The elephant in the room that nobody is talking about here is
they gave away too much. They could have adjusted their freemium model. Why not contact people using a lot of resources ? Let them know the best way to keep the services up at the current clip is for them to start paying.
Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides
121–130 of 164 posts
Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides
#122Now do you still believe in "learning by failure"?
Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides
#123What 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.
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?
You could move some of the pics to your own server, leaving AWS to handle growth in storage only. The raw costs could be very significant, though most likely you would need another person to create that system make it fast, which in SF probably means losing all the gains at that scale.
Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides
#124Earlier 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.
Ideally, but who says things will be automated in that order?
The crazy thing is that when people are suffering, there is work to be done. If the 30%+ unemployed in that scenario could reorganize themselves into servicing each others needs, they would surely want to do that.
Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides
#125Thank you for this. Reading the VC letters was just so amazingly refreshing I can't begin to tell you. I love how they said "no" in almost all the same ways. I'd really like to know the two that were so standup, that they wouldn't fund a competitor or someone who could, eventually, be a competitor. In all honesty, those are the types of funds you want backing you. They've bought your vision and they're not going to d…
It's not uncommon for VCs to have policies of not funding competitive startups, it's in their own interests as well as the startups.
If a VC has funded two competitors it means the startups become reluctant to share information with the VC, the founders of the first startup become unhappy with the VC and follow-on rounds become very messy and cause bad politics.
Certainly it happens (in some cases due to pivots, etc.) but I imagine it's something that most funds would prefer to avoid.
Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides
#126So 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…
Or simply take those $30k and get some colocation and hardware - get the monthly operational costs down to sub-$10k easily.
It strikes me every time how much money people sink down on Amazon(AWS) when they can do it themselves for a lot less. The usual counter-argument is "but we didn't have money for a sysop", well yeah - your devs/devops needs to manage the AWS system as well, it's not much harder to manage real hardware / servers and network.
Another post that striked me was $300k in consultants, thats more than 3 years of full-time employees - what did they do? Was it worth it?
Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides
#127So 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…
[Everpix founder here] Interesting idea and no we didn't try negotiating with Amazon. Not sure how much room there is here? However it's important to keep in mind in a situation like this, and at this scale of burn rate, you're not looking for a solution to shave off a few thousands $ left and right, which is kicking the can down the road (if even), but for a long term solution. The key problem here is that I don't t…
Yep totally understand. I meant this more as a general exercise perhaps more applicable to bootstrappers or even seed funded folks who had a single large cost that wasn't currently scaling.
Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides
#128So 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 op…
Kudos to Amazon then and thanks for sharing.
Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides
#129So 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…
Or simply take those $30k and get some colocation and hardware - get the monthly operational costs down to sub-$10k easily. It strikes me every time how much money people sink down on Amazon(AWS) when they can do it themselves for a lot less. The usual counter-argument is "but we didn't have money for a sysop", well yeah - your devs/devops needs to manage the AWS system as well, it's not much harder to manage real ha…
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 comfortable in my ability to keep a server running, but I've never maintained a SAN (is that what I would need to replace S3?) and wouldn't trust myself to provide the level of resilience that Amazon is able to provide.
Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides
#130So 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 op…
I can vouch for this with Rackspace as well. Our account is nowhere near $30k per month, but we do pay the $100/month managed service fee. I've had multiple conversations in regards to new services and infrastructure changes that might save us money.
It's always good to approach any of your business-critical vendors and service providers to discuss pricing. You might find that they are more than willing to negotiate.