It’s easier to narrow the domain of your market as specific as possible so as to maximize transactions and matching early on.

For instance, Uber launched in one city. This is so that all the growth efforts on both sides go to helping the markets meet. Twitch had to win with gamers before it could win in other categories. Pick a narrow domain for your business, perfect that user experience, then, as other have stated, prop up one side of the market yourself (probably the one least likely to churn forever) until the market can support itself organically.

My frustration stems from paying hundreds of dollars over several years to pay for backup and then silently learning Dropbox was no longer supported when we went to look for it in our backup. We could’ve made other choices about how to store/bavkup our own files with better communication.

Appreciate the thoughtful response. I recognize the challenge that cloud-synced folders introduce into the file storage ecosystem and the challenges with online/offline files + storage loopholes that could take a cause an engineering challenge.

That being said, we’ve been nearly 6+ years backblaze users and we probably can’t rely on backblaze if it can’t support these tools that are now pretty standard services to have installed. As I mentioned above, the promise for us was “pay for backblazd and never worry about whether our files are backed up”. We’ll be looking for an announcement if you can bring back Dropbox support.

Julian

In order to build trust, they open source their product. I forked it, removed the blocks from the freemium feature in 15 minutes using Claude Code. Never published the code to anyone else, just used it myself

Unfortunately, I think it isn’t going to be tenable for systems to be fully open sourced going forward.

My dad had a file untouched in Dropbox for 2 years. He overwrote it 2 days prior to me trying to recover it from Dropbox/Backblaze. They said he couldn't access the version that was just overwritten because that was over 30 days old, which is not what the definition of 30-day history is....

Now I need a new solution that will work for my parents

We discovered this change recently because my dad was looking for a file that Dropbox accidentally overwrote which at first we said “no problem. This is why we pay for backblaze”

We had learned that this policy had changed a few months ago, and we were never notified. File was unrecoverable

If anyone at backblaze is reading this, I pay for your product so I can install you on my parents machine and never worry about it again. You decided saving on cloud storage was worth breaking this promise. Bad bad call

People who are bad with money are bad with money