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Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

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Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

#61

Post by [deleted] »

teej wrote: post #44
bidev wrote: post #22

Hey Guys, Thanks for posting this. Could anyone please clarify for me following things? I have just started to learn about startup capital. 1. Since company is now closed down what happens to Investor's money ? Do they just loose all or do owners have to return it ? ( sorry if this seems pretty noob but I would like to know it ) 2. What does 1 year maturity mean in convertible notes ? 3. Shouldn't the Net Operating I…

In a scenario where a company is being shut down and there is still cash in the bank, the remaining funds would be distributed to the investors.

[deleted]

Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

#62

Post by eli »

danielweber wrote: post #51
nashequilibrium wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

AWS excels at scalability. There are certainly cheaper ways to have a bunch of VMs running 24/7.

Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

#63

Post by jasomill »

rtfeldman wrote: post #25
mbesto wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This breakdown is characteristic of software startups, not SV in particular. I was involved in the Web startup community in St. Louis, Missouri for years before moving to SF. It was the same for those companies: salary costs dwarfed all other costs.

Unless I'm mistaken, workforce is the largest single expense of most businesses, not software startups in particular. If anything, as a percentage of operating expenses, 52% sounds kind of low.

Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

#64

Post by rl12345 »

I just read all their pitch decks and they never mentioned exactly how Everpix was - or could be - better than Dropbox, which IMO would be the first obvious competitor.

The overall problem they were attacking is real, so maybe if they were more focused and had distilled better their solution, with a smaller and lest costy team, they could have made it.

Just my opinion from a totally outsider perspective. Take it for what it's worth. I want to congratulate the team for trying and wish better luck next time.

Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

#65

Post by barrkel »

mahyarm wrote: post #49
rgovind wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure if H1's are paid any lesser than locals...Do you have data points to prove otherwise?

Economically increased supply will decrease the price. Supply & demand. Another way to increase supply and thus save money is to hire remotely, and not restrict yourself to a small geographic area. If you can hire a guy in upstate new york where a house costs $40k all in, that $1000-$2000/month saved in after-tax rent costs (~$17-34k/yr pre tax) alone will significantly decrease their required wage.

If the supply of labor is reduced, the price of labor will rise until demand falls to match supply. That means that some positions will go unfilled; positions whose returns don't exceed the cost of the labor. But we don't know the total value of that labor. The community could be worse off altogether with those positions unfilled, because price doesn't capture all the information - we don't use money for every social exchange, and nor can we reliably estimate the present value of future contributions.

For example, many US companies are created by immigrants (18% of Fortune 500, or 40% if you include children of immigrants). Steve Jobs was the child of an immigrant. Hiring a guy who is so enthusiastic about getting a job that he wants to live in a rural area and live on a pittance, vs hiring someone who's ambitious and hungry - who's going to create the most value?

Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

#67

Post by sehrope »

danielweber wrote: post #51
nashequilibrium wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

If you have a fixed workload (i.e. X servers always online) then take a look at reserved instances. The break even point is about 6 months for the light instances and a bit more for the medium ones. I don't recommend the heavy ones as the cost structure is different (you pay regardless of whether tt's on so ... if you later change your instance types you still have to pay hourly for the full term of the reserve).

Even better is if you can plan your infrastructure on AWS around using spot instances. They can be really cheap (we're talking a 5x times cheaper then on-demand and 3-4x than reserved). If your instances are used in a stateless fashion with all persistent state saved externally (DB, S3, etc) then you can do some pretty cheap scaling with spot instances.

One setup I've played with is a core set of non-spot instances phalanxed by a number of spot instances (at a couple different price points) for stateless web traffic. As long as the spot price stays below your bid you have significantly more instances available (which should give your users better response times). When the spot price rises your spot instances die and things slow down, but your app would still be alive thanks to the non spot instances. Again it takes quite a bit more engineering to get a setup like this but this is the kind of thing you need to do to take advantage of elastic computing.

Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

#68

Post by jusben1369 »

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.

Yes they probably could have. I'm purely guessing here but I suspect the founders had a decision just like the VC's. Does anyone want to keep this alive and try and salvage it? It would be doable but a massive grind for 18 months and we're probably never going to build much more than a $5 to $10 million per year business even if we really do make it. Or do we just want to chalk this one up and walk away and use the experience to try and hit a home run next time?

Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

#69

Post by jusben1369 »

So one of the things that's interesting here is the Amazon component. And the anonymity of Amazon vs a smaller provider. Let's assume for a minute the founders actually wanted to keep it alive (I'm guessing they didn't but that's a whole other story) You're generating revenue of say $40,000 and your Amazon costs are $30K. If you went to a small or mid tier sized provider and said "Good news/bad news. We're generating $40,000 a month and growing (oddly revenue isn't which is again another story) You're costing us $30,000 a month. If we can cap you at $20,000 a month for 12 months that frees us up $20,000 and we can keep 3 employees on in the short term and still grow the business. We can get through the rough patch and continue to grow and in a year from now we can adjust this upward and be worth more. If you insist on $30K, which is your right, we shut the whole thing down because we can't keep the lights on.

Now the provider is either looking at generating $240,000 for the next 12 months or losing everything from your account. He/she is probably doing the deal with you because much of their costs are fixed. But I don't know if/how you have that conversation with Amazon.

EDIT: Oh and fantastic that they shared.

Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

#70

Post by patio11 »

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…

I am intimately familiar with high-level metrics at software businesses in many locales other than Silicon Valley, and direct cost of employees is the largest expense at all of them. (Not true generally, since marketing budgets get arbitrarily high at some firms, but true of all dozen or so that I have direct experience with.) It can easily range to 80%+.

Also, the imputed salaries being paid here are very much not Google/Facebook numbers. The payroll for a team of five Goolgers is plus or minus $100k a month, almost double what it was for Everpix. Everybody was likely taking far below-market salaries.

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