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Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

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Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

#151

Post by pmorle »

swisspol wrote: post #85
hv23 wrote: post #54

Awesome, 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.

First - this is a brilliant gift to the startup community - thank you. I am interested to know more about the marketing strategy of the company. It looks like you had some very successful campaigns with CyberMonday and Daring Fireball but spent very little? http://pollenizer.com/everpix-have-open-sourced-their-startu...

Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

#153

Post by count »

rnts08 wrote: post #137
napoleond wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People keep saying this, and I can see how it's easily true if we're talking about EC2 or one of Amazon's database services. But what's the hardware equivalent of S3 (the majority of the costs in this case) that's cheaper and "not much harder to manage" than S3? I feel like once you want to get past a couple TB of (redundant!) storage in colo/dedicated you're back to the land of sysops, no? I mean, I am decently comf…

GlusterFS on Supermicro Storage servers and loads of raid-grade harddrives, install once - scale forever. And it's not very hard to learn one additional software, and everyone knows that you need to setup a simple backup solution or system. What I'm saying is that if you pay a cold $30k to AWS it is probably time to look at other solutions - or your COGS will keep growing out of hand. I understand the greatness of AW…

I think you're not understanding that you DONT have to eventually manage all of the systems on your own. S3 requires effectively 0 management. Dynamo requires effectively 0 management. The list goes on, and grows every quarter.

Sure, if you're just running EC2 nodes, there's some sysop requirement there. But if you run those on ElasticBeanstalk instead, you don't even have to manage that!

It's very hard for server and hardware-focused folks to 'get' the dramatic difference of running with AWS or GCE or other large cloud ecosystems. It's trivial for a, say, Java developer, to have a large, scalable system and have 0 access to each try to manage the actual machines and software that everything is running on.

You CANNOT replicate that in a private environment today, for anything less than a large infrastructure management cost.

Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

#155

Post by [deleted] »

mr_luc wrote: post #134
patio11 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did a bit of Excel modeling of this, based on Everpix's hiring timeline and published numbers. My count is that they had 157 employee-months prior to shutdown at a fully-loaded cost of approximately $9,200 per employee-month. An employee-month is one month worked by a founder or employee, but not a consultant. Fully-loaded costs includes recruiting, healthcare, salary, and taxes, but (for the purpose of this calcul…

I think this is probably the definitive comment for the 'cost of talent' portion of the discussion. I just wish it weren't buried so far down.

[deleted]

Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

#156

Post by Sssnake »

reeses wrote: post #99
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.

Depending on your service provider (hosting, msp, mttos, whatever), the up-front msa can be truly painful if you want "real" service. I.e., redundant power and multi-provider network connectivity with multiple connectivity points that have a massive capital cost but will be as reliable as your commercial or home utilities. Couple the cost of establishing the relationship (especially with startup credit) with the NRC…

You are inventing a problem that doesn't exist. I can literally have a cabinet in a first class data center in 2 days and it takes 15 minutes of my time. You save assloads of money this way vs AWS which is incredibly expensive. You can buy an equally performing server for the cost of a month of renting the VM from amazon (for the big ones obviously, you can't buy servers as slow as a ec2 large instance.)

Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

#157

Post by Sssnake »

runako wrote: post #59
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.

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…

>In addition to being fast to deploy, cloud infrastructure lets you easily scale up and down to try things out

And you can buy a single server for $5k that will outperform $5k/month of EC2 VMs.

>Also -- buying and managing colo is a fairly specialized discipline

What? That is like saying "buying and managing phones is a fairly specialized discipline". No, it isn't. You give money, you get service. Not complicated. People have been able to handle this just fine for longer than you've been alive.

Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

#158

Post by swisspol »

latch wrote: post #107
swisspol wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Did you guys look at bare metal at all? (either dedicated or colocated)? Spot gets you in the same ballpark of price on a "unit", which can be mentally deceiving since an AWS unit is pretty weak. In our experience with CPU or IO intensive workloads, Spots are still 2-5x slower than what you can get at decent dedicated provider..

No, there was no time nor did we have the in-team experience. EC2 is one thing, which you can get down to pretty cheap if leveraging spot instances, but most of our infrastructure costs was on storage.

Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

#159

Post by tinco »

Sssnake wrote: post #156
reeses wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on your service provider (hosting, msp, mttos, whatever), the up-front msa can be truly painful if you want "real" service. I.e., redundant power and multi-provider network connectivity with multiple connectivity points that have a massive capital cost but will be as reliable as your commercial or home utilities. Couple the cost of establishing the relationship (especially with startup credit) with the NRC…

You are inventing a problem that doesn't exist. I can literally have a cabinet in a first class data center in 2 days and it takes 15 minutes of my time. You save assloads of money this way vs AWS which is incredibly expensive. You can buy an equally performing server for the cost of a month of renting the VM from amazon (for the big ones obviously, you can't buy servers as slow as a ec2 large instance.)

Alright, who in your company knows what hardware to buy at which datacenter for how much? What software is going to run on it? who picks that software? How do you get data onto it? How do you get data off of it? What happens when it goes down? How do you monitor it? How do you scale it to two servers? Or more? Who is going to do that? Who is going to know all that? Who else is going to know that so your company doesn't fail when the first person isn't around?

Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

#160

Post by andyjpb »

tinco wrote: post #159
Sssnake wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are inventing a problem that doesn't exist. I can literally have a cabinet in a first class data center in 2 days and it takes 15 minutes of my time. You save assloads of money this way vs AWS which is incredibly expensive. You can buy an equally performing server for the cost of a month of renting the VM from amazon (for the big ones obviously, you can't buy servers as slow as a ec2 large instance.)

Alright, who in your company knows what hardware to buy at which datacenter for how much? What software is going to run on it? who picks that software? How do you get data onto it? How do you get data off of it? What happens when it goes down? How do you monitor it? How do you scale it to two servers? Or more? Who is going to do that? Who is going to know all that? Who else is going to know that so your company doesn…

Exactly the same way as you do in the cloud: read the docs, write the script.
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