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

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#211

Post by rfnslyr » Wed, Nov 06, 2013, 12:18 AM UTC

akanet wrote: post #151

rfnslyr wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, VC kids. Let's be honest. Kid creates a decent website/service in a few days/weeks -> VC funding -> ludicrous spending on top tier development environments, offices, staff, and services -> "oh fuck". I'm 20 myself, and while I'm not the hottest shit around, I have been working at a bank for the past two years. I've been exposed to some really smart people with extremely challenging problems, way more so than cre…

I would urge you to consider whether you have an accurate picture of the world. It would be a staggering claim, to me, that even most of the people who get VC money could be characterized as "kids". Getting VC money is a lot of networking, calling, follow-ups, and frank discussion of terms. I don't think that selects well for "kids".

Sorry, I must have been living in an alternate universe where every person in SV is not a total genius at the age of 20.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#212

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Nov 06, 2013, 12:20 AM UTC

rscale wrote: post #186

dm8 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ma…

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Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#213

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Nov 06, 2013, 12:45 AM UTC

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…

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Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#214

Post by parasubvert » Wed, Nov 06, 2013, 12:57 AM UTC

keithwarren wrote: post #90

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).

My startup is in the same space as them and I can promise you that running our own storage is much cheaper. Azure and AWS run around 7K per month for 100tb. When you factor redundacy I need to buy 200tb, factor in other server infrastructure with the cost of a 4TB drive running around 180 and I can spend 15K to buy 200TB of storage. Put another way, we can own twice the storage capacity (or 1x mirrored) for roughly 2…

S3 is already redundant - it virtually guarantees no data loss and mirrors your storage across multiple data centres.

You're also completely ignoring the costs of hosting this stuff, the computers they're in, redundant network switches, failed disks over time, and administration costs to rack and stack failed drives plus all the risk associated with your redundancy going wrong. You're also assuming your hard drives will be able to handle the performance needs. Not to mention this is one site - no DR.

So, Amazon S3 at $7.5k a month for 100 TB is $90k annually with RIDICULOUSLY high redundancy and known performance. Reduce it to 99.99% availability (about what your setup with dual drives might be if you run it well) and you're at $60k annually.

You really are going to host fast, reliable 100 TB for under $60k? Betting your business on it?

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#215

Post by infinitone » Wed, Nov 06, 2013, 12:57 AM UTC

elag wrote: post #100

Other People's Money. There's a reason they're all smiling in the final photo.

Frankly, thats what struck me the most- them smiling as if nothing happened.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#216

Post by CoachRufus87 » Wed, Nov 06, 2013, 1:15 AM UTC

robryan wrote: post #202

I am confused about the $500k loan, surely this would need to be repaid before they can look at customer refunds?

I was wondering the same thing.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#217

Post by swisspol » Wed, Nov 06, 2013, 1:25 AM UTC

radicalbyte wrote: post #140

Sad. It looks like their technology did a great job at solving a very real problem. If any of the founders are here, can I ask a question: why did you chose to implement this as a cloud based service, when a little basic Math would suggest that it was a better match as a client-based tool with upgrades? Take me for example. My internet is 20mb down, 1.5mb up. That's pretty good for Western countries. I currently have…

We built a unique image pipeline with excellent full-res image optimizations allowing to save close to 5X in bandwidth and storage costs. Incidentally, it also makes syncing entire life photo collections much faster, that's why the average Everpix user had more than 9,000 photos.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#218

Post by swisspol » Wed, Nov 06, 2013, 1:29 AM UTC

camus2 wrote: post #182

swisspol wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

Mostly RDS / EC2 / Python with C/C++ extensions

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#219

Post by kansface » Wed, Nov 06, 2013, 1:43 AM UTC

enjo wrote: post #194

cookiecaper wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Liberal arts degrees for everyone!" strikes me about the same as "Engineering degrees for everyone!".

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#220

Post by kansface » Wed, Nov 06, 2013, 1:45 AM UTC

arbitrage wrote: post #92

dm8 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

90% of small businesses fail within the first year, or so the conventional wisdom goes. Not all of them can possibly fail for completely unique reasons.

Sure, but lack of hustle/perseverance is probably the biggest factor past the trivially solvable problems.