It's somehow ironic that a service provider whose name contains 'ever' and promised to store your photos for ever has to shutdown after only two years. As a user, I tend more and more to go with well established providers to avoid such situations. 40 days isn't much to migrate away from a service either. On the other hand, users have probably to be glad that the service wasn't shut down with immediate effect.
Everpix was great. This is how it died
81–90 of 268 posts
Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died
#82sadly, this is my first time hearing of this service...
Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died
#83If you're a user who signed up because of the new tagline: > Your photo mess, solved. I'd be pissed right now. Not solved, the company's out of business. This is why I won't sign up for another web service that isn't open source again. I'll gladly pay for hosting, but core technology must be libre.
As a user, I get pissed off with acquihires, or pivots. Those can feel like a breech of trust. This is different. It's pretty clear that the Everpix team worked hard to deliver the service they were selling, and in the end, failed. I love(d) Everpix. It really did solve my photo mess, and their daily "flashbacks" were a welcome dose of nostalgia, delivered to my inbox every morning. There are other photo services tha…
But your photos are much more important than the life span of one company. So if you're truly trying to solve photos, it has to be as an open source project.
Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died
#84I 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?
When you go down the VC path, they expect hypergrowth; certain doors are opened and others are closed. Personally, next time around I minimize dependence on funding.
VC kids treat themselves like kings and never truly get to hacking. What ever happened to internal hardware? Build, setting up, and tuning servers is one of the most fun parts of running a service.
When you get millions in funding its easy to piss away on the highest tier services. When you start from the ground up, every cent is managed.
Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died
#85Earlier 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.
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.
Dropbox has received a quarter of a billion dollars in funding.
Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
I think his implication was that paid users would have been enough to support it in the long run if the goal of investment were a stable business with some amount of yearly profits rather than a VC jackpot valuation exit.
Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Like any field, there are people who do research on it. Being familiar with the research that can be useful.
Just replace the word "Entrepreneurship" with "Sales" (which is similar) and perhaps you can understand.
Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died
#88Earlier 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).
s3 seems great for scaling out storage, but I'm sure there are gotchas.
I work in a very different area, but my experience with ec2 are you should drop what you're doing and immediately price out leaving. Roughly: for big hadoop tasks, ec2 is a horrid environment. The boxes are slow, flaky, and shitty; the network is slow and super shitty; and everything about the experience is ass. Oh, and the emr admins are assholes who push broken code; code that couldn't even have run once. These assholes, after issuing us a hotfix to a boot action, proceeded to change the path to the hotfix (without mentioning it to us), breaking our production clusters twice in in 30 hours. I guess I hold a grudge but I like sleeping. The point is emr and perhaps ec2 are complete amateur hour.
Quoting myself earlier:
from a former employer who wants to stay anonymous, ec2 bill per month: $97k
peak, softlayer: $26k. 1/3 the cost, 2x the performance.
And let's not mention emr; a $15k/mo cluster in softlayer did something like
5x the performance of an emr cluster that was costing (and running!) $2k/day.
Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died
#89I 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.
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Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died
#90Earlier 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).
My startup is in the same space as them and I can promise you that running our own storage is much cheaper. Azure and AWS run around 7K per month for 100tb.
When you factor redundacy I need to buy 200tb, factor in other server infrastructure with the cost of a 4TB drive running around 180 and I can spend 15K to buy 200TB of storage.
Put another way, we can own twice the storage capacity (or 1x mirrored) for roughly 2 months of S3 storage.