Where there's muck there's brass and Dropbox
Back in 2007 Joel on Software wrote a great blog post on how solving gnarly problems is what makes a business successful. As the yorkshire saying goes, where there's muck there's brass - nobody in our industry got rich solving easy problems.
It's a saying that has stuck with me for a long time. In the social solutions group at Demand we solve three gnarly problems - building scalable community solutions, live blogging events, and moderating community content - and that's what makes us successful. Google solve search, Facebook solve social, Apple solve great design, the list is endless. But to my mind probably the best example of a company that is making A LOT of brass for solving a gnarly problem is Dropbox. I still remember when I first got a Palm Pilot Personal in 1996 and started encountering the problem of How To Sync Stuff Reliably. The Palm Pilot was good if you wanted to sync with one PC, but syncing to your home and work PCs? Not so much. Then it was keeping local files synced with files on a Windows file share so I could work disconnected from the network. Windows 2000 supposedly had a solution, but it never worked reliably. Various other solutions have been tried and discarded over my career in IT, but none of them worked - until Dropbox. It works great as a file storage and sharing system both within our London office and in giving us access to our colleagues files in Austin, and their new Dropbox for Teams offering is a thoroughly convincing solution for small groups. I also use it to keep my Photoshop Lightroom catalog and photo archive backed up and accessible on different computers. It "just works" and everyone I've recommended it to has loved it. By solving probably the gnarliest problem I've encountered as a computer user, Dropbox throughly deserves the $4bn valuation they recently received. It's also a great lesson that all businesses and projects need to ask themselves - what gnarly problem am I solving?
