Call me optimist but I have a hunch that the level of engagement around the shutdown will attract investors to try and save the company.
Everpix was great. This is how it died
191–200 of 268 posts
Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let me break this down a bit: USD 500k at USD 2k/man day = 250 man days A US man year has ~235 man days, so that's just roughly 1 external FTE for a year. Not so much, actually.
What kind of FTE makes $2000 a day, what?
Top of my head: Patrick, Thomas and probably a lot of other HN regulars.
Looking besonders technology: lawyers, marketing and branding consultants, and, last but not least, management consultants.
$2000 is not outrageous.
Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you go down the VC path, they expect hypergrowth; certain doors are opened and others are closed. Personally, next time around I minimize dependence on funding.
VC kids treat themselves like kings and never truly get to hacking. What ever happened to internal hardware? Build, setting up, and tuning servers is one of the most fun parts of running a service. When you get millions in funding its easy to piss away on the highest tier services. When you start from the ground up, every cent is managed.
It's a lot of fun, but it's also a bit of a trap in my experience. My previous startup was all custom, my current one is all as hands off as we can be infrastructure wise.
Unless going custom allows you to do something that you couldn't otherwise do (cases which are rare, but existent), it's just optimizing margin. And you can't margin your way to success. (To failure yes, to success no.)
As noted above, their hosting was a big number, but it wasn't a dominant cost. It's like Amdahl's law of money, it doesn't matter how little you spend in one area if that area isn't dominating your costs.
And all else being equal, it's usually the wrong choice; the best way to grow the bottom line is to grow the top line. If you can spend X weeks cutting costs by Y$, or X weeks increasing revenue by Y$, grow the top line. It's fuel, it gives you options.
The thing I miss the most about doing it our selves was the raw fun of it, and how efficient it felt. But in retrospect it was a lot of time spent on things that ultimately didn't change the outcome.
Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died
#194Earlier 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…
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…
Only if you view a degree as skills training.
The idea that it is inefficient is what I find so interesting, because from my point of view it's entirely the opposite. For most people a degree will greatly improve their ability to learn new things. It will expose them to a whole host of thoughts, ideas, and areas of exploration that they would otherwise never touch.
The thing is, I don't have a degree. I have a LOT of one (well two actually). I feel that it's ok, because the last 30 hours or so that I'm missing are basically all computer science. That's the stuff I've been able to learn.
Still I can't imagine not having the college education that I do have. I use what I learned in psychology almost every day (absolutely essential for anyone trying to run a company). I use the lessons learned in history and literature to guide my decision making. Philosophy has greatly influenced HOW I interact with others and informs the type of team that I want to have.
College made me a much better entrepreneur and it did it only four years! Give me that experience every day over someone who skipped college.
Now, can you get all of that elsewhere? Of course. You can learn to program. That's easy. You can read every day. Of course. But unless you are a remarkable human being (and they do exist), you'll never achieve the breadth of knowledge that comes with a degree.
Hell I'm all for restructuring how we think about education. The answer isn't to eliminate it. Instead lets decouple the skills training aspect. Liberal arts degrees for everyone!
Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the relevant standard should be: focus on the core of your business, outsource everything else. 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.
Amazon regularly features SmugMug at their conferences and in case studies. I haven't looked at the specifics recently but they basically went all-AWS. (SmugMug is also a bit different from your typical consumer photo site but they are a photo storage and sharing company.)
Since they are a featured customer, they may also get price breaks.
Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
i was pushing 100 T / month with one server 1Gbit unmetered at 250$ / mo , also music site.
What backbones? We had an option to get much cheaper pricing on Cogent. We decided to pay a bit extra for premium. Also, most of our cost was for the hardware(not the bandwidth). We went with top-notch storage with RAID and a bunch of ram. In hindsight, we should have bought the hardware for one-time fee but didn't for cash flow reasons.
Wise move!
FWIW, 100TB (approx 300Mbps continuous) costs us approximately $450/mo with a good quality host (Quadranet) with a good blend of upstreams. A cheaper host (Ubiquity) charge us about half of that. It's worth paying the extra for sure.
Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died
#197Everpix. They just needed someone on the team who was passionate about marketing. Whose gifts ran in that direction. I bet what they do next will be even better/hotter.
Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died
#198> 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…
I am going to tackle this, from a coders point of view, you can very quickly see if someone is any good. Or a designer, sysad, most other things.
But MBA are like economists, they all have different ideas on how to advance, and it is very hard to actually hard to test them, takes a long time to see if they were actually correct, if they fail they have a good reason, and it all sounds like something you could have worked out anyway.
Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think his implication was that paid users would have been enough to support it in the long run if the goal of investment were a stable business with some amount of yearly profits rather than a VC jackpot valuation exit.
But isn't that more the role of traditional sources of capital (banks, &c.) than a SV VC?
To be honest, I've never heard of traditional sources of capital funding websites but I suppose that doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
In any case, I agree that it doesn't match the VC models, but I'm not sure there is another model available to a web business that can probably get enough traction to survive, but not enough to offer massive returns.
In fact, I'd go so far as to say there are probably significant market segments not being served because they offer a modicum of stable profit but have large up front costs without a lot of growth opportunity.
Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died
#200[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.
'very good reasons' == self interest.