ahead. While Dropbox has been publicly been thinking about organization since acquiring universal search product CommandE in 2021 (and probably privately been thinking about it for years before that), Dash itself is launching in an extremely crowded space. The bet is that only Dropbox has the chops to elegantly solve fragmentation at this scale — but proving that will take time. And in the meantime, it’s not immediately clear from their story why this is the company that will win.
Letting a conceptual identity overrule your product identity — the identity that your customers, the marketplace, and your employees all associate with you — is a big deal, and a painful journey to sign up for. It’s one of those things you can only do if you have a founder in control and a big visible urgent imperative (in this case, the new AI-first computing paradigm.)
It’s clear that Dash is one of those extremely mission-driven projects, fulfilling a vision that Dropbox senior leadership has held for a long, long time. And that they’re willing to be patient with it.
For the record I admire the swing. It would be neat to see an independent company win and outmaneuver the tech giants once again.
But there’s definitely a big, big gap between the conceptual identity Dropbox aspires to vs the product identity it has today. Dropbox has their work cut out for them.
Imagine my surprise one morning at Spotify when I woke up to the news of two massive podcast acquisitions, and discovered that I wasn't working for a “music company” anymore, I was now working for an “audio company”! Good to know!
Dropbox is famous for declining an acquisition offer from Apple. Which led tech visionary and notable asshole Steve Jobs to then dismiss them as a “feature, not a product”.