- Significant science progress
- New Explore view exposes more of the underlying Everpix science to users
- Daring Fireball sponsorship was a success
- Another 9M net photos added (i.e. taking into account deleted photos from accounts leaving trial)
We’re starting to see some traction: the number of signups in February doubled (3,800) compared to the previous couple months and the number of subscribers has reached 1,500. Subscription rates are also remaining high.
Explore view
We introduced the Explore view which is the first time a general image understanding technology is put into the hands of general consumers. The Explore View finds in users whole collections photos according to automatically extracted high level semantic categories. Today, these categories are: "city", "nature", "people", "animal" and "food", and more are to come. The Explore view facilitates the discovery of sometimes forgotten memories and reconnects users to their photo collection in a serendipitous way.
The Explore View demonstrates how our image understanding technology is truly general in that it is able to learn various concepts without any major redesign.
With feedback, users can donate misclassified images to automatically train the system further. Every week, our system gets better at capturing the incredibly complex variety of real-world user photos.
How Does It Work?
[REDACTED]
On February 11th, we released an update to our iOS that incorporates a Walgreens destination when sharing photos (for US users only). It’s a really neat feature that nicely complements the fact that with Everpix you have all your photos in your pocket at all times. Select some photos, then order prints at your local Walgreens and pick them up within the hour (no upfront payment or credit card needed). You can read the official press release here: http://press.everpix.com/post/42866170777/everpix-adds-instant-high-quality-mobile-photo-printing
To ease adoption, Walgreens currently offers a 25% off coupon code to people using the feature. Everpix also receives 18% revenue share on the print orders (originally 15% but bumped to 18% for the first few months considering our help in testing their new API system).
We don’t expect any significant revenue from this partnership but it’s more to be seen as a validation of Everpix working with an established large company and help for future partnerships (which are going to be essential for user growth).
It seems the number of users who have tried the Walgreens feature is currently low, but we have actually barely promoted it to our own users and it’s a new concept too. We’ll have to wait a couple months before drawing conclusions.
For the week of February 18th, we bought the sponsorship for Daring Fireball, a very popular and very respected Mac / iOS blog by the influential John Gruber. His readership should be an ideal target for Everpix as it’s mostly Mac / iOS users, early adopters, who care about well designed and innovative software products. This is something we want wanted to try for a long time but had deferred until we were quite confident with the product as the sponsorship is quite expensive at $8,500.
Sponsoring a week of Daring Fireball gets you a blog post at the beginning of the week, written by us, and one at the very end written by John. He really was impressed and liked the direction of the Everpix as you can see here: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2013/02/22/everpix. Of course, his writing about a sponsor is never going to be neutral, but if you peruse the archives, you will notice it’s rarely this long and this enthusiastic. He also offered us for free the sponsorship of one of his podcasts.
The interesting thing with sponsoring this specific blog is that not you’re not only buying access to a very specific audience and visits to your website, but if done right, you’re putting yourself on the map as a lot of tech influencers read him (and also outside the Mac / iOS community).
It’s not possible to measure perfectly the effect of such a sponsorship but this is what we have estimated:
- Extra website unique visitors compared to a "normal" week: ~16,000
- Extra signups compared to a "normal" week (web + iOS): ~2,200
- Projected gross revenue assuming 10% subscription rate to subscribers (typical range is 10-18%): ~$8,800
In conclusion, this sponsorship was certainly quite more effective than previous Google and Facebook mini ad campaigns we had tried. It also brought a “quality” audience to Everpix who really appreciated the product as seen on Twitter and general email feedback.
Allison Partners organized in February press tours in San Francisco and New York, both of them mostly focused on tech / photography press. Journalist feedback during meetings was all positive and the coverage results will come early March. More press tours are planned in the short term to increase press exposure and start reaching out to lifestyle / consumer press.
We had again a large AWS infrastructure bill this month, close to $19,000, mostly because we had to over provision a number of servers in order to move data around and optimize performance.
After this heavy work, we are in a better position than we were before, but our infrastructure costs are still going to be quite higher than they should be. The reason is simply that we have long list of know optimizations to perform, but we have no engineer nor bandwidth to actually work on them. And the opportunity cost of diverting the focus of our only infrastructure engineer from actual product building is not worth the savings in the short term.
We have hired a part-time external contractor specialized in cloud infrastructure to help us address at least the “low-hanging fruits”.
At our current burn rate we expect to run out of cash late May instead of the initially planned mid-June. The current options on the table are:
- $500K-$1M Bridge Financing (currently discussing this option with Index Ventures)
- $4-5M Series A (ongoing since last month)
- Selling the company (almost since day 1 we always had on & off discussions with a number of industry players and we are getting more and more involved in them)
After a first pass of partner-level meetings with a handful of top-tier VCs, who in turn circled with their other partners, the common high-level feedback was that Everpix was genuinely an impressive product and team, but we need to prove we can grow out of niche market and attain significant revenue (ultimately to the scale of $100M / year).
This was however before our Phase 2 PR push and the introduction of Everpix Free, intended to broaden the input of our user acquisition funnel. Our current plan to is to improve our user acquisition thanks to the updated strategy, then get back to VC fundraising.