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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

#151

Post by akanet »

rfnslyr wrote: post #132
650REDHAIR wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh get off your high horse. "VC kids", really?

Yes, VC kids. Let's be honest. Kid creates a decent website/service in a few days/weeks -> VC funding -> ludicrous spending on top tier development environments, offices, staff, and services -> "oh fuck". I'm 20 myself, and while I'm not the hottest shit around, I have been working at a bank for the past two years. I've been exposed to some really smart people with extremely challenging problems, way more so than cre…

I would urge you to consider whether you have an accurate picture of the world. It would be a staggering claim, to me, that even most of the people who get VC money could be characterized as "kids". Getting VC money is a lot of networking, calling, follow-ups, and frank discussion of terms. I don't think that selects well for "kids".

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#152

Post by drp4929 »

rhizome wrote: post #62
martingordon wrote: post #28

> 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…

To be fair, the slogan their late-term marketing consultant came up with was pretty lame.

Your response seems to assume that she has earned MBA, but she has not. http://www.linkedin.com/in/juliesupan

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#153

Post by bandy »

rfnslyr wrote: post #123
rhizome wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's kind of sad really. I'd love to have a big office with a dedicated center to some really awesome equipment. It's like a work of art that you crafted yourself, right up to the cable management!

It's loads of fun, especially when you have dedicated chillers and sufficient power for everything. However, as you come to the realization that your C-level execs negotiated forever contracts for keeping data and servers spinning with no common outage windows, consolidation/virtualization becomes difficult and eventually the reality distortion field collapses and you're out on the streets with everyone blaming you for the failure, despite your ability to run modern services with stone knives and bearskins.

Plus, you don't have that all-important "Cloud" buzzword for them to throw around!

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#154

Post by vondur »

enjo wrote: post #47
martingordon wrote: post #28

> 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 don't think one would need an MBA to figure out getting paying customers is the number one priority. They had a tough job ahead of them, lots of free competitors, so they felt that they had to make a vastly superior product to differentiate themselves. It's not a bad assumption, it's just a tough market to compete in.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#155

Post by cookiecaper »

rfnslyr wrote: post #128
enjo wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The anti-education bias of HN simply fascinates me.

It's strictly from a code monkey perspective. If you want to be a coder, you really don't need to go to school. If you want to take it to the next level and learn the theory behind what you are doing, get a degree. 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 go…

A "proper degree" is ridiculously inefficient. If you've already established a feasible career path, there is little reason to learn these things by following the standard curricular programs available at most educational institutions. Find good online communities and resources, buy textbooks and other primary informational sources, and hire a good private tutor to help fill in the blanks or answer questions and you can get the same stuff down much better in a fraction of the time it'd take with generalized mass schooling, i.e., universities.

University is an outdated model that's never really been applicable to the "real work" that needs to occur in an economy. Not sure why everyone decided it needed to become a general thing after WWII.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#157

Post by Encosia »

physicsyogi wrote: post #60
homersapien wrote: post #26

Their focus wasn't on the product, it was on living/working in SF. They could have saved a year's worth of AWS payments alone by trimming the fat that comes with wanting to be in a "hip" location.

True. But, it seems many VCs won't consider you if you're not in the valley.

Typically, no VC will consider funding a business which has gone bankrupt and shut down...

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#158

Post by anigbrowl »

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.

Even at 35k/mo, that's 420k/year. That seems reasonably low to me (in the sense of a fundamental operating expense, not in terms of the going rate for hosting, which I have no clue about). By contrast, look at their people costs:

Total Salaries (between 6 people) $1,168,710.45

Total Payroll $1,298,819.67

Total Personnel Costs $1,411,513.53

That's about 10x their hosting expenses. Even if they had free hosting it seems like it would only have kept them going for another 2-3 months.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#159

Post by cookiecaper »

martingordon wrote: post #28

> 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…

Does an MBA inoculate someone from making these judgment errors? If so, I personally know multiple MBA-holders who've made similar errors who should be informed that they deserve their money back or something.

It's important to be aware of the necessity to perform those business functions that coders probably would rather not bother with, but once that happens, I find that technical people tend to make much, much better judgment calls than their business school superiors.

In reality, it's rare to find people who're daring enough to apply simple rationality across most or all spectra, regardless of their background. Unfortunately, an MBA seemingly does very little to mitigate this, and it's the core problem.

Yes, people could hypothetically learn, but most don't. I don't understand why we've all fooled ourselves into believing that four years of rote memorization and arbitrary compliance will do anything. I guess it being a much more fundamental problem is scary, because as simple as it may be, it's apparently quite difficult for most people to change.

We have a big problem with our educational and hiring cultures.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#160

Post by NirDremer »

EricDeb wrote: post #143
weixiyen wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need an MBA to solve those problems. It's a problem with prioritization, not lack of ability.

That's exactly what an MBA does. Teaches you to prioritize effectively. It also gives you countless examples of businesses who don't, and the consequences they suffer. Sometimes learning these lessons in the real world can be very costly.

MBA is great but I think your expectations are high. Oftentimes the issue is not knowledge but rather working at high pressure and to do it well nothing beats experience & good mentors.
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