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Everpix November 2012 Report

High Level

  • Defined PR plans for December 2012 / Q1 2013 and hired PR consultant
  • Starting press tour for first milestone of December 18th
  • Ran an extensive Cyber Monday campaign to test subscription price elasticity
  • Wrapping up Windows Uploader beta testing

Users and Subscriptions

We had more new signups this month (+1,300) than the previous month. This is likely due to the fact we started doing some PR although limited to French websites (more below). US user growth is still organic at this point.

Our number of subscribers is now around 750 and this month’s subscription income is $7,244.29, the majority of it coming from our Cyber Monday campaign (more below). As usual, keep in mind yearly subscription are booked fully at the time of purchase i.e. not tracked as $40 / 12 each month.

Even with more users and photos coming in, infrastructure costs remained stable at $8,864.

Cyber Monday Campaign

The current Everpix subscription pricing ($5 / month or $40 / year) was originally set from our estimated variable costs and target margins, but we never really tested price elasticity. We decided to use Cyber Monday as an opportunity for a blind subscription price testing. During a 24 hours window only, we randomly offered different discounts to Everpix users currently in Trial or Grace period, but also to our very old users from Everpix Beta who decided not to transfer to Everpix 1.0 back in September.

Users in Trial or Grace period:

  • Subjects who were sent the email: 2,666
  • Subjects who received the email: 2,655
  • Subjects who opened email: 1,057 (39.81% of receivers)
  • Subjects who visited site: 150 (5.65% of receivers)
  • Subjects who subscribed: 123 (4.63% of receivers)

Old users from Everpix Beta:

  • Subjects who were sent the email: 15,748
  • Subjects who received the email: 15,271
  • Subjects who opened email: 4,690 (30.71% of receivers)
  • Subjects who visited site: 75 (0.49% of receivers)
  • Subjects who subscribed: 56 (0.37% of receivers)

Distribution of the 179 new subscribers:

  • 52 from $14 offer: 29.1%
  • 38 from $19 offer: 21.2%
  • 47 from $24 offer: 26.3%
  • 42 from $29 offer: 23.5%

Unfortunately, we didn’t test the $34 price point but the conclusion from this limited sample set is that there appears to be no real difference in demand when we lower the subscription price. For all we know, the subscription ratios would have been the same at $40, $45 or even $50. However, this conclusion might change when we switch from an early adopters crowd to a more mass market one.

Our explanation for the low subscription rate of our old Beta users is that it’s a combination of:

  • them being fairly volatile and with low retention anyway (e.g. coming from Tech Crunch and always trying the latest),
  • general lack of interest about Everpix (if they haven’t come back in the past months, why would they now),
  • the requirement to re-create an account,
  • and last but not least the fact we went from a free product to a paid product, and not freemium, which may turn off a number of them.

Note that this campaign was put together to test pricing and nothing else i.e. not acquire new users or be profitable. As a matter of fact, these new “subsidized” subscribers will likely incur a net loss of $1,000 to $2,000 over a year (depending on how many photos they import).

Ad-Based User Acquisition Testing

We also ran some test campaigns on Facebook and Google Ads for a few hundred dollars to get an idea of how much it would cost to acquire users this way:

  • With absolutely unoptimized messaging and graphics, it seems to cost $1.40-$1.60 to “buy” a visit to www.everpix.com.
  • Then we have a conversion problem on our landing page and / or an ad targeting problem as few of these visits resulted in a signup, which brings the cost of “buying” a sign-up to $30-$50 (and then not all sign-ups turn into subscriptions of course).

Clearly, user acquisition through ads is not a viable option until we have optimized our funnels.

PR Plans

In parallel to wrapping up PR firms interviews and finalizing our PR plans, we did home-made PR to reach out to some popular French Mac websites. This limited effort resulted in nice coverage (see it at https://angel.co/everpix#press) and an influx of French users to Everpix.

Considering the timing (end of year, CES, upcoming Series A), we decided to divide our “real” PR strategy in 2 phases:

Phase 1: Introducing Everpix (November 26 - December 31)

  • Synopsis: Everpix, a San Francisco-based startup, spent the last few months quietly building the best photo product on the web, marrying design, science and quality to take the pain out of managing years and gigabytes of photos that are waiting to be enjoyed again.
  • Goals:
    • Generate quality coverage amongst select media to net critical mass of users for our takeoff stage
    • Build validation amongst select media and analysts
    • Develop inertia for Phase 2 outreach
    • Establish ‘conversation starters’ for Series A meetings
  • Outside help: PR contractor with deep industry contacts
  • New features:
    • Universal iOS app for iPhone and iPad
    • Geofencing-based for camera roll syncing (we might be the first doing that)
    • Windows Uploader
    • Website supported on both desktop and mobile
  • Embargo Lift: December 18th

Phase 2: Telling the World (January 1st - Q2 2013)

  • Synopsis: Following their launch last year, Everpix has kept its promise of reinventing the way we experience our photo collections.
  • Goals:
    • Build upon momentum of Phase 1 coverage to secure mindshare for long-lead and regional/international coverage
    • Improve messaging and storytelling
    • Increase focus on consumer press, photography press, regional press
    • Promote Everpix milestones to position for fundraising
    • Secure tangible leads for Series A
  • Outside help: PR firm with broad outreach - Allison Partners (http://www.allisonpr.com/) or MSR (http://www.msrcommunications.com/)
  • New features (tentative):
    • Semantic tagging exposed
    • Final similar photo exploration on web and iOS
    • Highlights view on web
  • Embargo Lift: TBD

Key Performance Indicators

No improvements yet as we just started to work on our out of box experience, messaging and conversion funnels. Because of our subscription model, there’s also a up to a 30 days latency. December KPIs should be more interesting.

Important notes about this month’s KPIs:

  • We decided to replace bounce rate on product page on www.everpix.com by the visit-to-invite ratio which is more meaningful - unfortunately, we cannot compute it retroactively as we don’t have the required data.
  • We had to revise the Growth of Subscribers metric as it was incorrect the previous months due to a database formula error.

Windows Uploader Reaching 1.0

After fixing a number of issues and having some external users test it, we are on track to release the 1.0 version of our Windows Uploader in time for phase 1 of our PR.