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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

#171

Post by ringdabell »

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.

One of the biggest myth about getting an MBA is that you learn anything at all.

The two primary motivations for getting an MBA are completely unrelated to obtaining an "education":

1. Career transformation (i.e. you're a marketer that wants to go into banking.. basically impossible to get interviews without going to bschool)

2. Obtain a professional network

"Learning" is really a tertiary priority.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#172

Post by ilolu »

zaidf wrote: post #135

My hunch is that Everpix's $35,000/mo AWS bill could have been significantly less if they went with their own dedicated servers. When I ran my music start-up, really smart people would look at me funny when I'd tell them it is cheaper than AWS for us to get a couple of high-power dedicated servers with unmetered 100mbps bandwidth. We were pushing over 100tb per month and paying under $3,000/mo, including the cost for…

Where did you buy your dedicated servers ?

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#173

Post by ryanhuff »

cookiecaper wrote: post #159
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 bet…

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.

An MBA inoculates somebody from making poor decisions just as much as anybody having expertise in any specific field. As you would agree, nobody is beyond making a poor decision.

Let's also be clear than an MBA is a broadly defined credential, as there are a host of specializations (including Human Resources management, Marketing, Finance, etc) that are often bundled within the "degree". However, from what was described in the Everpix case, I am confident that somebody with the right mix of educational training in early-stage venture management (MBA w/entrepreneurship concentration) and smarts could have added value.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#174

Post by ents »

mvkel wrote: post #146

I think Gruber (ironically) said it best: "Everpix sponsored the DF RSS feed twice this year, which is how they first came to my attention. ... Really a shame to see them close." There's the problem. They spent $16K on Daring Fireball sponsorship instead of doing basic research to discover where they should actually be targeting their marketing efforts. Your best idea for acquiring more users is to sponsor one of the…

I bet a lot of people here, myself included, learned about Everpix through DF.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#175

Post by zzzmarcus »

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?

I am another very, very satisfied Everpix user who is sad to see them go. They did such a perfect job of increasing visibility on old photos and I've been sharing pictures like I never did with Facebook or any other social network. Such a shame.

I'm Currently looking at loom.com as a replacement, though they don't have the same cool Flashback feature that I loved.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#176

Post by zaidf »

ilolu wrote: post #172
zaidf wrote: post #135

My hunch is that Everpix's $35,000/mo AWS bill could have been significantly less if they went with their own dedicated servers. When I ran my music start-up, really smart people would look at me funny when I'd tell them it is cheaper than AWS for us to get a couple of high-power dedicated servers with unmetered 100mbps bandwidth. We were pushing over 100tb per month and paying under $3,000/mo, including the cost for…

Where did you buy your dedicated servers ?

Initially Softlayer. When that became too expensive, we negotiated a deal with an excellent provider called Choopa.com.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#177

Post by abalone »

I wish the author had dug into the budget more. Yes you need to grow your company.. but $1.2M in salaries? Half a million in "consulting fees"? To develop an early stage product?

This seems like a missed opportunity to explore startup finances. Not just growth strategy. I personally would love to know more.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#178

Post by criley2 »

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…

It's not just code monkey.

Who do you want to run your company?

A guy with no MBA but a 6 year history as CEO of a successful company, or a guy with 6 years of academic training and a MBA, but no history of ever running a company?

Same for coders. What do you want, the guy who has coded in a similar environment for 6 years, or the guy who spent 6 years in academia being taught to code with no experience on any project outside of academics?

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#179

Post by gph »

guynamedloren wrote: post #67
qq66 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Payroll = salary + benefits Personnel costs = full-time employees + contractors (iOS development shops, etc.)

Wait, so are these 3 costs not summed? I didn't do all the math from funding to net income, so I might have missed something.

That infographic is very confusing and misleading. They lined the numbers up as if they should equal out to the net income at the bottom. They don't.

The 2.3 million funding doesn't count towards net income. I'm guessing that number is the subscription revenue - expenses, which it says in the footnote that not all expenses are shown. What everyone else said about Salary/Payroll/Personnel is correct, so I have no idea why it listed all three on the infographic.

I'm guessing the author of the article took those numbers from their financial report and didn't have the financial sense to understand what he was doing so he just threw them together in a way that made sense to him, but doesn't actually make sense in reality.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#180

Post by keithwarren »

650REDHAIR wrote: post #141
keithwarren wrote: post #48

I cannot help but wonder if this is why my startup Pivotal ( http://pivotal.ws ) got a rejection letter from YC last night.

Hey Keith, Hope this isn't too harsh, but that landing page needs work. Is there anyway you could turn what's in that video into a compelling landing page? I'm not sure where you're at with testing or usability, but I can't imagine that landing page generating many signups.

That is what 20 minutes on Instapage gets you. Long term this is not our branding (Pivotal is already taken) and we did not want to invest much time in the public site before we are ready to start marketing the system. That site was put up so there was at least some place people can go when put our name on an accelerator application or tell someone we meet what we are working on.

We putting about $500 dollars into AdWords just to see what CAC looked like and the sign up conversion rate was around 2%, certainly meager when we are talking about just asking for a name and email but alas, it served its purpose.

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