#everpix

Flickr Probably Bought Everpix

Flickr’s Magic View (on the web) reminds me of something. Part of the new camera roll, Magic View organizes your photos by subject: animals, people, architecture and so on. These categories are sub-divided. Dogs, cats, beverages, towers etc.

It’s a lot like Everpix. Add that to the new Flickr uploaded, which sucks images from various apps and weeds out the duplicates, and it’s a fair guess that…

It is with a heavy heart we announce that Everpix will be shutting down in the coming weeks.

We started this company two years ago with the goals of solving the photo mess and designing better ways for people to enjoy their memories. We are very proud of the work we've done—from the cutting-edge semantic analysis and syncing technology, right down to every pixel on our website and mobile apps.

We are grateful to our investors for giving us the opportunity to grow this project. But more importantly, we are so very thankful to the folks who supported us with subscriptions and feedback. You guys are the best.

It's frustrating (to say the least) that we cannot continue to work on Everpix. We were unable to secure sufficient funding in order to properly scale the business, and our endeavors to find a new home for Everpix did not come to pass. At this point, we have no other options but to discontinue the service.

We will email everyone soon in regards to refunds and exporting photos from Everpix—your memories are very important to us, and you can rest assured everyone on the team is working hard to ensure a simple and painless process.

Please read this document which explains the situation in more detail. Please don’t hesitate to reach out with questions or thoughts. Email us at [email protected] or tweet @everpix.

Thank you, again. We'll miss you.

The Everpix Team

Key Points

Everpix has switched to read-only mode and will continue to operate until December 15th, 2013.

Your data is safe, and we will not sell or transfer any of your photos or personal information to anyone else, period.

We will email instructions to all Everpix users on how to download their photos.

We will refund every subscriber. This process will take some time and we will email everyone in the next few weeks with more information.

Thank you everyone. We will miss you.

Bill Gates once said that "It's fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure" and there's a startup I read about recently that is not only heeding the lessons for themselves, but also opening up to the world so we can understand how to (hopefully) avoid the same fate.

Everpix, a photo startup based out of SF that received US$1.8M in funding shut it's doors in December.  Despite having had over 6,800 paying customers, a magnificent product, a patent pending tech and a solid team: they didn't cut the mustard.

Everpix Quick Breakdown:

Ex-Apple founders with 6 FTEs

55,000 total signups and 6,800 paid users

Freemium model of $4.99/month or $49/year

Free-to-paid conversion rate of 13%

MAU/signups of 60%

WAU/signups of 50%

Although they shutdown, they did leave a legacy in the form "knowledge" thanks to their recent publishing of docs that dated right back to their incorporation, on GitHub. The documentation was comprehensive, including Investor Reports, surveys, metrics, KPIs, financial breakdowns, roadmaps and more. 

I have to be honest. The first time I saw everything, I did ask myself how it was possible that such a well organized, structured and analytical startup could fail. But the more I dug, the more I could see that they were possibly starting to fall into the "a great tech doesn't mean a great business" pot hole, not to mention starting to really rack up some hefty expenses. 

However, it is not fair to say they were completely destined for doom initially. They understood a lot of stuff that arguably many startups fail to recognize before it's too late. The team understood the importance of metics such as user retention, downloads, active users and referrals not to mention their success in customer surveying and communication. They achieved to some extent pretty solid metrics and everything was measured with KPIs. However, their massive surges in free users after unexpected PR simply ate up their resources, or should I say demolished them. This reminded me of the importance of staying stealth until you are ready and also assessing (and limiting) free user capacity. After all, users are good. But if they take and don't give (at least in some way), they kinda suck. 

Their passion for designing something so cutting edge, coupled with their resource eating free users proved to be their Achilles heal. Well, from my humble opinion anyway. Others who have completed an Everpix post-mortem were a little more brutal, arguing that they were destined to fail from the beginning because their revenue model was flawed, while others argue the monetized too early (huh? I hear you say). Just look at SnapChat, another photo sharing startup. Despite having zero revenue,  managed to secure a pretty impressive $US60M series A, but that is a story for next time. 

The key takes aways I got from analyzing the Everpix story were:

If you can't achieve enough growth, monetization won't save you 

It is now a hell of a lot harder to hammer down series A funding than a few years ago (blog about this coming soon)

Even with solid metrics, if you focus to much of dev and not enough on marketing and sales, you can lose focus of where you need to get to

Stay stealth until you can handle users, but don't go too far past your MVP

Don't monetize too early, but don't monetize too late (if you don't get it, don't worry neither do I, ask the VCs: they will each tell you a different story)

And finally: Life can be a bitch, but showing how well you tried can make you a winner.