- First closing of the $1M bridge lead by Index Ventures happened ($500K was wired in)
- More than 40 new million full-resolution photos synced and a solid $14K of sales
- Infrastructure expenses finally going down
- Focused on increasing user retention, conversion rate and early preparation for Series A
No PR effect this month, so we’re back to word of mouth user acquisition. There were 2,600 new signups and we now have 2,850 subscribers total. Overall subscription rate is stable around 10% which is above average in the Freemium industry (it’s close to 20% for users who sync 1,000+ photos).
As mentioned in the previous report, we have a performance problem with the visit to sign-up rate on the www.everpix.com landing / product page being lower by a 2X to 3X factor to what we would expect according to a few comparison points. We did some A/B testing with a completely different design based around a short auto-play video but after enough visits, the conversion rate was actually slightly lower, so we rejected it. We’ll keep experimenting.
We have rolled in an invite feature for Everpix Free users: such users who invite their friends to Everpix get extra bonus months if they sign up and sync at least 1 photo. Such offers are fairly typical of Freemium products so we are using proven methods here, but they will still need tuning over time for our user base and its usage patterns.
The cost saving measures implemented last month of doing all our image analysis and view (re)computation using cheap unused EC2 capacity paid off (that part of the bill went from several thousand dollars to $630).
We have a number of cost optimizations we can do in other areas of the system but they will take some time. At the end of the day, 85% of our infrastructure costs is storage related (photos and their metadata) and we can only do so much about it on AWS. Longer term, we will have to move out of AWS and into custom data centers. This is expected to generate substantial savings but at the cost of upfront capital expenses.
The work with Julie Supan is on its way, on track to be done by mid-June but it’s too early to share anything. As a reminder, this is the last step of our preparation for our Series A.