Amazing things

a story of starting, stopping, and what’s next

Five years ago, while anxiously sipping coffee, I won the domain copy.com in an online auction. It was a great day.

Billions of files later, from that same coffee shop, there’s one more Copy file left to share — our story. And what comes next.

Becoming “Copy”

In the humid Michigan summer of 2011, I was running the storage business at Barracuda Networks. Barracuda had acquired my data backup company a few years earlier. Together, we grew the resulting product into the world’s largest backup appliance business. Today, Barracuda’s backup solution sits at the top of its market, providing businesses with the best end-to-end protection for physical servers, virtual machines, databases, email services, cloud infrastructure, and more.

During the shift to cloud services, we examined the future of storage applications closely. Over the years, Barracuda has pioneered many data storage technologies. For one, it boasts a massive independent cloud storage network (the likes of which Dropbox only recently adopted). Barracuda also has years of innovation in data de-duplication, data syncing, and application development. We decided to use these skills to help address challenges our more than 150,000 business customers faced with file sharing.

We were under no illusions that end point file syncing would be easy. Instead of trying to build another “Dropbox for business” product, we felt a consumer approach was necessary to meet the design expectations end users bring and to validate our file syncing platform.

To accomplish this, we launched Barracuda’s first consumer-oriented brand, and Copy was born.

A four letter English word

For some, trying to build a brand around a word as generic as Copy was crazy. One person suggested it would be confused with an aging Microsoft migration utility of the same name. But … it worked. Almost immediately, we were the #1 result for the word “copy” across all major search engines, including Google and Bing. The media, from CNET, to ZDNet, to many international sources, were happy to use the Copy name.

Our Users were happy too. In just a few months, millions of people were storing and sharing files using Copy on iPhones, iPads, Android devices, Windows mobile, and their Windows, Mac, and Linux computers.

Not being first to market, we needed an angle. We focused on creators by honoring the amazing work they produce and store. We chose an origami crane for our logo — it represented creativity, craftsmanship, and artistry. Paper also provided an excellent visual brand foundation related to storing, copying and sharing information.

We adopted “Store, protect, and share your amazing things” as our tag line. “Amazing things” became a resonating symbol for the team. Sure, technically, Copy could be used to share your utility bill as easily as it could an inspiring photograph you shot. But for us, aligning with creativity was just more aspirational.

Better, for a time

The Copy brand informed our features as well. Even today, there’s still nothing as good as Copy was for large files. We knew creators made big files and we didn’t want to burden them with file size limits. This perspective inspired our early adopter storage referral program too.

We introduced “Fair Storage For All” to split the storage allocation of files across people sharing them rather than make each person pay for the entire file size. Copy users could share folders inside shared folders seamlessly. And People loved our convenient drag-and-drop copy.com homepage for temporary file sharing.

Since Barracuda is a security company at its roots, security was a priority for Copy from the start. We had some of the earliest private file sharing features and prototyped in-line virus alerting on the service.

While our user-base grew, our B2B ambitions took form as Copy for Companies. We were the first to offer federated storage, allowing Copy users to access both personal and company data using a single account. Access to company data could be secured by direct integration with LDAP authentication. We introduced team sharing and built in off-boarding compliance for revoking employee data access at termination.