In Memoriam Everpix 

Why a product is the sum of it’s parts and why a little detail might have influenced it’s success

In case you’re the last one in the tech world who hasn’t heard about it Everpix is shutting down it’s service:

It is with a heavy heart we announce that Everpix will be shutting down in the coming weeks.

You don’t know what Everpix was? Here you go:

Everpix solves your photo mess. Enjoy your life photo collection effortlessly—everything in one place, automatically organized, and ready to be rediscovered. Everpix dusts off your memories and lets you see them in a brand new light.

The Right Beginning

As a long time fan I signed up for Everpix end of February 2013 and started paying in March. To me it seemed to exactly fit what I was looking for in a photo storage service. It just grabbed all my photos from everywhere—automatically and without effort—and put them somewhere save. Whenever I needed to show a photo or event I could open the app on my iPhone or iPad and show it directly or send it to Apple TV. I loved it.

The Wrong Direction

Just a little after I started my trial, Everpix introduced a free tier for storing the last year of your photos:

We are very excited to announce Everpix Free, a free version of Everpix that keeps all your photos from the past 12 months, forever! It’s not just the last 1,000 shots or a couple gigabytes—instead ALL the photos you took within the last year are synced to the cloud. Those memories are with you, anytime, anywhere.

I could feel their itch back then and you can only imagine VC’s pressuring them into offering a free version, so they could grow faster. Until then you had a trial system. Try it for 30 days and then you decide. As I almost knew immediately I would sign up anyways I did it when they offered this:

We are phasing out our the 30-day trial system. This means your account will be converted to Everpix Free—keeping all photos from the past 12 months. If you are ready to subscribe, you can use the coupon EVERPIX40 to get the discounted price of $40/year when you first signed up. The coupon is good until Sunday, March 10, 2013 on qualified accounts.

A No Value Proposition

Why do I think it went wrong in terms of user growth? I think they chose the wrong business model because they focused on the wrong metric. To experience the full value proposition of Everpix you need to have all your devices of all people in your home and those old photo backups in Everpix, which you couldn’t do with just having your last year. Their free tier was basically competing with iCloud which is more convenient for my Mom than Everpix. No installs and it just works. So why offer it?

It’s Not a Wine Tasting

If you have a paid service that roughly costs $50 per year you simply don’t have user growth like Instagram. So the thinking goes, you can only grow users by offering a free tier so they get a taste of your awesome product without paying. (And very handily we get some vanity numbers for our reporting.) This usually would work, if you didn’t offer something that you can only experience in full. You can try a little bit of a bottle of wine and get the full experience, you can’t try a little bit of a car. You have to take it for a ride on a trial.

Free As In Beer

Freemium is usually successful if you start with a free product which is 100% of your value proposition and the premium subscription just adds valuable features for a smaller percentage of your users. With Dropbox for instance you get the full experience just with more storage.

No Time

Many people are saying they were too slow to launch and didn’t focus on acquiring users. That might be right, but if you look at the price tag of $2.3 Million I think there are way worse outcomes for this kind of money and I would have loved a VC to spend some more money to actually grow the user base until they are profitable. I guess most financial projections and models didn’t show the kind of return most of those ad-based shit products are supposedly making.