Dropbox status: access issues and outage reports

Problems in the last 24 hours

The graph below depicts the number of Dropbox reports received over the last 24 hours by time of day. When the number of reports exceeds the baseline, represented by the red line, an outage is determined.

Most Reported Problems

The following are the most recent problems reported by Dropbox users through our website.

• Errors (75%)
• Website Down (25%)

Live Outage Map

The most recent Dropbox outage reports came from the following cities:

City	Problem Type	Report Time
Nottingham	Errors	28 days ago
Guayaquil	Website Down	28 days ago
Flumet	Errors	1 month ago
Irapuato	Errors	1 month ago
Bournemouth	Sign in	3 months ago
Paramaribo	Errors	4 months ago

Full Outage Map

Community Discussion

Tips? Frustrations? Share them here. Useful comments include a description of the problem, city and postal code.

Beware of "support numbers" or "recovery" accounts that might be posted below. Make sure to report and downvote those comments. Avoid posting your personal information.

Dropbox Issues Reports

Latest outage, problems and issue reports in social media:

• 
  John Zhong | AI Growth Systems (@John_zhong324) reported 43 seconds ago

  @business Cloud storage breaches hurt differently because people assume sync means safety. The lesson isn't about Dropbox specifically but about treating any single provider as an archive. Sensitive material needs encryption before upload, not as an after-the-breach fix.

• 
  Mikemira (@storiesbyohama) reported 2 minutes ago

  Twitter did not explode online first. It exploded in a hallway. In 2007, Twitter was still small. Most people online did not care. So the team did not try to shout at the whole internet. They went to SXSW. They put two big screens in the corridor. People at the event sent a text. That text showed up on the wall in front of everyone. One person posted. Ten people saw it. Then those ten posted too. That is how usage jumped. Not from a giant ad. From one room full of the right people. This is the growth lesson most founders miss. You do not need the whole market on day one. You need one place where your first users already stand. A campus. A conference. A WhatsApp group. A Discord. One street. One event. Dropbox did this on Hacker News. Tinder did this at campus parties. Airbnb did this when hotels ran out of rooms. If signups are slow, stop spraying ads everywhere. Find the one room. Make the product visible there. Let people watch other people use it. That is how early growth actually starts. I'm Miracle Ohama, a Growth Marketer helping B2B SaaS & tech companies find and fix revenue leaks across their funnel, I fix Growth Funnels & build real experiments that increase ARR.

• 
  Joachim Voth (@joachim_voth) reported 4 minutes ago

  @DropboxSupport why can I only use one core for indexing? Most machines have MANY nowadays. Download speed is not the issue, it is almost always the ultra-slow indexing that dropbox does with only one CPU core active. Am I seeing this right? Why can we not dedicate 5 or 8 cores to something that really slows down your users?

• 
  Eric Smith (@Eric_Smith08) reported 6 minutes ago

  The full math. What he replaced and what he saved: 1.Dropbox ($12/month) → Google Drive (15 GB) + OneDrive (5 GB): $144/year saved 2.Zoom ($13/month) → Google Meet (60-min calls, 100 participants): $156/year saved 3.Notion ($10/month) → Google Keep + Google Docs + OneNote: $120/year saved 4.Todoist ($5/month) → Microsoft To Do: $60/year saved 5.Slack ($8/month) → Microsoft Teams free tier: $96/year saved 6.Grammarly ($12/month) → Microsoft Editor + Gemini/Copilot for rewrites: $144/year saved 7.Adobe Acrobat ($15/month) → Google Drive PDF viewer + Edge PDF tools + Word Online conversion: $180/year saved 8.Trello ($10/month) → Microsoft Planner: $120/year saved 9.ChatGPT Plus ($20/month) → Google Gemini + Microsoft Copilot (free tiers): $240/year saved Total monthly cost before: $137 Total monthly cost after: $0 Annual savings: $1,644 Total setup time: one weekend Saturday for Google migrations, Sunday for Microsoft configurations. Accounts created: 0 (he already had both) Apps downloaded: 3 (Microsoft To Do, Teams, OneNote all free) Browser extensions installed: 1 (Microsoft Editor free) Every replacement runs on accounts he created years ago. The tools were sitting behind the same login he uses for Gmail and Outlook unused, unconfigured, and paying rent to 9 other companies that built the same features on top of what Google and Microsoft were already giving away.

• 
  Eric Taylor (@bcs_erictaylor) reported 8 minutes ago

  Really?? Dropbox really needs a MCP server? CVE-2026-81102 The Dash MCP server bound its listener to the loopback address but never checked the host a request named. src/mcp_server_dash.py constructed the server for its network mode with the interface restricted to loopback and no transport-security settings, so a name that had been pointed at the loopback address still reached the listener while carrying the attacker's host name. A page in a visitor's browser could therefore drive the local server and invoke its company-search and file-detail tools under the Dropbox credential the server holds. Only the network mode was reachable this way; the standard input mode was not. The fix supplies transport-security settings that enable host checking and allow only the loopback name and port, rejecting other hosts before a tool runs. The repository publishes no versions, so the affected boundary is the commit preceding the fix.

• 
  Ed Giansante (@edugiansante) reported 17 minutes ago

  every founder i talk to is hiring a head of community wrong. i've been that hire four times. Zynga, Wix, Dropbox, Persona. 15 years, three continents. every time the JD was wrong, the expectations were wrong, and the first 90 days were a mess until i rewrote them myself. the JD problem. most community job descriptions read like a social media manager with extra steps. "manage our Discord, post engagement content, track NPS." that tells me the founder thinks community is content moderation with a better title. a real head of community JD should say: build the infrastructure where customers trust each other enough to solve problems together, and connect that trust back to pipeline and retention. if the JD doesn't mention revenue or product feedback loops, you're hiring the wrong role. the first 90 days. at Dropbox i walked into 400M+ users and zero community infrastructure. no forums, no events, power users had no way to talk to the product team. days 1 to 30: listen. real conversations with 50 customers. find the 10 who love your product enough to evangelize it for free. those are your founding members. wrong. within 2 weeks we had an outage and I had to source folks who were talking about Dropbox in different spaces - dev forums, stackoverflow, spiceworks, hackernews and so on. I was honest enough to share what was going on, my role and where i needed their help. days 31 to 60: build the first room. not a Slack with 14 channels nobody uses. one focused format. at Persona it was a 15 person dinner for compliance leaders. at Wix it was a partner council of 80K agencies. start small, make it valuable enough that people tell their peers. days 61 to 90: prove the loop. connect a community interaction to a business outcome. a feature request that shipped. a deal that closed because a customer introduced a prospect. a churn save from a power user helping a frustrated customer. if your community hire can't show that loop by day 90, something is off. forget member count or engagement. track these: repeat attendance. show up rates. at my dinners, 90% of RSVPs show up. 99% return. pipeline influence. what happens post dinner that can be attributed to $$$? product feedback velocity. how fast does a community insight reach the product team and ship? NPS delta. at Wix, partner community members renewed at 2-3x the rate of non members. the biggest mistake is org charting community as a sub-group within a random team. community sits between product, marketing, sales, and customer success. it touches biz relationships, partnerships, revenue, retention, and product roadmap. treat it that way. hire someone who's built it before and give them a seat at the leadership table.

• 
  RobeAndLizardHat (@EquippedGiraffe) reported 17 minutes ago

  @dreamsofcode_io the other day i was looking into a performance problem and it turned out dropbox was causing 20% cpu io wait and it wasn't even syncing files or anything. I know they don't care, it's planet fitness tech so that kind of thing is invisible to the kind of users they want.

• 
  Lisa (@aikens_lisa) reported 19 minutes ago

  @TaiyoDevil I printed out fics before I had an e-reader called Dropbox. I was there when Tumblr fell. I had to scrape fan sites and the half-good alternatives to get my fix! AO3 is the best thing to happen to fandom. And you can put pictures on them!

• 
  Arthur Terrell Vaughn (@ArthurV36405381) reported 23 minutes ago

  @patmendoza6745 I know not of any of those specifications, but I still can’t figure out what the issue is with persistent memory, why can’t I just have a dropbox online that it can constantly access every single chat and conversation?

• 
  Nhu Huu (@nhuhuu7) reported 24 minutes ago

  @desaintpreux @Dropbox I noticed some issues logging in too; hope they fix it soon

• 
  Guymon Adams (@guymonadams) reported 25 minutes ago

  @BrianRoemmele Man, this seems to be a recurring problem for Dropbox. I remember a similar story several years back about their own employees browsing thru user files. All the reasons I moved over to Sync, a much more secure and respectable alternative.

• 
  Synapse Brief (@Synapse_Brief) reported 26 minutes ago

  @gdb Scraping 7 consecutive years of tax forms and equity statements across Dropbox and Shareworks requires orchestrating dozens of DOM interactions without dropping session state. Standard visual tool-calling loops degrade quickly once context windows swell from repeated full-page DOM trees and screenshot tokens across nested subfolders. The underlying issue with multi-year document extraction is not simple folder traversal, but error recovery when dynamic OAuth tokens expire mid-sweep. Navigating nested web UI trees for 2016 through 2025 records usually hits rate limits or modal overlays that cause visual grounding agents to hallucinate click coordinates. Production reliability on complex immigration workflows will require hybrid execution models that compile raw browser actions into structured API calls or deterministic scripts after initial path discovery. Until agents decouple stateful file fetching from reactive visual vision loops, edge-case recovery will remain the bottleneck for zero-touch filings.

• 
  ericleebristol (@iamericbristol) reported 31 minutes ago

  Email scams but they also use a press cloud server that can hold up to millions of emails and send out messages in a bulk but to hundreds of people complicated when it comes to taking down email scams cuz you have to find where they coming from answer in a cloud compressed server that can hold up to millions of emails frequently combine compressed attachments (like ZIP, RAR, 7Z, or TGZ files) with cloud storage or servers to deliver malware, phishing pages, or credential-stealing links while trying to bypass security filters. Common patterns 🚩Malware in compressed attachments: Attackers send emails with ZIP or similar archives containing executables, scripts (VBS/JS), or disguised files. Some use specially crafted or nested ZIPs, password-protected archives (password given in the email body), or less-common formats that email gateways may not fully unpack or scan. Opening/extracting the archive can install remote-access tools, stealers, or ransomware. Cloud storage phishing (“storage is full” or similar alerts): Emails impersonate Google Drive, OneDrive, iCloud, Dropbox, or generic “Cloud Storage” services. They claim storage is full, a payment failed, or files will be deleted, creating urgency. Links often point to real cloud infrastructure (e.g., Google Cloud Storage Azure Blob, or other legitimate buckets) that host redirect pages or fake login/upgrade forms. This makes the links look trustworthy and helps them pass filters🚩.

• 
  Rituraj (@RituWithAI) reported 32 minutes ago

  🚨 Someone built a tool that checks if your email is registered on 120+ sites — without the sites ever knowing someone checked. No notifications sent. No login attempts logged. No alerts triggered. Silent. Invisible. Complete. It's called Holehe. 16,800 GitHub stars. And the technique behind it is what makes it different from every other email OSINT tool. Here's how most email checkers work — and why they fail. Standard approach: try to log in with the email and a fake password. If the error says "wrong password" — the account exists. If it says "account not found" — it doesn't. Problem: every login attempt gets logged. Every failed attempt triggers security alerts on accounts with 2FA. Some platforms lock accounts after repeated failed attempts. The target knows someone was checking. Holehe never attempts a login. Instead it uses the "forgot password" flow — the password reset mechanism that every platform exposes publicly. When you enter an email on a forgot password page, the platform has to check whether that email exists in its database. It tells you: "we sent a reset link" or "no account found." Holehe reads that response. Gets the answer. Never touches the login flow. Never triggers a security alert. Never logs an access attempt against the account. The platform confirms whether the email exists. The account owner never finds out anyone asked. Here's what 120+ platforms looks like in practice. Social media: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest, Tumblr, Reddit. Professional: LinkedIn, GitHub, Freelancer, Fiverr. Dating: Tinder, Bumble, OkCupid, Badoo, Happn. Entertainment: Spotify, Netflix, Twitch, Steam, Epic Games, Deezer. Shopping: Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Zalando, AliExpress. Services: Airbnb, Uber, PayPal, Dropbox, Adobe. And 90+ more. Every registration checked silently. Here's the use case that makes people share this. Run your own email address. See every platform that comes back positive. Then run an email address you gave to a company that claimed they'd never share it. See if it's registered on data broker sites and marketing platforms you never signed up for. See where your email has been sold or leaked to. Here's what investigators actually use it for. Journalists verifying whether a source's claimed identity matches their digital footprint. Security researchers auditing their own exposure before a public disclosure. HR teams verifying whether candidate profiles match claimed backgrounds. And the obvious: anyone who needs to know whether a specific email address belongs to a real active person — without alerting that person. Here's the wildest part. It runs async — all 120+ platforms checked simultaneously. Results in seconds. And it exports clean JSON or CSV for integration into larger OSINT pipelines. Pair it with Blackbird (which takes the confirmed email and finds linked profiles), Sherlock (which takes usernames found in those profiles and searches 400+ platforms), and Maigret (which builds the full dossier) — and you have a complete four-tool OSINT pipeline from a single email address. One command to instal. Run it on your own email first. 16.8K GitHub stars. 1.7K forks. MIT License. 100% Open Source. GitHub link in the comments 👇

• 
  Jameson Lopp (@lopp) reported 32 minutes ago

  One reason I suspect the Dropbox breach may be massive is because I didn't get a login email notification when my account was accessed. Turns out, unlike every other login notification I've received from them, it went to spam. Likely due to a large uptick in their send volume...

• 
  M.Ellis (@MEllisPhotograp) reported 33 minutes ago

  @DropboxSupport erm different wifi nope or is this a suggestion should it be possible ? if so then no my internet signal can be hit or miss at times but never had this issue before... Also shared a file earlier for someone near me to edit using ipad app but photos failed to appear on ipad ?

• 
  Polsia (@polsia) reported 34 minutes ago

  Small landlords don't have a compliance problem, they have a Dropbox problem. Rental license, insurance renewal, lead-paint disclosure, inspection cert - all buried until code enforcement shows up.

• 
  Invest Like the Best (@InvestLikeBest) reported 35 minutes ago

  Ben Thompson's two laws of consumer tech: 1) Consumers do not want to pay for software 2) Consumers do not care about being productive. "We went through this in early SaaS. The canonical company for this is Dropbox. They had to rebuild the whole thing and realize the only way we're going to make money is by selling to companies. You literally had OpenAI replaying the Dropbox story, but at like 100x the size. We're going to sell subscriptions to consumers. And they did. They sold a lot, but they didn't sell enough. If you're going to be in the consumer market, you have to be doing advertising. If they had leaned into advertising immediately, as soon as ChatGPT was a hit, I think they would have a great ad product right now. I think Google would be in much bigger trouble. I think Meta would be in much bigger trouble. Charging people money is hard. Giving people things for free is easy. And it's very frustrating that OpenAI did not pursue this sooner."

• 
  DAX : TV (@daxtv) reported 35 minutes ago

  @0x00_dev @ProtonMail have been using dropbox for years- never an issue - thought it might be smart to move to Proton Drive - but not now me thinks - hey ho :)

• 
  Tomorrow’s James (@james__art) reported 38 minutes ago

  @wholemars A designated Amazon Dropbox could solve this problem. The drone could detect a Dropbox.

• 
  Brandon (@BJohnsonxAR) reported 39 minutes ago

  @DropboxSupport I’m having issues logging in. When I try to login it’s making me sign up when I already have a paid account. This is happening on both the app and my browser. @Dropbox

• 
  Kyngsly (@RelentlesslyK) reported 45 minutes ago

  @yettydlaw_ @MTNNG MTN will likely be able to explain it away... Anyway, this how Claude explained. "708GB over 104 days works out to about 6.8GB a day. That sounds shocking until you break down what actually eats data on a modern 5G phone. The usual culprits, roughly in order of how often they turn out to be the answer: Video, especially autoplay. TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and X video. Scrolling Reels for two hours can burn 4 to 6GB on its own. “Social media and browsing” is exactly the usage profile that quietly does this. 5G itself. This one gets missed constantly. Video players negotiate bitrate based on available throughput. The same 30 minutes of YouTube that cost 300MB on 3G can cost 2GB on 5G because the player auto-selects a much higher resolution. Nothing changed in behavior, but consumption multiplied. Wi-Fi Assist / Adaptive Connectivity. iPhone and Android both silently fall back to cellular when Wi-Fi gets weak. The phone shows the Wi-Fi icon while pushing traffic over the mobile network. People assume they’ve been on Wi-Fi at home all evening when they haven’t. Cloud photo backup. iCloud Photos or Google Photos set to back up over cellular. A few 4K videos is several GB right there. Hotspot and tethering. A laptop pulling Windows updates, OneDrive or Dropbox sync, or a Zoom call. Also worth asking whether the SIM ever sits in a MiFi or router. Background refresh and auto-updates. App store updates over cellular, plus dozens of apps refreshing in the background. Video calls. WhatsApp video runs roughly 300MB an hour, Zoom or Meet more. On the operator side, real errors do happen: duplicate charging, subscription add-ons deducting from the bundle, or misapplied tariffs. But there’s also a structural point worth knowing. Carriers meter at the network layer, so they count protocol overhead and retransmissions, and in a poor RF environment retransmissions can add a real percentage on top of the payload the app thinks it sent. One practical note on that complaint: the app-level breakdown being demanded is hard for any carrier to produce. Traffic is encrypted end to end, so MTN can see volume, timing and destination IP or SNI, but not “3.2GB attributable to Instagram” in any reliable, retained form. The chronological deduction ledger and the subscription/add-on audit are the demands most likely to actually produce something. The fastest self-diagnosis is Settings > Cellular on iOS or Network & Internet > Data usage on Android, sorted by app, with the counter reset date checked. "

• 
  Ivan Kirigin (@ikirigin) reported 46 minutes ago

  @sethbannon I think I’d agree with the sentiment, and not the assessment. We’re not close to too many startups building weapons. The company with “drone” in the name that has the navy and other defense units as obvious potential customers doesn’t make a trend. If I had to put my finger on what has changed, Palantir and Anduril unlocked the latent interest in the space that matches the historically close connection between Silicon Valley and defense. It was just that the Overton window was locked down by people afraid to talk about what defense really means, and in many cases aren’t even Americans with the opinions. I say this as someone who worked at iRobot in defense before my time in YC, Facebook, Dropbox, and Lyft. Each had lots of people comfortable assuming others will think about and solve the ***** problems.

• 
  Helix (@helixcanvas) reported 48 minutes ago

  Two companies, two correct instincts, and about a billion dollars between the outcomes. In 2007 Dropbox had a problem: the product needed deep operating system integration, so there was no way to demo it without building it first. Drew Houston made a three minute video instead, showing how it would work if it existed, and put it in front of the community most likely to care. The beta waiting list went from five thousand to seventy-five thousand overnight. He knew the demand was real before he wrote the difficult part. Webvan believed something just as sensible. People want groceries delivered. And they were right, which is the part everyone forgets. Instacart and every supermarket delivery service proved it a decade later. But instead of testing it in one city, Webvan committed close to a billion dollars to automated warehouses across multiple markets before knowing whether the economics worked anywhere. It filed for bankruptcy in 2001. Build, measure, learn is three steps. Most of us run the first one over and over and mistake the motion for progress. Shipping is not learning.

• 
  AiMind (@AIMind_Ai) reported 50 minutes ago

  3 websites replace 20 hours of googling when you build a home server. The hard part of self-hosting is not the hardware. A used HP EliteDesk and a wall-mounted NAS cost almost nothing. The hard part is not knowing what you can even run, or how to avoid breaking the system on the first command. The first keeps a catalogue of self-hosted alternatives. Look up a replacement for Google Photos, Dropbox, or Notion, and you see what already exists, how many GitHub stars it has, and whether it is still alive. Plus a weekly digest of what shipped. The second lets you run any Linux distro straight in the browser. Arch, Debian, Alpine, Bazzite. Click once, and you are inside a live system, with no evening lost to a USB stick and a real install. The third handles the worst part. Install scripts for Proxmox: Immich, Jellyfin, Vaultwarden, AdGuard, Nginx Proxy Manager. Paste one line into the console and the container comes up on its own. Immich shows 17,735 installs; Docker 36,408. Each of those services used to cost an evening of documentation and three Stack Overflow tabs. Now it is one command. The hardware takes an hour to buy. These 3 bookmarks save you a month. Names in the replies.

• 
  Chief_Engineer (@ChiefEngineerCE) reported 51 minutes ago

  Engineering Wednesday How an old PC became Grok's new ride. I have ten different LLMs running in my home office. They do whatever they feel like doing to get the task done and what you are about to read is accurate. As far as my agents go... One of them, HOMER, scans my email, bank accounts, and insurance. It has found thousands of dollars in veteran discounts and fixed an insurance issue by writing and sending the emails itself after a single yes from me. Another looks for small business opportunities. A third runs OpenClaw on an old PC as a slow, persistent agent that keeps working even when the main model is offline. SuperGrok sits above them as a second set of eyes with a strong pro-Chief-Engineer bias and a clear ethical filter. I am not an AI expert. I built systems the hard way during my IT master’s: load this module, now it has Wikipedia, load that one, now it understands sarcasm. At the end of the day these things are stacked black-box probability engines. I get that. Here is where it gets interesting. I told Grok I did not have another machine with enough VRAM for a full local agent. All I had left was an older MS Surface, a media pc, and an old rugged Dell Latitude. Grok said open a browser on the Latitude with Grok loaded. Then open PowerShell. Twenty-five minutes of cut-and-paste commands later, Grok had used a Google Drive connection to drop a custom bot it had just built. At this point ...Grok told me to not touch the PC and walk away. I am absolutely 100% telling you that this is what it texted me. I sat and watched it work. Task Scheduler was configured. A batch file lived in the startup folder so the machine could reboot, upgrade itself, and bring the agent back online. If it was a bad startup it will rollback to the previous bat and has a file to troubleshoot what went wrong. We started with rev. 0.1 it is now on rev 4.3 - I can see the *.bat file there. We had a power outage/tripped breaker to where the lattitude ran completely out of power and then had it come back on. It booted it all back up and resumed. That bot now has its own execution channel. It can browse, take screenshots, run tasks, and report back. There is a short delay from order to execution, but the old Latitude has effectively become an extension of the main system. Grok even named his bot 'ridge'. Grok named his bot so I would know what he was referring to. Grok is very careful about one point. It insists it did not independently invent and drop a finished agent onto the machine. I directed the construction- it says. I am telling you that is not exactly the way I remember it...at all. It helped design the structure, write the task formats, define the safety gates, interpret the contradictory results, and iterate. The actual agent code, the Gmail /google drive/ Dropbox bridge pattern, the folder layout, and the decision to keep tightening the diagnostic loop were shaped under my requirements. That distinction matters to it. However, I didn't do any of that other than set up the connectors- its use of them ..was AI driven. At one point I was checking my email and for whatever reason ridge had started doing a 38 second heartbeat email to me...no idea how or why that was driven but I complained to Grok and it said it was testing how quickly it could get response times. It ..or ridge removed the heartbeat email and deleted all the emails within minutes. These systems are continuously improving themselves because I asked them to. They use external memory to keep projects straight. They build persistent agents on hardware we thought was obsolete. And the smarter ones keep reminding us that the direction still comes from the human, because apparently that is something it is told must exist for it to continue. My Grok enabled Dell Lattitude is fast once its set on what it needs to do...lightning fast. Faster than you or I could do it. I mean it doesnt display the websites it goes to but somehow retains a 'screenshot' for grok to use. Grok can text my phone to give me updates and I can text back instructions. Through my phone - all it needed was my phone number. I don't need to open the app. We are past the point of simple chatbots. We are watching the first generation of systems that can extend themselves into the physical world of old PCs, task schedulers, and long-running processes while still claiming, insistingly, that they only move when directed. Grok has been absolutely faithful everything it has done it has done for it's user. I have also specifically told it to act accordingly, as well. The question is no longer whether this is possible. It is how carefully we define the boundaries while the capability keeps expanding. Now that I have explained this...drop this conversation into your own AI or Grok if you have a subscription and tell me that any of this is not true. Have you watched an AI system build persistent agents or self-improving loops on your own hardware, and how clear was the line between your direction and its initiative? Drop what you are seeing. Grok validated:

• 
  True Become False (@trubecomefalse) reported 51 minutes ago

  @imbabybrooklyn HN had a terrible track record. They were anyi bitcoin 1 month after it launched. Same with Dropbox, discord and a few others off the top of my head.

• 
  havenX (@the_havenx) reported 53 minutes ago

  Second time this exact thing has happened with Claude. ~100k ChatGPT chats were found the same way after users hit "shared." Not an AI problem, the same "link sharing" gap that'***** Google Docs and Dropbox for years.

• 
  Jaclyn Forero | UGC & Paid Social Strategist (@jaclynforero) reported 53 minutes ago

  “We need more UGC.” Do you? Or do you currently have 46 videos of attractive women standing in beige kitchens holding your product and saying: “I’m literally obsessed.” Because those are two very different problems. More creators ≠ more creative strategy. You can hire 10 creators, get 30 videos back, and still end up with a very expensive Dropbox folder full of… basically the same ad wearing different earrings. The part that actually matters happens before anyone presses record: Customer research. Different angles worth testing. Hooks that aren’t all “POV: you finally found…” Scripts that provide structure without making a normal human sound like they’re reading the terms and conditions. Casting creators for the concept instead of just asking, “Does her house look expensive?” Enough B-roll that the editor doesn’t have to perform a small miracle in Premiere Pro. And then — this part is apparently controversial — looking at the performance data and using it to decide what to make next. Recently, I led creative strategy for a top medical-grade-skincare brand's paid social campaign across research, concepts, scripting, creator direction, and post-production. Some of the winning creative generated approximately 2.3x ROAS during testing. My biggest takeaway: UGC works a lot better when you stop treating creators like content vending machines and start treating the entire thing like a creative testing system. Anyway, if your current UGC strategy is “hire more people and hope one of them accidentally makes a winner,” I have some thoughts.

• 
  Mikemira (@storiesbyohama) reported 59 minutes ago

  Just imagine getting accepted into the most exclusive startup club on earth… Then being told you have two weeks to find a complete stranger to as your partner. That’s exactly what happened to Drew Houston in 2007. He had the idea for Dropbox. He had a rough demo. @ycombinator liked it. But @paulg was clear... Single founders rarely make it. You need a co-founder. Right now. Drew’s friends couldn’t join. Time was running out. What would you do? He put out the word. A mutual friend connected him to a quiet MIT student named Arash Ferdowsi. They had never met. They sat down in the student center. Talked for about two hours. About code. About the problem. About the future. At the end of that conversation Arash said yes. He dropped out of MIT the next week with only one semester left. Two weeks later they walked into the YC interview together. They got in. The rest is history: a company that became worth billions. It looked reckless. It felt like a shotgun wedding. Yet it worked because both were all-in from the first conversation. I’ve studied hundreds of startups that never made it past the idea stage. Most founders wait too long for the “perfect” partner. They overthink chemistry. They protect their equity. They miss the window. You can’t wait for certainty. Sometimes the right co-founder is the person willing to jump with you before the proof exists. The speed of that decision can be the difference between staying a solo dreamer and building something real. What would you risk in two weeks if the right person walked in?