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Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

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Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

#51

Post by danielweber »

nashequilibrium wrote: post #30
carsongross wrote: post #9

What a hugely useful thing for you guys to do. Thank you, truly. The lesson I see from this: AWS hurts bad if you are using it heavily, but salaries... salaries kill. Automate, outsource and self-build as much and as long as you can possibly stand it, and then push on a lot longer than that.

Is the AWS cost so high because they primarily stored pics? If so what can be done to reduce this cost in terms how to store the pics?

I'm currently someplace where we are treating AWS as a VM provider and it's freaking nuts how much it costs. (We might be looking at the problem wrong or failing to appreciate the fact that we can always scale with enough money.)

Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

#52

Post by ameister14 »

sethhochberg wrote: post #43
Sssnake wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That means no time to roll out custom infrastructure It is sad that the industry is so anti-intellectual that we're actually afraid of computers now. Giving dell a CC# and giving them your hosting providers shipping address is not a complex or difficult task. There is no need for "custom infrastructure" to run a trivial web app. You buy servers, you plug them in.

I wonder how much of the resentment to owning hardware comes from the "fail fast" approach - if you're trying to vet a business model quickly or move onto the next thing, having actual physical assets to take care of if the company ends up failing could be an off-putting extra complexity for some people vs just clicking "delete instance" with some virtualized provider.

I think it has more to do with initial fixed cost.

Personally I used my cofounder's existing array, but that's not an option for most companies, particularly starting out, and cutting out server purchasing costs pays in the short term. However, if you have the initial funding, as in this instance, it pays to buy the servers you need.

Plus, it's an asset that, should your company fail in 6 months, can be sold to at least salvage some of the initial investment.

[edit]In the last boom, though, people bought millions of dollars worth of servers and equipment that are now less than worthless; in many cases you have to pay to get rid of them. So, I guess there can be a significant downside.

Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

#53

Post by danielweber »

mbesto wrote: post #18
crystaln wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> HR - $1,374,695.06 - or 52% of total costs Why would it be unusual for the majority of costs to be salaries for a company that sells services and develops products? This has nothing to do with the "talent war." That's just the way things work. What else would they be spending money on? > AWS - $394,588.35 - or 14% of total costs How much higher would that number have been had Everpix built out their own infrastruct…

My points weren't criticisms, they were merely highlighting the sentiment that comes from outside "the bubble" that is SV. It is unusual to people outside SV* to see such a high number (the % was just an additional data point that signals to non-tech people how much salaries constitutes tech startups). This has everything to do with the talent war - the market dictates that an engineer's salary must be $foo because F…

A million dollars is a lot, but I have no reason to think it's crazy. Without very important context, hearing "a million dollars on salary" isn't useful.

What was the salary per person, for example?

Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

#55

Post by dreamfactory2 »

adventured wrote: post #4

Could Everpix have been run by a very small team at the end, rather than shut down? It looks like it was near adding a net 1,000 subscribers per month. Also, wouldn't it have been possible - with the understood pain points - to substantially reduce costs by moving off of AWS? Trading the ease of AWS for the critical cash for operations.

Although AWS are continually cutting costs so probably worth sitting out and focussing on cost reduction elsewhere and growth.

Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

#56

Post by runako »

nashequilibrium wrote: post #30
carsongross wrote: post #9

What a hugely useful thing for you guys to do. Thank you, truly. The lesson I see from this: AWS hurts bad if you are using it heavily, but salaries... salaries kill. Automate, outsource and self-build as much and as long as you can possibly stand it, and then push on a lot longer than that.

Is the AWS cost so high because they primarily stored pics? If so what can be done to reduce this cost in terms how to store the pics?

In rough order of difficulty/startup cost:

- AWS reserved instances (doesn't help with storage costs though)

- dedicated servers at e.g. SoftLayer

- colocation

Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

#57

Post by pbiggar »

loceng wrote: post #15
adventured wrote: post #4

Could Everpix have been run by a very small team at the end, rather than shut down? It looks like it was near adding a net 1,000 subscribers per month. Also, wouldn't it have been possible - with the understood pain points - to substantially reduce costs by moving off of AWS? Trading the ease of AWS for the critical cash for operations.

This could have been beginning of a hockey stick growth too. You'd think this is where a VC would be willing to accept some risk.

Series A investors make very few investments that are time consuming and capital consuming. Often, a specific partner will make just 1 investment per year, and stick with that company for 7+ years. They'll also allocate ~$15m in capital to it (the $5m for the Everpix raise, plus another $10m for follow-on investments in future rounds). So they're not willing to take risks like this, it doesn't make sense with the model.

Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

#59

Post by runako »

Sssnake wrote: post #34
tinco wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't these numbers also so high because they took VC funding? The VC wants to throw the company against the wall as fast and hard as possible to see if it sticks. That means no time to roll out custom infrastructure, and hiring rockstar consultants just to build the product as fast as possible. The idea is not terrible, it's definitely better than doing everything the right way (tm) for 5 years, just to find out th…

>That means no time to roll out custom infrastructure It is sad that the industry is so anti-intellectual that we're actually afraid of computers now. Giving dell a CC# and giving them your hosting providers shipping address is not a complex or difficult task. There is no need for "custom infrastructure" to run a trivial web app. You buy servers, you plug them in.

In addition to being fast to deploy, cloud infrastructure lets you easily scale up and down to try things out. This is useful if you're still finding traction or distribution channels that work best.

>> Giving dell a CC# and giving them your hosting providers shipping address is not a complex or difficult task

Financially, cloud servers have properties that might make them attractive relative to this. Also -- buying and managing colo is a fairly specialized discipline. There are a ton of business reasons to not take on a risk in this part of your business when you can outsource it at nominal cost. A COGS of 14% is quite nominal.

Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

#60

Post by syntern »

rokhayakebe wrote: post #17

You know at some point we are going to have to sit back and ask "Where the F&*^K" does this $100M or $1B business number comes from. The minute I get the opportunity to put my money my mouth is, I will invest solely in lifestyle businesses: one to two guys/gals wanting to build a profitable business with a yearly dividend, one where if the team makes $500,000/year we are all extremely happy.

VCs are probably skipping this small-scale opportunities because there are $100M / $B numbers too, and why go small, if they can go for the big show?

We need to give these lifestyle business more spotlight, so that people who are aiming for such won't get embarrassed that they are not aiming for $B.

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