Everest

» see everest.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

In November 2011 Francis Pedraza had some mockups and no money. He was a year out of Cornell, working on an app about personal goals, and a friend of Peter Thiel caught sight of the designs over his shoulder in an airport. That look over a shoulder got him the meeting, and the meeting got him $300,000. It is the kind of origin story that only sounds plausible in the specific years it happened in.

The product launched quietly on iOS in December 2012 and came out of stealth on 14 February 2013 with a second round of $1.2 million behind it, money from Scott Belsky, Dave Blakely, Mark Attanasio and Jim Palotta. What it did was take a thing you said you wanted, learn to ski or finally see Patagonia, and cut it into steps small enough to actually start. Push notifications nudged you. You photographed each step as you cleared it. Other people watched you clear them.

The money was supposed to come from brands. Around twenty companies ran sponsored challenges inside the app, Codecademy and Airbnb and General Assembly and Quiksilver among them, which made Everest an ecommerce play rather than an advertising one. That was the theory. In practice the company raised $2.2 million across three rounds, went looking for $5 million more in late 2013, and did not get it.

By December 2014 there were 300,000 downloads, which is not nothing and was not enough. A rival habit app had reached single-digit millions in the same window. A second version of Everest leaned harder on photos and came out looking too much like Instagram to justify its own icon. On 18 December 2014 the company emailed its users: visit the site soon if you want to save your moments, because the servers are going offline.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the genre it belonged to ~

Everest arrived in the short window when a phone was going to fix your character. The app stores of 2012 and 2013 were thick with products that treated a human being as a backlog, and the pitch was always the same shape: your ambition is real, your follow-through is the bug, here is the patch. Everest did it more beautifully than most, with that mountain-in-a-circle mark and a lot of white space.

The flaw was structural. A goal app only works while you are failing at the goal, and the moment it works you have no reason to open it again. Churn is built into the premise.

~ where the money went ~

Unusually for a dead startup, Everest wound down with cash still in the bank, and what remained went back to the investors rather than into a last desperate pivot. Pedraza was 23 when he took Thiel's check and 25 when he handed money back. He went on to found Invisible Technologies, which is now worth a great deal more than Everest ever raised.

~ camo coveralls at the same address ~

everest.com today sells hunting apparel. Camo coveralls, ladies logo hats, that sort of thing. The domain outlived the app by more than a decade and gave no sign it had ever been anything else.

I have no distance to confess here beyond the obvious one. In 2013 I was an engineer in Turkey and this was a free iPhone app about self-improvement sold to Americans who already had the vocabulary for it. The honest reason I never touched it is not geography or language. It is that I have never once believed the problem was that my goals were insufficiently itemized.

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