141–150 of 268 posts
I cannot help but wonder if this is why my startup Pivotal ( http://pivotal.ws ) got a rejection letter from YC last night.
Hope this isn't too harsh, but that landing page needs work. Is there anyway you could turn what's in that video into a compelling landing page? I'm not sure where you're at with testing or usability, but I can't imagine that landing page generating many signups.
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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.
I think the relevant standard should be: focus on the core of your business, outsource everything else. If you are a photo backup company, storage is (or at least should be) part of your core. It seems like they tried to take the heroku route, repackage aws services with premium software and sell it for a premium. But forgot to charge the premium end user price.
> 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…
You don't need an MBA to solve those problems. It's a problem with prioritization, not lack of ability.
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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).
s3 seems great for scaling out storage, but I'm sure there are gotchas. I work in a very different area, but my experience with ec2 are you should drop what you're doing and immediately price out leaving. Roughly: for big hadoop tasks, ec2 is a horrid environment. The boxes are slow, flaky, and shitty; the network is slow and super shitty; and everything about the experience is ass. Oh, and the emr admins are asshole…
This was over 5 years ago. I am sure things would be even cheaper now.
I can't help but wonder if that safety net feeling is part of what doomed Everpix. If they had believed they were incredibly lucky to land $1.8M and that they had to build the whole business with that (rather than having a belief that more funding awaited whenever they needed it), would it have forced a different set of decisions to be made that would have driven revenue and growth, and ultimately success, instead?
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.
"Everpix sponsored the DF RSS feed twice this year, which is how they first came to my attention. ... Really a shame to see them close."
There's the problem. They spent $16K on Daring Fireball sponsorship instead of doing basic research to discover where they should actually be targeting their marketing efforts.
Your best idea for acquiring more users is to sponsor one of the most expensive RSS feeds in the world? Sponsoring DF is typically what companies do when their accountant says "you need to get rid of some cash, stat."
If Everpix hadn't yet found a path to sustainability, doing something like sponsoring Daring Fireball as a tactic to acquire more users is a good indicator of some very poor business decisions.
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If you just use EC2, no EBS, and reserved pricing then AWS is just as cheap as other providers if not cheaper. It is all the nice features that make it expensive. S3 is pretty damn cheap too. Of course, raw hosting costs are only part of the calculation. You have to include sysadmin time and salary.
You can't really compare EC2 sans EBS to something like a dedicated server. Most apps need permanently available storage. Of course, if you don't need permanent storage (and your needs are bursty) than using EC2 is probably a huge win.
Wow. What an interesting example of what's wrong with the venture capital model. A great product dies because the founders "spent too much time on the product". I hope a 9th inning miracle saves the day. If not, thanks for the great product.
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:…
No... it absolutely doesn't. But this particular photobucket wasn't even a $1 business. It was a NEGATIVE business.
My hunch is that Everpix's $35,000/mo AWS bill could have been significantly less if they went with their own dedicated servers. When I ran my music start-up, really smart people would look at me funny when I'd tell them it is cheaper than AWS for us to get a couple of high-power dedicated servers with unmetered 100mbps bandwidth. We were pushing over 100tb per month and paying under $3,000/mo, including the cost for…
My hunch is that Everpix's $35,000/mo AWS bill could have been significantly less if they went with their own dedicated servers. When I ran my music start-up, really smart people would look at me funny when I'd tell them it is cheaper than AWS for us to get a couple of high-power dedicated servers with unmetered 100mbps bandwidth. We were pushing over 100tb per month and paying under $3,000/mo, including the cost for…
i was pushing 100 T / month with one server 1Gbit unmetered at 250$ / mo , also music site.
Also, most of our cost was for the hardware(not the bandwidth). We went with top-notch storage with RAID and a bunch of ram. In hindsight, we should have bought the hardware for one-time fee but didn't for cash flow reasons.