- Hired a full-time and on-site marketing / user growth consultant
- Actively searching for PR firm to handle our “real launch”
- Everpix 1.1 looking good for our “real launch”
- Windows Uploader just sent to first batch of external testers
- KPIs are defined and tracking started as of November 1st
Not many new users this month (+700) but keep in mind growth is still organic as we have not done our PR push (very few people still know about us). In terms of early virality metrics, there were 300 virtual users added (i.e. recipients of Photo Mails who are not Everpix users yet).
We have almost 500 subscribed users now (80%+ on yearly subscriptions) out of about 4,000 eligible users. Subscriptions gross income for the past 2 months is as follow:
- $6,121.88 in September
- $6,351.95 in October
Again, keep in mind these numbers will not match what’s the Profit & Loss statement as our payment processor wires funds to our bank account on a daily basis but with a 1 week delay. Also these amounts do not take into account subscriptions through the iTunes Store which are negligible.
Our infrastructure costs for October were $8,438, so quite lower than for September as we are not running Everpix Beta anymore. We also discovered some wasted cloud storage space as well as opportunities for better provisioning of cloud machines, so infrastructure costs should continue to go down next month.
After 45 days of search using multiple recruiters and various online job boards for a great candidate to drive user growth & marketing at Everpix, reviewing a 100+ resumes and doing several on-site interviews, we still were not able to find the ideal candidate (i.e. with extensive early stage startup and photo space experience).
As you know we have been heavily focused on product building so far due to the number of challenges in an ambitious system like Everpix. We realize it’s more than time to switch gear and focus on user growth & marketing: we especially have a lot of foundation work to be done in this area (from product messaging to KPIs). Rather than keep waiting for this ideal candidate, we decided to hire an on-site and full-time marketing / PR / user growth contractor for a couple months so we can get moving ASAP.
One of the first tasks of our new team member for user growth & marketing was to work on defining a proper set of key performance indicators we can use in the next 6 months to track our progress. See the other page of this document for the list of our 10 KPIs, which we started tracking as of November 1st.
As you will notice, we have a lot of room for improvement, which is expected considering we didn’t have bandwidth to look into things like out of box experience or conversion funnels until now. The next step for our contractor is to take concrete actions to improve the KPIs.
We have now reached a point where we could launch Everpix with a few days notice: the product features in Everpix 1.1 really reflect the Everpix vision and make it very clear Everpix is not another Flickr or SmugMug.
Our current problem is fine-tuning the product messaging for launch and finding a great PR firm to launch with. We have considered 14 PR agencies in the past 3 weeks, met and followed up with several of them, but haven’t been impressed so far. Finding PR agencies which understand the precise needs and constraints of early stage startups, and truly “get” Everpix turns out to be surprisingly hard - it’s certainly not a budget problem for us as we’re willing to allocate what is needed.
We do want to launch ASAP as we’re the only ones offering such a holistic photo solution on the market today. Unfortunately, not having the PR agency chosen prevents us to decide on an official launch date at this point. We will actively work on contingency plans to ensure we don’t miss our opportunity window.
For our subscribed users, we added an experimental feature on the Everpix website: searching photos by likeness aka “finding similar photos”. It’s a really interesting way to rediscover one’s photo collection and showcases the type of unique interaction we can build with photos - no other photo platform offers anything like this today.
If you have more than 5,000 photos in your collection, we encourage you to give it a try (look for it at the bottom of the Everpix home page after signing in on the website). This feature will be enabled on all Everpix accounts soon after we are done tuning it.
New iPhone and iPad apps with our brand new Highlights view have been submitted to App Store for review and should be out the week of 11/12. These are the versions we will launch with as they represent well the vision of Everpix on mobile platforms.
The first version (0.9) has just been sent to a couple hundred users who volunteered to beta test it. It lets users sync photos from the Pictures and Documents default folders as well as custom folders. Compared to the Mac version, it has the following limitations:
- No support for photo libraries like Picasa or Lightroom
- No support for external hard drives
For the Windows world, these limitations are not critical (yet) and we will address them in future versions.
After a short phase of beta testing, our goal is to roll out the 1.0 version of our Windows Uploader as soon as possible to it can be part of our “real launch”.