Great material for a business school case.
Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides
81–90 of 164 posts
Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ).…
At Everpix, we were already extensively using spot instances for the vast majority of our EC2 needs (which were pretty intense considering the type of computation and image science we were doing). That did save quite a bit of money when we did the switch and it was easier to do than we expected, so strongly recommended!
Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides
#83So 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…
> But I don't know if/how you have that conversation with Amazon.
I do. I've had a conversation like that with Amazon. What I found is the Amazon hosting team is excellent: they moved mountains for my account to get us to success.
The Amazon account exec arranged immediate discounts and bridge services, even working through the holidays, then brought in multiple engineers for phone calls with me to teach me how to optimize our project to cost less to run. Every one of the Amazon people who helped me was 100% on board with finding ways to make the project successful.
That conversation is always worth having with vendors in my experience. They may be able to come up with ideas, or offer rebates, or promotions, or even convertible note financing toward the next fundraising round.
Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides
#84So 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…
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Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides
#85Awesome, thanks for sharing. The PR expenses (109,552.34) seem pretty high and I wonder what that line item entails. Did you guys use a PR firm or run any expensive marketing campaigns?
No marketing campaigns (we spent maybe ~10K on online ads mostly for testing). We did use a national PR firm though for several months and PR contractor for a couple months as well before that.
Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides
#86Would love a breakdown of the AWS cost.
This is the best data:
https://github.com/everpix/Everpix-Intelligence/blob/master/...
Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides
#87Everpix designer/cofounder here. This is pretty dense stuff. We're working on putting together a more extensive and user-friendly site to make sense of this heap of data. Stay tuned. :-)
No way, I'm a co-founder too! Were you at that office on 2nd street? We should totally have hung out :P
Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides
#88I wonder why they didn't simply downsize on the hosting. I mean if that's a huge part of the operating cost, so much you need to shut down the entire operation, doesn't it make sense to go with a different host? even resorting to a dedicated box or choosing a different cloud provider? It's really hard to believe because I bet the end user didn't really give a damn about whether it was hosted on amazon or elsewhere. I…
I keep reading comments from this angle, so I'll throw in my 2 cents as an Everpix founder :) I can assure you that without the facilities of AWS, which saved us a ton of time and development overhead early on, there would have been no Everpix. Period. Actually, the very first Everpix was on Google App Engine, but that's a different story. As an early stage startup, whose core business is not building infrastructure,…
> it's expected to have payroll your largest expense - there was no surprise
Only when you are small haven't marketed the service and your subscriber numbers are still small. You could probably support 10x the subscribers with only 2x (or less) of an increase in staff.
Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides
#89Awesome, thanks for sharing. The PR expenses (109,552.34) seem pretty high and I wonder what that line item entails. Did you guys use a PR firm or run any expensive marketing campaigns?
No marketing campaigns (we spent maybe ~10K on online ads mostly for testing). We did use a national PR firm though for several months and PR contractor for a couple months as well before that.
My message to all startups out there: despite Valley folklore, it is ok to have a marketing budget and spend money to advertise to users - especially initially. Not every successful company or service grows "organically".
Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides
#90Would love a breakdown of the AWS cost.
AWS costs seem reasonable to me and it is definitely the smart way to build a service like this. Saves a ton on time early and services like this can optimize later when they are much larger.