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Everpix was great. This is how it died

theverge.com

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Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#221

Post by kansface »

rhizome wrote: post #66
bjansn wrote: post #43

The transparency in this article is something we can learn from. It's sad to see a service like Everpix go as they were making money. But if you look at the other numbers, they just staffed up too quickly. Salaries, personnel and payrolling costs of together $3.7 million in two years is just way to much compared to the money they were making. What I'm curious about is that the cost per user (storing photos) is what k…

If they were paying $35K/mo to AWS for hosting and storage, they could have paid about that much for a year of hosting on their own machines. There's a lot we don't know about this angle, but suffice it to say they were throwing money away on infrastructure.

That 35K wasn't the breaking point (nor close to it).

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#222

Post by imsofuture »

batemanesque wrote: post #167
devindotcom wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

it's a real shame Disrupt carries any weight. the awful hype is one thing, but the fact that it screws over genuinely promising companies due to its grotesquely corrupt nature is a real problem

It's a shame that TC carries any weight. Let's stop beating around that bush...

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#223

Post by hv23 »

chiph wrote: post #15
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.

I'm not a SV resident, nor a startup kind of guy, but one thing I've noticed is that VC firms are hit driven. And when there are periods in time when hits are far apart, you end up with events like the Series-A crunch. I'm wondering if there could be a VC firm that would emphasize a low cost of business (for them) in return for not so many hits, but rather a series of smaller firms that just get on base. They'd build…

That sounds pretty close to the 500 Startups strategy.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#224

Post by jliptzin »

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…

Is this payroll over one year? If so, that's absurd. No one should be making $200k+ in salary at a startup that still has yet to turn a dime of profit. Just shaving 10% off that number would have covered their AWS costs for another 3 months.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#225

Post by mvkel »

ents wrote: post #174
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.

Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of people here. Not enough to generate real revenue.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#226

Post by kshatrea »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #107

[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!

This happens routinely at Disrupt. I remember a fabulous startup called Prism Sky Labs (could connect to any network camera with drag and drop software and was quite cool in ambition) lost to Qwiki.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#227

Post by pkmehta »

This article is well-written and The Verge's production quality is tremendous. Can we get more like this?

On Everpix - pretty shocked at the candor/level of disclosure in this article including from the founders and Index Ventures. VCs tend to keep mum about their misses so a bit refreshing to see.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#228

Post by driverdan »

United857 wrote: post #74
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.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't Dropbox use AWS? (Or at least did until recently.) The two services' pricing (on a per GB basis) is within the same ballpark.

I'm sure Dropbox gets better volume pricing than Everpix did.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#229

Post by dublinben »

thatthatis wrote: post #201
ghaff wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Nope, their lowest tier is $5/mo.

http://www.smugmug.com/features

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#230

Post by acjohnson55 »

kansface wrote: post #220
arbitrage wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Product-market fit? Team's ability to execute? Resource constraints?
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