Successful Businesses in a Challenging Economy The world was driven into an economic recession in 2008. This presented a challenge for many businesses; however, some businesses have manage to thrive despite the external global factors. Three such companies that have thrived are Dropbox, Square and Sunrun. Andersen (2013) writes that when a company hires great people, and create a culture where employees are respected and supported, the company reaps the reward. That is one of the commonalities of these three companies. Employee happiness in itself is not the only key factor for thriving during challenging economically challenging times. An analysis of these three companies also reveal that they have been successful at recognizing and …show more content…
Dropbox is a technology company that builds simple, powerful products for people and businesses (About DropBox, 2015). The company was founded in 2007 by Drew Houston, an MIT student. Drew conjured the idea for Dropbox while on a four hour bus ride. During the ride he realized that he forgot his USB memory stick, leaving him with a laptop. Frustrated (pain point), he mentally devised a concept to create technology that would synch files over the Web (Barrett, 2011). Dropbox survived the economic recession of 2008 by staying lean. In 2008 it had nine employees and 200,000 customers. Two and a half years later it had added five employees and its’ users rose tenfold. Their challenge was marketing a product to solve a problem people didn’t realize they had (Barrett, 2011). Instead of advertising, they turned their small but loyal customer base into salespeople, giving away 250 megabytes of free storage in exchange for a referral (Barrett, 2011). One-quarter of all new customers still come to Dropbox this way. Within two and a half years the snowball had rolled into a $4 billion valuation (Barrett, 2011). What one learns from Dropbox is the notion of identifying, and capitalizing on pain points. Equally important is the notion of making customers aware that they have a need for your product. The process of offering services to customers free is a great methods to show the value of one’s