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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

#261

Post by AndrewKemendo »

shin_lao wrote: post #254
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is staggering to me some of the salaries that founders give themselves. I remember reading a tip for pitchdecks/term sheets that if you put your founder salary as anything above 150k that is slightly too high for most offers. That is insane to me. I make less than 80k a year, in D.C., with a mortgage and two kids while I build on the side. A cursory glance tells me most founders aren't under such strict cost regim…

70 k/year doesn't make a difference and it's not a good thing to have founders struggling with money. If your brain is too focused on the trivialities of life you can't invest yourself 100% in the company.

Apparently it would have in this case. That would have been two months of AWS for each founder, so saying it doesn't make a difference is clearly wrong.

I didn't say pay yourself nothing - pay yourself the minimum amount you have to in order to keep your life from impeding your work. If that means you need luxuries to be comfortable, then your lunch will get eaten by someone who is more spartan.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#262

Post by smackfu »

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…

Wow, $9500 for a week, and only in the RSS feed. That is pretty pricey.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#263

Post by TylerE »

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…

We support 4x their number of paying customers with an ANNUAL server bill that is ~half their MONTHLY bill.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#264

Post by mathattack »

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…

Is this an issue of needing an MBA, or just needing to think about marketing and finance?

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#266

Post by qq66 »

keithwarren wrote: post #54
baddox wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you aware of Pivotal Labs and Pivotal Tracker? http://pivotallabs.com/

I am, we know long term we will have to change the name and already have something lined up but we figured it best right now to keep the current name. Make a bunch of mistakes and then rebrand.

Publicly admitting a plan to "make a bunch of mistakes" under another giant company's trademarked brand may not be wise.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#267

Post by jmathai »

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.

That's the goal behind Trovebox (formerly OpenPhoto). But we've since moved away from the consumer space and into the business/organization space.

Nonetheless, we're open source, hosted and a bunch of other things to try and make this problem suck a little less.

Here's the original Kickstarter from 2 years ago, http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jmathai/openphoto-a-phot...

Github repositories at https://github.com/photo

Hosted service now geared towards organizations at https://trovebox.com

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#268

Post by aespinoza »

autarch wrote: post #80
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).

This should be fairly easy to price out, right? I suggest you start by simply comparing the cost of dedicated hosting-provided hardware. This is the middle ground between owning your own stuff and something like AWS. Pricing out the cost of owning your own servers can be tricky since you need to account for a number of factors: * Initial cost of hardware - don't forget to include things like network switches, remote…

Thank you for your answer. I agree with you. And after I read this article I went on to do some research decided to move the servers in-house. But I am also researching a Hybrid cloud using AWS.
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