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Everpix was great. This is how it died

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Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#71

Post by marincounty »

sameer_sundresh wrote: post #41
shin_lao wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you. From what I read it seems they cared more about raising money than making money.

Our per-user income was above our per-user costs. But we hadn't yet reached the economies of scale where fixed costs were covered.

I always ask on question to every business, and nonprofit. How much were, are the founders of the company making per year? It's usually a lie. I've also noticed when young entrepreneurs are given a large amount of money; they don't quite realize that it's probally all the big money they will ever see. I know I didn't. I made a lot of money in my twenties, thinking it would always be this easy. Sometimes, the availability of money is just because you were at the right place at the right time; people underplay luck--especially people in their twenties, or rich kids. Rich kids have their parents to fall back on. Poor kids will never have that safety net. I don't know anything about this company, but their situation is not unique--it's the norm, that's why I cringed reading the article and looking at the pictures. I've seen it too many times before.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#72

Post by dm8 »

kohanz wrote: post #35
[deleted] wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

I do not hold an MBA, but have a few friends that do and this seems like an inaccurate generalization. My understanding is that MBA's can have varied focus areas, with a varying curriculum. For example, MBA's can be focused on: Finance, Marketing, Management, etc, and yes, Entrepreneurship.

How can you have formal education in Entrepreneurship? It's pretty much on job type of learning. Not trying to be snarky but I'm genuinely curious.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#73

Post by johnrob »

but everyone here is hung up on the concern over being able to build a >$100M revenue subscription business in photos in this age of free photo tools

Dropbox is a billion dollar company doing exactly that. I'm willing to bet that photos/videos are what exceed quotas and create paid accounts.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#74

Post by United857 »

rhizome wrote: post #61
SoftwareMaven wrote: post #16

I can't help but wonder if that safety net feeling is part of what doomed Everpix. If they had believed they were incredibly lucky to land $1.8M and that they had to build the whole business with that (rather than having a belief that more funding awaited whenever they needed it), would it have forced a different set of decisions to be made that would have driven revenue and growth, and ultimately success, instead?

From the sounds of it, what doomed them was pricing too low in a way that made it impossible to create higher tiers of service, and, perhaps most importantly, using AWS for everything. AWS bills monthly, so if in fact they were running a $35k/mo bill there, a HUGE refactor was passed by. But then again, startups don't hire sysadmins anymore.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Dropbox use AWS? (Or at least did until recently.) The two services' pricing (on a per GB basis) is within the same ballpark.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#75

Post by crapshoot101 »

angersock wrote: post #19
Codhisattva wrote: post #2

Wow. What an interesting example of what's wrong with the venture capital model. A great product dies because the founders "spent too much time on the product". I hope a 9th inning miracle saves the day. If not, thanks for the great product.

From the article: "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:…

Wait, explain? Why should VC's fund something they don't think will make enough money? That seems to be a sense of entitlement - clearly, paid users were not enough to support this product on its own (which by all accounts, is a shame).

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#76

Post by sashaeslami »

3JPLW wrote: post #6

Dammit. That sucks. I am (well, was) a paying member of Everpix and I loved it. It was very great. It surprises me that this is how I found out about the closing. They haven't sent out the notifications to members yet, it seems. Guess I now have to look for another similarly seamless remote backup of my photo library. Any suggestions?

We're here. http://eversnapapp.com

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#77

Post by johnrob »

middus wrote: post #11
ismail wrote: post #4

500k for consulting???????

Let me break this down a bit: USD 500k at USD 2k/man day = 250 man days A US man year has ~235 man days, so that's just roughly 1 external FTE for a year. Not so much, actually.

That would be a very high fill rate (5 days a week) for such high prices.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#78

Post by dm8 »

martingordon wrote: post #44
[deleted] wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

Part of the problem is that an MBA can be a lot of different things even within a schools. I, for one, am working on learning how to solve problems that startups face, problems that can't be solved by code. I'm not saying that hiring an MBA would have been a magic fix for Everpix, but when looking at the business as a whole, the product looked great (despite its lack of support for non-JPEG formats, but that's more o…

Is working at a startup mandatory as part of curriculum then?

Also, every startup has tons of different problems at micro level even though macro themes are consistent (e.g. getting new customers etc.). It will be hard to generalize problem solving across startups.

I agree that Everpix couldn't find scalable business model for their product. But what I'm saying is you may not necessarily need MBA to find market/business model.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#79

Post by bjansn »

rhizome wrote: post #66
bjansn wrote: post #43

The transparency in this article is something we can learn from. It's sad to see a service like Everpix go as they were making money. But if you look at the other numbers, they just staffed up too quickly. Salaries, personnel and payrolling costs of together $3.7 million in two years is just way to much compared to the money they were making. What I'm curious about is that the cost per user (storing photos) is what k…

If they were paying $35K/mo to AWS for hosting and storage, they could have paid about that much for a year of hosting on their own machines. There's a lot we don't know about this angle, but suffice it to say they were throwing money away on infrastructure.

Yes. We moved back to our own infrastructure as well. But AWS has a broad range of services. I can imagine storing photos on S3 makes sense for a startup like Everpix. Because, you don't need to worry scaling on storage level. Sometimes it makes sense to pay a premium, but it should really be tied to your growth metrics. If you see a month to month growth to which you can't keep up with updating and migrating your own infrastructure, then make the move to AWS or another big cloud vendor.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#80

Post by autarch »

aespinoza wrote: post #69
rhizome wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the sounds of it, what doomed them was pricing too low in a way that made it impossible to create higher tiers of service, and, perhaps most importantly, using AWS for everything. AWS bills monthly, so if in fact they were running a $35k/mo bill there, a HUGE refactor was passed by. But then again, startups don't hire sysadmins anymore.

Do you think they were better off by having their own servers ? (Honest question we use AWS and Rackspace, and we feel the pain of Monthly bills as well).

This should be fairly easy to price out, right?

I suggest you start by simply comparing the cost of dedicated hosting-provided hardware. This is the middle ground between owning your own stuff and something like AWS.

Pricing out the cost of owning your own servers can be tricky since you need to account for a number of factors:

* Initial cost of hardware - don't forget to include things like network switches, remote console devices, etc. - you may also want to buy something like a remotely accessible power switch so you can forcibly reboot machines

* Rack space costs

* Bandwidth costs

* Sysadmin time to manage the hardware (you already need a sysadmin to manage things like backups, logging, etc.)

* On-site remote hands if your rack host is not physically near your sysadmin

But regardless, I'm pretty sure that _anything_ ends up being cheaper than AWS once you get beyond a fairly small number of servers. The big advantages of AWS are integration with other services (storage, load balancing, etc.) and the ability to spin many machines up and down very quickly.

However, if you can tolerate waiting a day or so to provision new servers, dedicated hosting-provided hardware is almost certainly going to be quite a bit cheaper.

You could also compare this to something like Linode. Again, you lose the ability to provision new machines almost instantly, but they are pretty quick to bring up new machines (minutes, not hours or days). They also have a number of nice integrated services like backups.

Finally, you can also do some sort of hybrid setup where you have core stable services on dedicated machines but still spin up AWS instances to deal with bursty computation needs.

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