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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

#201

Post by thatthatis »

ghaff wrote: post #142
thatthatis wrote: post #129

Earlier 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.)

I don't believe smugmug is a freemium service, are they?

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#203

Post by jfb »

Glyptodon wrote: post #199
jfb wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I wonder if this is an opportunity -- the world is not solely composed of moon-shot local social enterprise websites, and worthy businesses are being shut out of the world of cheap money by the prevailing culture. Hmm.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#204

Post by argonaut »

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…

Let's be clear: learning about those lessons will take maybe, at most, a month or two of reading a couple of books, reading PG's essays, and reading a few of the blogs written by great entrepreneurs and VCs. That's it. An MBA probably does teach you this - it just doesn't need to take two years and XYZ thousand dollars. There's a lot of fluff in an MBA that's just not necessary for a startup.

The fact also remains that the vast majority of people I know who got an MBA did it for the network, not for the education.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#205

Post by sameer_sundresh »

autarch wrote: post #122
rpedela wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you just use EC2, no EBS, and reserved pricing then AWS is just as cheap as other providers if not cheaper. It is all the nice features that make it expensive. S3 is pretty damn cheap too. Of course, raw hosting costs are only part of the calculation. You have to include sysadmin time and salary.

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.

Your second paragraph exactly describes Everpix's computational needs: bursty with no use for local persistent storage.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#206

Post by sameer_sundresh »

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…

I don't know why the article list salaries, payroll and personnel costs as separate numbers like that. Payroll includes salaries, and personnel costs includes payroll.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#207

Post by strelok1 »

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…

They were paying themselves nice salaries weren't they.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#208

Post by joelandren »

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.

To be fair, there's a lot more to user acquisition than a slogan.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#210

Post by beambot »

> They hoped that at the very least, they would be able to refund their customers' money and allow them to download their data.

I wish more web services gave the option of hooking into my own personal AWS S3 buckets or DropBox account (with append-only permissions). This would totally eliminate any concerns over data retention and possession. Double-bonus points for open formats. I want to (unambiguously) control the underlying data!

I don't know if EverPix had this option or not... it's just a frustration for me that keeps me from using (most) web applications.

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