File sending startup idea

Discussions
#1

This is a problem I have constantly where I want people to send me a file that is too big for email and haven’t seen any products that solve it. Basically I want a cross between SnapChat and DropBox. They could use drop box of course but these are essentially non-technical users and signing up and installing it is too much work.

The basic functionality is

  1. Go to a website and enter an email address it sends an email to someone with a link.
  2. They click on the link and it takes them to a page to upload the file
  3. Once uploaded I am sent an email notifying me the file is ready
  4. I go to the link and download the file
  5. The file and link are automatically deleted after a period of time (7 days maybe)

Keys: No user accounts are needed to be created for the service to work, especially from the side of the person uploading the file. It needs to be extremely easy to work.

Business Model: You can purchase a paid account to allow people to send you larger files, ie larger than 100mb.

If anyone knows something that does this let me know, otherwise feel free to steal and implement this and let me know what done :slight_smile: I would do it myself if I had more time.

#2

Do you know about WeTransfer? (www.wetransfer.com)

It’s very similar to what you are describing, except for the 7 days feature, which, as far as I know, is not available in WeTransfer.

#3

I think you can get a paid/business Dropbox account and send people a link to a shared folder.

https://www.dropbox.com/help/20

How to let my friends upload their files to my Dropbox account?

#4

I will check this out. Never heard of them before.

#5

I ended up using this. They do have a pretty awful splash screen to try and get you to upgrade to the ‘premium’ version but once past that it seems to work well.

#6

I’m more of a fan of… https://letscrate.com over retransfer.

It’s just a bit more up my street visually.

Sidenote

There’s a interesting bootstrapping story for the guy (now) behind (VC-funded) treehouse… they were originally a web events company (Carsonified) and bootstrapped a product on the side. It did ok but then they sold it and it got made awful by the new owners (see http://dropsend.com).

They also used to be pretty open about their process and attempted to blog the sale of the product - old posts still available at http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/?s=dropsend

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