Everpix

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

~ the last words ~

the first time i heard of everpix was that verge post-mortem in november 2013. i was on picasa for local photo browsing and flickr for public uploads at the time, then dropbox camera uploads once the iphone i owned in 2013 started overrunning its local storage. the everpix invite window in 2011 and its public launch in may 2012 never crossed my rss feeds in ankara. by the time i clicked through casey newton's piece, the service was already switching its apps to read-only.

the product itself was small and tightly designed. you installed the iphone or mac app or connected your facebook and instagram accounts, and everpix ingested every photo you had ever taken across those sources. it deduplicated and stitched them into a single scrollable timeline that surfaced older shots on their anniversaries with a daily flashback email. that email was the thing users loved most and the thing the company almost never talked about in its own marketing.

the operating cost of that pitch was the problem. every photo ingested had to be stored on amazon s3 and processed through an ec2 pipeline for thumbnailing and computer-vision tagging. the bill grew linearly with the users, and even paying users at forty-nine dollars a year did not clear the per-user cost by much. free users were pure loss. the founders knew this. the plan was always to raise a series a on the strength of the retention numbers and use that money to build a real business model on top. the series a did not close.

~ the record ~

~ the pitch ~

pierre-olivier latour and kevin quennesson had both worked on aperture inside apple. they left in 2011 to build the personal-archive photo tool they wanted for themselves, incorporated as strat.io. the company was renamed everpix as it moved from private beta to public in may 2012. the funding path started with a five-hundred-thousand-dollar seed from 500 startups and grew to about two point three million dollars once index ventures came in.

the pitch to investors was that the pain of managing a lifetime of digital photos was going to get worse as smartphone cameras made everyone shoot ten times more. someone had to build the calm archive that lived on top of dropbox and flickr without asking you to file anything by hand. everpix did that job well enough that its user reviews became one of the founders' pitching assets, along with a retention curve that was more like a subscription service than a photo utility.

~ the numbers ~

by the time the company started pitching for a series a in the summer of 2013, everpix had roughly fifty-five thousand registered users. about six thousand eight hundred of those were paying customers on the forty-nine dollar annual plan. that produced somewhere around three hundred thirty thousand dollars in annualized revenue. the operating burn was much higher than that. the team was six people and the aws bill for the next quarter was climbing toward thirty-five thousand dollars a month.

the founders pitched more than a dozen venture firms. no lead investor emerged. some passed on the deal because photo apps had already been repriced to zero by google and yahoo, which were both offering unlimited backup for free. others passed because the ratio of paying to non-paying users looked too weak to sustain the model without aggressive conversion work. by the last week of october 2013 the company had six weeks of runway left.

~ the long tail ~

the november 5 2013 announcement gave users a data-export window through 15 december 2013. the apps went read-only immediately. casey newton at the verge ran the definitive account the same day and the post kept getting linked back in vc thread after vc thread for years. everpix became one of those startup names that founders learn from without ever having used the product, which is exactly what happened to me a decade later while writing this.

latour and quennesson both moved on to other jobs at other companies. google photos launched a year and a half later with the same daily-flashback flavor of surprise-your-past-self ux, running on a much bigger balance sheet. that is where the calm-photo-archive category lived from then on. everpix is the small clean version of it that existed for eighteen months and could not carry the storage cost of its own good taste.

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