121–130 of 268 posts
Can somebody explain the difference between salary, payroll, and personnel? As far as I can tell, this money goes to employees. However, with a sum of roughly $3.8M, this seems a bit high for 6 employees over 2 years ($270k+/employee/yr), so that can't be right..
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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…
If you just use EC2, no EBS, and reserved pricing then AWS is just as cheap as other providers if not cheaper. It is all the nice features that make it expensive. S3 is pretty damn cheap too. Of course, raw hosting costs are only part of the calculation. You have to include sysadmin time and salary.
Of course, if you don't need permanent storage (and your needs are bursty) than using EC2 is probably a huge win.
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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.
Build, setting up, and tuning servers is one of the most fun parts of running a service. As someone who has worked in this space, I can tell you that the skills simply do not exist. They don't hire for them, because they all ("all") use outsourced hosting and deployment frameworks that insulate them from these things.
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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).
It's something that was absolutely on the table for our planned 4th generation infrastructure. It was unlikely to us we could stay on AWS. We already had 400 millions full-res photos and running 80+ EC2 / RDS instances for 50,000 users. At our growth rate, we would have been close to a billion photos by end of year. It's far from simple though: you need to find the people who can build such systems and also be able t…
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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/busin…
I don't see why. Startups aren't some magical beast unmatched anywhere else in the world. They're small businesses.
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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).
It's something that was absolutely on the table for our planned 4th generation infrastructure. It was unlikely to us we could stay on AWS. We already had 400 millions full-res photos and running 80+ EC2 / RDS instances for 50,000 users. At our growth rate, we would have been close to a billion photos by end of year. It's far from simple though: you need to find the people who can build such systems and also be able t…
It's really unclear we would have been able to go this far in the first place without AWS.
You could have drastically cut your burn on that last $550K by hiring a sysadmin and bringing it all out of AWS (maybe keeping S3). This would have likely also involved retooling on the app side, but in the long run it would have given you more time for positioning/promotion/etc. All in all, 4th Gen is way late for this.
P.S. Number of photos is basically irrelevant, were you actually using market-fit metrics for infrastructural decision support?
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.
I'm not a SV resident, nor a startup kind of guy, but one thing I've noticed is that VC firms are hit driven. And when there are periods in time when hits are far apart, you end up with events like the Series-A crunch. 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…
> They spent too much time on the product and not enough time on growth and distribution. The first pitch deck they put together for investors was mediocre. They began marketing too late. They failed to effectively position themselves against giants like Apple and Google, who offer fairly robust — and mostly free — Everpix alternatives. People on HN crap all over MBAs, but these are the types of problems many of them…
The anti-education bias of HN simply fascinates me.
I dropped out, or semi-dropped out because I wanted to be a frontend/UI guy and learning shit like C++ and basic C/PERL/PHP I'm saving now for a proper degree, and the rent to go along with it. Probably going to do electrical or computer engineering, because that, you can't really learn online like you can HTML/CSS/JS.
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 $35k/mo bill there, a HUGE refactor was passed by. But then again, startups don't hire sysadmins anymore.
If you are a photo backup company, storage is (or at least should be) part of your core.
It seems like they tried to take the heroku route, repackage aws services with premium software and sell it for a premium. But forgot to charge the premium end user price.
That means their storage + servers per customer cost ~$.5/month. Storage per paying customer of about $5/month.
Ergo their $5/mo service has costs of $5/mo per paying user.
This isn't a failure to raise funds, it's a failure to achieve basic unit economics. And that's just cost of goods sold before you even think about acquiring new customers or paying staff.