I was discussing a somewhat related subject yesterday, on an in-company product development workshop.
For a DropBox-like product, feeling safe you won't lose your files is the baseline. If you cannot reliably ensure the files won't get randomly deleted, you don't have a product. Once you have a product, the value you add gets increasingly more subtle - better metadata capture, nicer ways to organize your files, an outstanding slideshow or music app - and what determines your ultimate success may feel completely random and totally unrelated to the original way you defined your product.
It would be interesting if we could measure luck based on previous YC batches.
For a DropBox-like product, feeling safe you won't lose your files is the baseline. If you cannot reliably ensure the files won't get randomly deleted, you don't have a product. Once you have a product, the value you add gets increasingly more subtle - better metadata capture, nicer ways to organize your files, an outstanding slideshow or music app - and what determines your ultimate success may feel completely random and totally unrelated to the original way you defined your product.
It would be interesting if we could measure luck based on previous YC batches.