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Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

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Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

#111

Post by eik3_de »

coldtea wrote: post #97
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.

> 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. Going off on a tangent here, but if (a) "software is eating everything" and (b) "salaries kill", wouldn't that mean a society of mass (30%+) unemployment in the future? I wonder who would ha…

> society of mass (30%+) unemployment in the future

basic income?

Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

#112

Post by jot »

Do startups at a similar stage usually measure things as diligently as Everpix seem to have done?

If they kept an eye on of all this on a monthly or weekly basis while they were still running would they have been doing too much or too little?

I've worked with some organisations that are reluctant to invest in this level of analysis. Some of them might even now say "It didn't help Everpix to spend time on that stuff."

Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

#113

Post by masklinn »

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…

> 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)

It's not unusual at all for payroll to be the vast majority of a company's expenses. Normal profitable business usually expect payroll to be 30~40% of gross revenue (and that's for companies actually earning money, not during bootstrapping), and 50% exists although it's usually considered dangerous for profitability.

And of course that depends on the domain, a hairdresser and a refinery will have very different payroll rates and structures. Pretty much all of software and saas company activity and value comes from the people working there, in fact I'd expect payroll %-age to be higher (not lower) outside of SV: lower rent and likely lower utilities.

Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

#115

Post by bayesianhorse »

To me it looked like Everpix expected the kind of growth usually seen with free services from a paid-subscription model.

On the one hand, paid subscriptions "make more sense economically", on the other hand, as long as we are talking about high risk capital anyway, a free service model might have made more sense "financially".

Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

#117

Post by sgt101 »

rgovind wrote: post #103
coldtea wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Going off on a tangent here, but if (a) "software is eating everything" and (b) "salaries kill", wouldn't that mean a society of mass (30%+) unemployment in the future? I wonder who would ha…

My theory is that when everything is automated, so will food production also be, assuming there is enough energy in the world for that. Then everyone will need very little money and Everpix can charge much lesser amount of money...thus still keeping number of users the same.

Sleeping inside and keeping warm might be an issue though?

Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

#118

Post by neil_s »

This is very interesting, thanks for taking the time to compile it all.

What I'm wondering now is whether you plan on open-sourcing the technology built so people can potentially plug it into their own storage providers and take up the cost of storage, or adapt the photo analysis tech. You've built a wonderful base here, will it be put to some use?

Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

#119

Post by nraynaud »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #108
nutanc wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why you start with Amazon. And then once you reach scale you slowly start building your own private cloud. Its much more efficient and costs a lot less. We have been doing the same in our startup.

Yes. Something else I think people fail to consider is what I would call a hybrid approach. For example, even if you mostly operate on your own infrastructure, keep a replica of your data tier going on EC2, along with freshly configured images for the rest of your moving pieces. This way you have an instant pop up B site for disaster scenarios. There are a lot of other possible concepts. Keeping a dataset at amazon t…

I think it's the best way to go, but also for a resilience approach, I want to be able to ditch a datacenter in 15min. If you can ditch the datacenter, why not ditch the whole provider? So we tried to keep the deployment scripts ready for a competitor at all times, having backups we could restore there etc. And if you grow big enough, this becomes a bargaining chip with your provider too: I can ditch you in 15 min.

Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

#120

Post by FollowSteph3 »

Why is the main focus on Aws costs when in comparison the HR costs are multiple of the Aws costs? Is it because were too technically minded here? Is it cause the charts in the article only showed the Aws costs whereas including the HR costs would have changed that perception. I don't know but i just keep seeing people focus on the Aws cost which was not the real problem in comparison.

It makes me think of bad pre-optimizations ;)

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