- Company — Everpix
- Sector — Consumer photo storage / SaaS
- Founded / Died — 2011 / 2013
- Lifespan — ~2 years
- Capital raised — $2.3M from angels and seed VCs, per the company's own disclosure (Everpix-Intelligence, GitHub)
- Peak scale — ~55,000 registered users; ~7,000 paying subscribers; ~$40,000/month in subscription revenue in its final quarter; ~400 million photos imported. These are self-disclosed but unusually credible, because the company published its raw financials and analytics.
- What it built — A cloud photo service that automatically ingested a user's entire photo library and surfaced the good pictures using early computer-vision ranking. It was widely regarded as the best product in its category.
- Stated cause of death — The founders said plainly that they "didn't succeed in raising our Series A in the highly competitive VC funding market," and that revenue covered variable costs but not fixed costs (Everpix-Intelligence; TechCrunch, 5 Nov 2013).
- Evidenced cause — Stated and evidenced causes broadly agree, but the emphasis differs. The published numbers show a company that spent two years and most of its capital on engineering before turning on monetisation, then found that a $49/year subscription against heavy storage costs needed enormous scale to work — in a category Google and Apple were about to make free. The failed Series A was the proximate event; marginal unit economics were the condition. Founder Pierre-Olivier Latour said the team had been "focused on developing the product, not on fundraising or the business."
- Warning signs visible earlier — Monetisation was switched on only in early 2013, roughly eighteen months in. Infrastructure costs scaled with photos stored rather than with revenue. Google Photos' predecessor features and Apple's iCloud Photo Library were both visibly coming. The team had no dedicated business or fundraising lead at any point.
- Money outcome — Investors lost the $2.3M. Employees were let go; the founders wrote that they could not make payroll past November 2013. No acquirer emerged. Users' photos were made downloadable for a grace period, which cost money the company did not have and which the founders did anyway.
- Post-mortem quality — Exceptional, and arguably the genre's most valuable document. Rather than an essay, the team published actual metrics, financial model, cohort data and board materials to a public GitHub repository. Not self-serving: the numbers embarrass the founders in several places.
- Transferable lesson — Publishing your numbers is the highest-integrity form of post-mortem, and almost nobody does it. Substantively: in consumer subscription, delaying monetisation until you have a beautiful product means you discover your conversion rate at the exact moment you need it to raise.
- Sources — Everpix-Intelligence (GitHub) · TechCrunch · VentureBeat
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