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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

#181

Post by TheTechBox »

Touche wrote: post #45

If 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.

> This is why I won't sign up for another web service that isn't open source again.

There are really two sides to this coin. This kind of model works well for Wordpress with hosted and self hosted/open source(?) though.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#182

Post by camus2 »

swisspol wrote: post #113
robterrell wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I think the article said it was $35k per month in AWS costs alone. If they had 6800 paying customers at the cheapest rate ($50 per year) they were making $333,200 per year -- $27,767 per month. My #1 priority would have been getting the storage costs to be break-even, with plan to get well under in a year. I have to assume they tried and discovered they couldn't get their numbers low enough.

FWIW we designed Everpix's infrastructure and our unique image pipeline so it would break even and it did: revenue from subscriptions (around $40K / month) did cover both free and paid accounts (around $30K / month).

what stack did you use on the server ?

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#183

Post by emn13 »

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.

Yeah, it's weird. And for all it's inefficiency, there are absolutely brilliant things to be learnt that you'd never come up with it all.

I'm not sure it's specific to programming, but I find it dismaying to see how many solved problems we still need to fight with every day just because the people that originally wrote the code never paused to think enough about the theory behind it all.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#184

Post by emn13 »

anigbrowl wrote: post #158
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.

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 seem…

But it wasn't necessarily scalable from a business perspective, and that might not have been attractive to the investors they needed. Especially if it's true their pricing was low.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#185

Post by jervisfm »

So I am wondering: as a startup founder / cofounder are you obligated to return investors' money/funds if it comes to the point that you have to shutdown your startup? Or was the raising of the money done with the understanding that investors may never get it back ?

Obviously, the answer here depends on the exact agreement(s) between the investor(s) and the founders but I am curious about the typical case.

If indeed, as I suspect, you are not "in-debt" by the amount of money that you had raised, this makes the shut down a bit less painful and also gives you room to try and do another startup in the future (due to not been burdened with paying back huge sums of borrowed money).

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#186

Post by rscale »

dm8 wrote: post #72
kohanz wrote: post #35

Earlier 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.

An MBA in entrepreneurship has business classes adapted for an entrepreneurial audience.

A typical MBA involves the study of topics such as marketing, finance, risk management, accounting, economics, statistics, operations, HR, organizational dynamics, business law, and strategy.

Many of these can easily be adapted to be more useful for entrepreneurs. A finance class can focus on venture capital more than the bond market. A marketing class can focus on new product development more than the promotion of existing products. A law class can deal with the issues most relevant to startups. The accounting needs of a startup exec are different than those a future partner at Deloitte. etc.

As a clear example of the type of content that an entrepreneurial class could cover, Steve Blank's book Four Steps to the Epiphany originated not as a book, but as the notes for his class at Haas.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#187

Post by shin_lao »

sameer_sundresh wrote: post #41
shin_lao wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you. From what I read it seems they cared more about raising money than making money.

Our per-user income was above our per-user costs. But we hadn't yet reached the economies of scale where fixed costs were covered.

Thanks for the answer. It sounds like your per-user profit was insufficient.

Did you have intermediate milestones before reaching the "economies of scale" one?

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#188

Post by hsod »

angersock wrote: post #19
Codhisattva wrote: post #2

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.

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:…

"fuck these guys" is way over the top. there's nothing wrong with deciding you only want to invest in businesses you think have a shot at being worth 1 billion dollars some day.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#189

Post by ye »

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).

Your alternatives are

1) Switch to other cloud providers, I'm not aware of any very cheap ones.

2) Switch to other hostings, which can be 1/10 as cheap as AWS, but then you have to deal with the failures.

3) Colocate and build your own servers/storage. It's only cheaper if your bill is much more than a 24/7 sysadmin(s) salary.

I suspect DropBox don't give a shit about server costs, they are swimming in money. But I bet having their own data centers will save them money.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#190

Post by enjo »

criley2 wrote: post #178
rfnslyr wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 projec…

I want both.
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