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Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

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Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

#131
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.

Unless all the automation is owned by a monopoly.

Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

#132
post #67

Earlier 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 ).…

The break even point is about 6 months for the light instances and a bit more for the medium ones.

Actually I ran the numbers for some of our (higher end ec2 instances). And some of them you break even in 6 weeks

Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

#133

Could Everpix have been run by a very small team at the end, rather than shut down? It looks like it was near adding a net 1,000 subscribers per month. Also, wouldn't it have been possible - with the understood pain points - to substantially reduce costs by moving off of AWS? Trading the ease of AWS for the critical cash for operations.

Buried beneath a stack of preferences it makes little sense for founders to make any sacrifices to save the company (i.e. not take a salary for a while) since all money will go to investors first.

Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

#134
post #96
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am intimately familiar with high-level metrics at software businesses in many locales other than Silicon Valley, and direct cost of employees is the largest expense at all of them. (Not true generally, since marketing budgets get arbitrarily high at some firms, but true of all dozen or so that I have direct experience with.) It can easily range to 80%+. Also, the imputed salaries being paid here are very much not G…

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.

Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

#135
post #97

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…

I do worry about that.

I also worry about centralization (of both government and corporate power) which get at the primary political problem to be dealt with in my opinion: how to mitigate the sociopathic element.

My best answer, at this point, is to break large states up into lots of small states, spreading the sociopathic ruling classes broadly and making it difficult for corporate interests to completely dominate a given political unit.

Within a given smaller and sovereign political unit, I hope that decisions will be made that encourage full, useful employment (since there is less room for both social services shenanigans as well as corporate indifference in a compressed society.)

Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

#136

$30K/month and ~100 servers seems like a huge waste. I'm in the business of managing similar services. I handle, not photos, but video streams. My work is for one of the largest companies in the world (Fortune-5) and I deal with things like superbowl traffic spikes, etc... Everything is handled in house but for spiky loads, we look to things like Akami. I realize managing at Fortune-5 is different than 100% oursourci…

Note that they were apparently doing very fancy image processing, not just pushing bytes; that does make things more difficult/expensive.

Yes, I took that into account in mulling things over. We do very similar stuff with video streams (post processing) before pushing to Akami. We also use SAN backed storage and Cisco CSM load balancers. All of our equipment is in the US and we use VMWare for everything. I know little about AWS and their virtualization technology but where I work, it would appear we pay a little bit more of a premium for VPS nodes if I assume Amazon rolls their own - the $30K just seems outrageous in this regard. And to top things off, we don't host just one web site; we have a myraid of applications spanning our data centers to deal with all sorts of stuff (many product lines each with their own web site with streaming, flash, user accounts, etc...)

Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

#137
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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 AWS and Cloud systems when starting up, especially to keep CapEx down, but only to a certain point, you still have to manage systems (servers), security and storage/mount-points etc, so why not take the time to learn how to do it yourself and save a lot of money? Why not get an experienced DevOps instead of pure Developer?

And this company was already paying $300k to consultants, why not use a consultant or outside company to setup/manage their own hardware and service contracts as well? It would still be less than $30k and would still scale a lot better.

Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

#138
post #102

I did some spreadsheet-ing to look at the "profitability" of their userbase. If the business were sustainable, then Monthly Recurring Revenue [1] would be higher than the cost to service the customers [2]. If not, then growing the userbase just increases total monthly losses (assuming a steady freemium conversion rate). In Everpix's case, it appears they were growing unsustainably. Their data shows that all the way u…

Your analysis is certainly logical, but with all due respect relies on the faulty assumption that Everpix's infrastructure, responsible for almost all of variable costs, was somehow "frozen".

The reason we were getting closer and closer to being positive on variable costs (looking at revenues on a sales recognition basis, since from the sales volume perspective, things were already positive in the last few months) is, yes, improved monetization, but more importantly AWS optimizations. We had squeezed a lot out of S3, then EC2 and our last step, the one we were working on before shutting down, was RDS where there was a ton of room. Looking at our trajectory, I'm pretty confident we would have been positive even on AWS (but unlikely much). You can even compound that with AWS discounts which apparently even startups can get looking at other comments in this thread.

To re-iterate, you would not build a freemium business like Everpix, with intense computing and storage requirements, at scale on AWS. Large photo platforms have their own storage and servers. Everpix was never intended to grow out of AWS either and you know you can cut your infrastructure costs to at least half. That was the plan post Series A. Most CTO / CEOs of large established photo companies I talked to said they were doing much better than this 1/2X, so that's conservative (I've been told ranges of 3-8X in savings vs S3 for instance).

Anyway, Everpix was bringing about $6 revenue / user / year IIRC, which is the part that really matters considering the denominator, infrastructure costs, is something you know you can really bring down. One relevant reference point is 500px for instance which is doing about $1 revenue / user / year [1]. I would be surprised if they were growing "sustainably" too ;)

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/07/500px-scores-8-8m-series-a-....

Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

#139

So 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…

Thanks for sharing. This is a truly inspirational insight. As a novice startup wannabe, I have this idea that whatever imperfection I start off with, I can just tidy up when and if I get huge. But from a look at Everpix, I can see this is probably a fatal approach. You've got to be scalable from the start. Do you agree?

Re: Uncensored Everpix metrics, financials and slides

#140
post #137

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…

Have you tried running the equivalent of S3 using GlusterFS? Because I've seen mixed results with Gluster in practice and am not sure I'd feel comfortable going that route. Also, which one of their staff would have had to learn how to scale that? How many mistakes would they have made along the way and how much would that have cost them?
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