sameer_sundresh

There's two levels to the scale problem: (a) sufficient scale for a successful small business, and (b) sufficient scale to repay a whole VC fund, with interest. VCs agreed that (a) was achievable, but they really need (b) and didn't see that with us.

Tools for private photo collections are important, but don't have the same sort of explosive viral growth curve of, say, a public social network. Even private social networks have a more difficult time scaling up quickly compared to the more open but less privacy-respecting alternatives.

The totals are all over 2+ years, not per year.

Poor choice of photo, perhaps. This wasn't a posed photo originally intended for the article. We were just smiling to look good for the camera.

I don't know why the article list salaries, payroll and personnel costs as separate numbers like that. Payroll includes salaries, and personnel costs includes payroll.

Your second paragraph exactly describes Everpix's computational needs: bursty with no use for local persistent storage.

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.

When you go down the VC path, they expect hypergrowth; certain doors are opened and others are closed. Personally, next time around I minimize dependence on funding.

I know what you mean, SF is too expensive. But it's basically impossible to relocate a team of 7 who already have various different ties to a given area.

That's right. AWS infrastructures costs were already being covered by subscription income. We also had prototypes ready to flesh out to reduce per-user costs as we scale up, but were not at that point yet.

Essentially part-time specialist employees. Hiring them full-time would have cost a lot more.

We're sending out emails in batches. We will also be in touch about refunds and downloads.

Definitely. For Everpix, sharing to email is 25x as popular as sharing to Facebook.

T-Mobile's plans are all unlimited talk and text now. The only difference is the amount of high-speed data (after which you still get EDGE data access).

It's pretty common to buy things for friends and family, in the hopes of improving the quality of their lives and the quality and amount of time you can spend with them (this doesn't always work out as planned).

It's also pretty common to not just buy tangible objects directly for yourself, but to buy the sort of community you want to live in. Endowing museums, universities and hospitals, sponsoring the artists and politicians that suit your tastes (and not just your business interests), etc.

Thanks, I'll have to try that out. So far, I haven't had great experiences accessing my Android devices from my Linux laptop.

That said, your workflow isn't representative of most users, if only for the fact that most users don't really have a workflow per se, they just do whatever's easiest at the moment. People have photos all over the place (mobile devices, multiple computers/drives, social networks, email, etc.), and Everpix pulls them together into one unified collection.

From our research at Everpix, most photos taken today are on mobile phones, and most people very rarely connect their phones to their computers. So you really need a solution that starts on the mobile device, and cloud services work the best for that.

Digital hoarding isn't just backing up your family photos; it's compulsively finding, downloading and storing all sorts of content that you have no real use for (movies, music, TV shows, books, software, etc. -- usually in violation of copyright).

Most people enjoy commemorating a special moment with a photo, and being able to easily relive that memory a few years later. Smart digital technology makes this cheap and easy. Sure, having the camera out all the time is compulsive. Going through and manually editing, tagging and deleting photos is compulsive too. Most people do neither, but they still want to keep their photo memories safe.

No, that's not true. It only gives us the rights to (a) display your photos to you and those with whom you share them, (b) auto-organize your photos for you, and (c) delete photos stored on our serivce (when you click delete photo or delete source or delete your account).

We can't (and don't want to) use your photos commercially, browse through your photos, distribute them to people you haven't authorized to see them, turn them into ads, etc. And we've never had any sort of government request to access an account.

That's correct. It's legalese for an almost tautological statement: "we are allowed to do what you tell us to do with your photos." We take privacy seriously.

I can't help you with Flickr, but the tools the author mentions in the article (Dropbox for backup file storage and Everpix for auto-organization/exploration/mobile access/selective sharing) can handle 100,000 photos, no problem. Personal bias: I pay for Dropbox and work at Everpix.