Everpix was great. This is how it died

A US man year has ~235 man days, so that's just roughly 1 external FTE for a year. Not so much, actually.

For starters, most people already use something like Facebook, in which they've selected the best or most interesting of their photos to share to the adoration of their social network. When these users wonder if they've done enough with their photo collection, they just have to look through FB and remember that yes, they did put up a few photos and people liked and commented them, end of further discussion.

Of course, these users may have thousands of other photos that they just never got to...but that might not matter for most people...they've already gotten some satisfaction from sharing.

Of course there are shutterbugs who do feel a yearning to go through their photos and see them all again...but are there enough to support a paid service? Hard to say, especially with the many other photo services out there.

From my perspective, I have a pro Flickr account where I have nearly 10,000 photos...which represents less than 5 percent of the photos I've taken in the last few years. However, a service like Everpix is not appealing enough to me...because the barrier to me is not that I can't easily access old photos, but that I've realized that editing and sorting photos is the long part of the work...and unless Everpix mitigates that part better than Lightroom and a bunch of external HDs, I don't think id be compelled to try it out.

And so for now, Flickr is good enough...I mostly use Flickr because it's an easy way for people to find me. I imagine 500px likewise finds its success less as a storage service and more of a place to shareable nod be seen. A lot of the testimonials I've seen of Everpix was its value to people and their own photos...which, while is a very valuable thing to serve, it is ultimately the sharing of these photos that makes people want to join a service in the first place

I'm wondering if there could be a VC firm that would emphasize a low cost of business (for them) in return for not so many hits, but rather a series of smaller firms that just get on base. They'd build a pool of talent, and one or more of the firms might hit it big (aka got lucky), but the VC would be more about spreading their bets, and having a strong base to generate recurring income. And with a possibility of synergy between the various firms under management. So -- more dividend oriented than IPO oriented.

"The reaction was positive for you as a team but weak in terms of whether a $B business could be built."

Wow, fuck these guys. It seems like a lot of good ideas are getting left on the cutting-room floor because people are holding out for the next giant thing.

I hope the crowdfunding thing is enough to help unlock capital for things like this.

(j/k crowdfunded equity is going to be a shitshow)

EDIT:

The folks probably blew some money they didn't need to, but the quote I brought is specifically "Yeah, so, you guys are good but we don't see this being a billion dollar business".

A glorified photobucket doesn't need to be a gigantic billion-dollar business. Most startups which solve simple problems and solve them well are very useful to consumers but aren't going to be massive juggernauts; that doesn't mean that they're bad investments.

Had the investor said, "Yeah, we don't see this becoming a $100M any time soon", maybe that'd make sense. But the additional order of magnitude (one billllllllllion dollars) strikes me as unreasonable.

This is a great example of why everyone thinks we're in a bubble folks.