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Everpix was great. This is how it died

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Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#111

Post by innonate »

I just posted some more detailed thoughts here:

http://innonate.tumblr.com/post/66113756052/everpix-blog-we-...

In some way we felt like classmates with Everpix. We started in the same half of the same year. Most every thing they wrote about we believed in too. We didn't know the team, but from afar they seemed like stellar people with their hearts in the right place -- right where our hearts were too.

Awesome job team Everpix. Thanks for the inspiration and sharing the journey with us!

Nate CEO - Picturelife https://picturelife.com/

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#112

Post by dpe82 »

sameer_sundresh wrote: post #41
shin_lao wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you. From what I read it seems they cared more about raising money than making money.

Our per-user income was above our per-user costs. But we hadn't yet reached the economies of scale where fixed costs were covered.

Curious: how many TB where/are you storing and what was your bandwidth usage like?

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#113

Post by swisspol »

robterrell wrote: post #98
wehadfun wrote: post #64

I find it hard to believe that no one wanted to buy this service. $35K per month in revenue.

Well, I think the article said it was $35k per month in AWS costs alone. If they had 6800 paying customers at the cheapest rate ($50 per year) they were making $333,200 per year -- $27,767 per month. My #1 priority would have been getting the storage costs to be break-even, with plan to get well under in a year. I have to assume they tried and discovered they couldn't get their numbers low enough.

FWIW we designed Everpix's infrastructure and our unique image pipeline so it would break even and it did: revenue from subscriptions (around $40K / month) did cover both free and paid accounts (around $30K / month).

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#114

Post by bsimpson »

guynamedloren wrote: post #51

Can somebody explain the difference between salary, payroll, and personnel? As far as I can tell, this money goes to employees. However, with a sum of roughly $3.8M, this seems a bit high for 6 employees over 2 years ($270k+/employee/yr), so that can't be right..

I was confused by that too. I suspect that they are subsets of one another (e.g. don't sum them because they are largely redundant).

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#115

Post by swisspol »

aespinoza wrote: post #69
rhizome wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the sounds of it, what doomed them was pricing too low in a way that made it impossible to create higher tiers of service, and, perhaps most importantly, using AWS for everything. AWS bills monthly, so if in fact they were running a $35k/mo bill there, a HUGE refactor was passed by. But then again, startups don't hire sysadmins anymore.

Do you think they were better off by having their own servers ? (Honest question we use AWS and Rackspace, and we feel the pain of Monthly bills as well).

It's something that was absolutely on the table for our planned 4th generation infrastructure. It was unlikely to us we could stay on AWS. We already had 400 millions full-res photos and running 80+ EC2 / RDS instances for 50,000 users. At our growth rate, we would have been close to a billion photos by end of year.

It's far from simple though: you need to find the people who can build such systems and also be able to afford the capex. And then there's the risks of running your own system and opportunity cost.

It's really unclear we would have been able to go this far in the first place without AWS.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#116

Post by emdowling »

rhizome wrote: post #101
nakedrobot2 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Drew Houston at Websummit last week, they haven't spent any of that money.

So all of their acquisitions and burn has come from (crunchbase caveat) ~7MM? There's some missing pieces to be sure, but suffice it to say that having that much cash in your back pocket allows a different set of considerations.

Drew said the same thing at TC Disrupt in SF this year. Reading between the lines: All the acquisitions and ability to pay 300+ staff without needing to touch a massive $250 million pot of money is basically telling the market (eg: Box): "We can play the enterprise game very well and have the revenue to prove it"

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#117

Post by asdasf »

aespinoza wrote: post #69
rhizome wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the sounds of it, what doomed them was pricing too low in a way that made it impossible to create higher tiers of service, and, perhaps most importantly, using AWS for everything. AWS bills monthly, so if in fact they were running a $35k/mo bill there, a HUGE refactor was passed by. But then again, startups don't hire sysadmins anymore.

Do you think they were better off by having their own servers ? (Honest question we use AWS and Rackspace, and we feel the pain of Monthly bills as well).

Yes, when you have a large amount of storage, it is well worth doing it yourself. The cost of redundant storage devices with replication ends up being paid for in like 3 months of S3 bills.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#118

Post by kyro »

enjo wrote: post #47
martingordon wrote: post #28

> They spent too much time on the product and not enough time on growth and distribution. The first pitch deck they put together for investors was mediocre. They began marketing too late. They failed to effectively position themselves against giants like Apple and Google, who offer fairly robust — and mostly free — Everpix alternatives. People on HN crap all over MBAs, but these are the types of problems many of them…

The anti-education bias of HN simply fascinates me.

But code-slingers are world-changers.

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#119

Post by jfb »

Glyptodon wrote: post #86
crapshoot101 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, explain? Why should VC's fund something they don't think will make enough money? That seems to be a sense of entitlement - clearly, paid users were not enough to support this product on its own (which by all accounts, is a shame).

I think his implication was that paid users would have been enough to support it in the long run if the goal of investment were a stable business with some amount of yearly profits rather than a VC jackpot valuation exit.

But isn't that more the role of traditional sources of capital (banks, &c.) than a SV VC?

Re: Everpix was great. This is how it died

#120

Post by angersock »

crapshoot101 wrote: post #75
angersock wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: "The reaction was positive for you as a team but weak in terms of whether a $B business could be built." Wow, fuck these guys. It seems like a lot of good ideas are getting left on the cutting-room floor because people are holding out for the next giant thing. I hope the crowdfunding thing is enough to help unlock capital for things like this. (j/k crowdfunded equity is going to be a shitshow) EDIT:…

Wait, explain? Why should VC's fund something they don't think will make enough money? That seems to be a sense of entitlement - clearly, paid users were not enough to support this product on its own (which by all accounts, is a shame).

Individually, sure, it makes sense, but the fact remains that the emergent behavior of the system seems to be the ossification of capital.
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