Everpix was great. This is how it died • Hacker News Board

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#161

Post by beachstartup » Tue, Nov 05, 2013, 10:02 PM UTC

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).

yes. they would have 100% been better off, provided they actually knew what they were doing, which i guess is questionable since the business failed.

pricing out servers and researching / working with smaller infrastructure providers who actually care about you and your account (imagine that) is real work, which is why so many people avoid it these days.

it's much easier to click a few buttons and "choose" machine type x in the offerings that amazon has designed to maximize their own profit.

computers are hard, let's go shopping.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#162

Post by j_s » Tue, Nov 05, 2013, 10:02 PM UTC

I was a potential customer that decided against Everpix.

1. I couldn't install their desktop app without 'Run as Admin' (which is understandable but not documented as part of the process). When I did a minimal effort at reporting this (responding to my signup email), the email bounced.

2. I asked for slideshow support and basically got a 'we don't do that here'

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#163

Post by triplesec » Tue, Nov 05, 2013, 10:08 PM UTC

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #107

[Everpix] lost the $50,000 first prize [at TechCrunch Disrupt] to Shaker, a bizarre kind of Second Life-meets-Facebook social network that raised $15 million and hasn't been heard from in a year. A promising, arguably 'disruptive' company lost at a TechCrunch event to a startup backed by Michael Arrington? Color me shocked! Shocked, I say!

I remember those final pitches. It was bizarre that Shaker, some Habbo Hotel-like facebook soc media skin would beat this functional idea, or beat a very good but boring B2B accounting thing which looked like a great idea. Of course the shaker guys also had a totally freaktastic presentation _style_.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#164

Post by devindotcom » Tue, Nov 05, 2013, 10:11 PM UTC

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #107

[Everpix] lost the $50,000 first prize [at TechCrunch Disrupt] to Shaker, a bizarre kind of Second Life-meets-Facebook social network that raised $15 million and hasn't been heard from in a year. A promising, arguably 'disruptive' company lost at a TechCrunch event to a startup backed by Michael Arrington? Color me shocked! Shocked, I say!

Yeah, I was doing photos at that one. I nearly lost my shit when I heard it won. Mike said there were 'very good reasons' but I never found out what they were.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#165

Post by batemanesque » Tue, Nov 05, 2013, 10:14 PM UTC

sad to hear this, great product. in a perverse way it was also nice to see an article & responses from the team that dodged the usual Valley bullshit.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#166

Post by batemanesque » Tue, Nov 05, 2013, 10:14 PM UTC

devindotcom wrote: post #164

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #107

[Everpix] lost the $50,000 first prize [at TechCrunch Disrupt] to Shaker, a bizarre kind of Second Life-meets-Facebook social network that raised $15 million and hasn't been heard from in a year. A promising, arguably 'disruptive' company lost at a TechCrunch event to a startup backed by Michael Arrington? Color me shocked! Shocked, I say!

Yeah, I was doing photos at that one. I nearly lost my shit when I heard it won. Mike said there were 'very good reasons' but I never found out what they were.

"backed by Michael Arrington" - what more reason could you want?

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#167

Post by batemanesque » Tue, Nov 05, 2013, 10:15 PM UTC

devindotcom wrote: post #164

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #107

[Everpix] lost the $50,000 first prize [at TechCrunch Disrupt] to Shaker, a bizarre kind of Second Life-meets-Facebook social network that raised $15 million and hasn't been heard from in a year. A promising, arguably 'disruptive' company lost at a TechCrunch event to a startup backed by Michael Arrington? Color me shocked! Shocked, I say!

Yeah, I was doing photos at that one. I nearly lost my shit when I heard it won. Mike said there were 'very good reasons' but I never found out what they were.

it's a real shame Disrupt carries any weight. the awful hype is one thing, but the fact that it screws over genuinely promising companies due to its grotesquely corrupt nature is a real problem

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#168

Post by batemanesque » Tue, Nov 05, 2013, 10:16 PM UTC

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #107

[Everpix] lost the $50,000 first prize [at TechCrunch Disrupt] to Shaker, a bizarre kind of Second Life-meets-Facebook social network that raised $15 million and hasn't been heard from in a year. A promising, arguably 'disruptive' company lost at a TechCrunch event to a startup backed by Michael Arrington? Color me shocked! Shocked, I say!

careful! comments like this might get you disappeared by the YC positivity-maintenance crew

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#169

Post by diziet » Tue, Nov 05, 2013, 10:16 PM UTC

x0x0 wrote: post #88

aespinoza wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 asshole…

Soft Layer seems to be as expensive as EC2, if not more expensive, especially when compared to reserved instances.

The 244gb cr1.8xlarge (16 cpus, 240gb ssd) amortized over 3 years costs $659 / month. Softlayer would charge quite a bit more for similar specs ( order of magnitude more).

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#170

Post by rhizome » Tue, Nov 05, 2013, 10:18 PM UTC

rpedela wrote: post #147

autarch wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't really compare EC2 sans EBS to something like a dedicated server. Most apps need permanently available storage. Of course, if you don't need permanent storage (and your needs are bursty) than using EC2 is probably a huge win.

Dedicated servers don't really give you permanent storage either. Granted, it is more permanent than EC2 instance storage, but hard drives do get corrupted. You still need backup and replication for a robust solution.

"Disk is cheap"