While it is true that SEM is primarily a demand fulfillment medium as opposed to demand creation, there are plenty of companies that successful market new mousetraps via SEM. For example: flash sale sites (try searching for “designer jeans” – users are not looking for a flash sale, the flash sale may not even be selling design jeans at the time of the click, and yet they acquire subscribers who eventually become customers).Additional, SEM is not just search queries but also contextual advertising, such as on the Google Display Network (formerly the Google Content Network). Advertising on articles about products similar to yours can be very effective at creating demand for a new mousetrap.So while it may not have worked for Dropbox, simply concluding that “search doesn't work for new mousetraps” is about as accurate as concluding that “consumers will never feel comfortable using their credit cards to buy online.”

dropbox doesn't know how to do search then. sure, no one searches for online syncing but a lot of searches for online storage et al. instead of saying it was a failure, just admit that you don't know how to do it

Good point.

Interesting and probably true if a) you are creating a new product category that customers don't know they want yet (so aren't searching for) and b) you have a product with a very well-designed viral model. Dropbox is fortunate to have both and has executed brilliantly – I say that as a regular and very happy user.But at the same time, I don't believe their lessons necessarily apply more broadly. Certainly for companies in established markets/categories, I've seen search/inbound marketing work very effectively.

This just in: startups usually suck at marketing, when they turn from instinctive, inexpensive methods, to playing around with a “marketing budget”. Expensive failures in marketing ROI are nothing new to the startup world. Especially if you're using costly paid search ads in conjunction with pioneering a category and defining how people use emerging technologies. What would Twitter have advertised on to “acquire users”? “Microblogging”? “Tweets”? The very idea is absurd. Every startup needs a different strategy. It's quite possible in this case that certain users on certain websites (i.e. display ads for awareness creation) might have had higher intent. Typically you're trying to gain buy-in from an initial wave of users who may evangelize the product. Google itself did this…

I bet his Adwords campaign sucked.This article is like saying “I played MarioKart64 once. I could never beat my friends at it though – therefore the game is stupid.”

I wasn't looking for online storage or syncing… But when a friend showed me that I could automatically sync files to my Android phone – I was hooked.

[...] reminded of that sometimes. Dropbox CEO and founder Drew Houston provided another example of that in a presentation at the recent Stanford Accel Symposium, where he talked about how the cloud-based storage company grew to where it is now, with more than [...]

OMG you put a kitten picture into your blog posts!

Exactly the same here. And now, I can't help but show all of my friends, many of who go on to try the service themselves. Dropbox's biggest success is clearly word-of-mouth and PR.

“All the AdWords in the world are not going to save you if no one’s looking for what you’re making…” is something a competent, ethical marketing firm should have pointed out to DropBox early in their discovery process. My company partners with a web search specialist for search marketing, and he's pointed that out to us on a number of occasions. He has no interest in running campaigns that don't work for his clients, so he's happy to walk away if what he's got isn't what they need — and one of the consequences is that he's so much in demand we often can't get him when we want him.

[...] is unlikely to be easily described by a search term, search marketing may not work well for you. The now-popular cloud data storage service Dropbox found this out the hard way, after spending some $400 for each new user acquired through search [...]

[...] you know Dropbox has spent very little on advertising, yet is worth $4 billion? What have they done that’s made their business so [...]

[...] [...]

[...] For example, take a look at what happened to Dropbox when they blew cash on Google Adwords: [...]