BOX VS DROPBOX 2016 FOR FREE
BOX VS DROPBOX 2016 SOFTWARE
BOX VS DROPBOX 2016 TRIAL

The top of the new Egnyte Protect dashboard. “I’d say, I agree with you, but do you have to say it publicly?” “He’ll say what it isn’t fashionable to say,” says Maples. Investors have long since given up on Jain holding back his tongue, whether in criticism of the freemium model or the competition. Jain’s talked up the possibility of an IPO for years as well, penning an op-ed calling for the return of the “initial profitable offering” in March 2015 while pronouncing, not for the first time, the imminent demise of Box and Dropbox. Revenue is still not quite at $50 million. Now in June 2016, Egnyte says it still a couple quarters from reaching break-even with its cash flow and on pace to be profitable in 2017.

In May 2014, Jain told Recode that Egnyte was just several quarters away from profitability and on track for $50 million in revenue for the year in August 2015 Jain repeated the same projections to Business Insider. Sometimes Egnyte’s taken that mindset too far. “He’s a guerrilla warfare guy,” says Murphy at Menlo. And it heavily played up its “hybrid” capability, meaning it would allow some storage and functionality on-site with security-minded companies, years before Box retreated to add a similar function. The company couldn’t afford to market as heavily as its peers? Egnyte would focus on search engine optimization to appear alongside them in Google results. “We’d say, do we still believe this or are we in a state of denial?” says Maples.Įgnyte’s CEO Jain held his ground. “You look at how these guys are taking off, and we’d debate the freemium model frequently,” says board member Matt Murphy, now a managing director at Menlo Ventures. Internally, the board of directors felt the pressure. While Egnyte continued to inch up its revenue up to $25 million, then $30 million, then $40 million and score customers like Nasdaq and Coach, it lacked the 100%-plus growth of its better-known rivals. In a crowded file storage and sharing marketplace in which the offerings can blur together for customers, “Dropbox is out there like Kleenex, everybody knows them,” says Terri McClure, a senior analyst at ESG. Shunning a freemium model kept Egnyte’s costs lower-but it also meant that Box and Dropbox became much more famous among average businesspeople. Box raised more than $500 million before its IPO Dropbox has raised more than $600 million in venture capital dollars and at least $500 million in debt. In turn, the company didn’t have to raise as much venture capital to grow, taking on just $62 million over four funding rounds, and none since December 2013.

BOX VS DROPBOX 2016 TRIAL

“So you spend virally to grow and hope that after the fact, a non-trivial percentage of people will convert.”Įgnyte elected to offer a two-week free trial instead, limiting its back-end costs. “You still have to store information on your servers,” says Maples, a partner at Floodgate Fund.

BOX VS DROPBOX 2016 FOR FREE

Online storage for files and media spread quickly through the freemium approach, says IDC analyst Sean Pike, years faster than it would’ve selling directly to IT managers.īut while some companies, such as email marketer MailChimp, can offer their service for free without much extra cost, storage companies have to spend to store data just the same whether it belongs to customers who pay or not.

BOX VS DROPBOX 2016 SOFTWARE

In a freemium model, companies give away free versions of their software to individuals in the hope that they’ll spread the product to friends and coworkers to the extent that companies eventually gladly pay for bigger, premium accounts. Box and Dropbox raced to popularity through the adoption of a customer growth strategy called freemium. Egnyte embraced a contrarian view of the cloud storage market from the beginning.

Box vs dropbox 2016