"We didnt expected that being a startup is so hard. We worked for 2-3 years 10 hours a day 6 days a week and it brought us to barely breaking even. We just cant do this anymore, living in uncertainty is killing us. We have failed to pursue our dream but we hope that we can just shut down this part of our lives, move onwards to working for large company that will care for us and hopefully our skills, pain and experiences will help us to achieve something that we couldn't do alone - create revolutionary product or feature, but under bigger brand."
If this startup hadn't panned out, I don't know what I was going to do. Thinking about having a staged breakdown so I could live off my parents money while still raging in Mission and eating burritos and Thai. Longer term goal, channel that startup burnout into something more meaning-full like opening some profitable franchise, like yogurt or cookies and doing rails gigs on the side.
god I feel sorry for the poor saps still in the grind.
Except they're probably not... Not all the acquisitions of this sort are "you're filthy rich now", especially after dilution, taxes, and plain old time.
This is very true, the new Silicon Valley show Episode 1 is free on YouTube (son clued me in) but that isn't how acquisitions always work out, the word dilution rings loudly.
I'm tired of this "they worked hard for that" BS with acqui-hires and shutdowns.
Yeah, sure, they worked hard, but in the end they get a big fat F for the end result.
Services don't last forever, but I'm not gonna congratulate someone who runs around in circles for 3 years purporting to deliver a product of value, and then gives up when offered a better deal for themselves.
They didn't build a product, they built a nothing. It's like reverse vaporware, and I won't respect it.
Yeah this is my main problem with the way "startup culture" seems to work. There's a lot of people in my university really pushing people to start their own businesses, but the general reasoning just seems to be "come up with something, advertise so that you get bought out, take the money". There's no emphasis on actually making anything, just on drumming up hype for an idea and selling that.
They proved that they can build products. That makes them very valuable to companies with more money than time. It's a significant career success, if perhaps not quite a business success. And we can congratulate them for that.
sure, if the product they made wasn't depended on by people. these kind of acquisitions seem to always leave the product customers in a lurch. and for that we don't have to congratulate them.
Assuming this was a smart acquisition by Dropbox, they'll be able to create more value now than they were before the acquisition. Unless you're arguing that the acquisition is actually wealth-destroying, it seems pretty selfish to oppose it.
I fully agree, may be the HackPad team wanted an exit and wanted to retire and spend all their earned money to live a hedonistic life. What's wrong with that?
Yes, may be this project/product was a step towards a bigger aim they had. May be they wanted to build a SpaceX and started small to gain experience, capital and contacts.
Definitely!
I'm just being realistic - These press releases are basically the tea ceremony everyone is expected to perform.
If you just made several mil I honestly doubt you're thinking about making the "transition as smooth as possible". You're thinking "should I buy a Lambo or a Ferrari?"
They probably got a memo from Dropbox saying "now that we own your ass, here is a press release that you'll publish asap"
"We gotta play 'em one day at a time."
"I'm just happy to be here. Hope I can help the ball club."
"I just want to give it my best shot, and the good Lord willing, things will work out."
This is really disappointing. I have been a paying Loom member since shortly after the service was released, it's too bad it wasn't enough to keep it an independent company. After DivvyShot, Everpix, Snapjoy, and now Loom, I don't think I can trust another photo management startup again.
I wonder if we'll start seeing startup fatigue. Then again, a company just failing must be vastly more common.
I've noticed that these days I avoid all free services and, when the information is available to me, will pick the lifestyle over the vc backed company.
Maybe there's a middle ground? If someone provided me with a VPS but made it really easy to self-host applications from a curated list, I'd be all over that.
Self-hosted auto-updated service nodes, that run on your own cloud-connected server. All your data, your encryption, your permissions, everything.
Then you connect to your services via any thin client (just thumbprint on any terminal anywhere and you're logged in). Any screen, any device, anywhere.
And the on-boarding process was so painful - it took me weeks to load up ALL my photos onto Everpix. After they failed, I signed up with Loom and again it took over a month for it all to upload. I feel sad as I don't envy the next startup that tries to "solve" this very real problem.
It doesn't look very seamless. If you had a Loom account, you don't automatically get a Dropbox account. You have to make a dropbox account and then link the account to "import" your photos. I guess you can put your photos into Dropbox's "Carousel" but none of this happens automatically.
I've actually just done it - it was seemless (though, as you mentioned I had a dropbox account). I clicked the link, read the page, signed in to loom and then authed loom->dropbox. Process started instantly and photos started showing up! Plus now I have 0.5T on dropbox.
We keep being taught the same lesson, day after day, and we never learn, but I think it's time to put this explicitly.
Startups like this are lying to us, straight in the face. Simple as that. And we believe the bullshit they say every time. It's written so almost explicitly in the startup "literature". Growth. They are not building real products that are supposed to solve problems for people, they build make-believe products that are supposed to lure people in. Because that's how you prove your worth these days - by number of users you can get on board.
I apologize if I hurt someone who doesn't start the company just in order to bullshit his/her way to acquihire year or two later. Maybe you're honestly building a real product to solve real problems and you actually care about your users. But then again, to quote Nick Fury, "things like this give me trust issues".
I'm still waiting for someone to solve the "punching through the Internet" problem. This way I could express what I really feel, as a user, about taking "a toast" for the "next chapter" of your "immensely exciting journey".
100%. Photos are here to stay while most startups are not. As much as I hate saying it,being a start-up founder myself, I'd go for Google, Yahoo, Amazon or a more backup-oriented startup.
not saying jake won't take the money and run if offered it, or shut down exposure, but given that it looks like he's fairly comfortable after collegehumor and his investment in tumblr, chances are lower that he's looking to offload exposure/elepath. but who knows.
Crap. I bought a year of Loom for precisely the reason that I do not want my photos taking up space on my drive. Now I have to explain to my extended family why all the confusion they put up with setting things up was for naught.
Of course, the opposite is companies like Google, who run services as experiments and discontinue them because they have better things to do. It's hard to reach that middle ground of stability.
Did you know that you can configure Dropbox to only sync certain folders? It's called "Selective Sync" in the settings. Just uncheck your photos folder, and it will keep all your files in the cloud and not on your drive. You can still get to them from Dropbox's web interface.
My virtual server costs $200 per year and has 50gb of virtual disk space. I can run whatever I like.
What does buying saas really give me that a whole server doesn't?
Obviously one needs to be a Unix hacker to make it do anything but I've got that covered.
You are not the target market for Loom. It makes no sense to ask why you'd pay for Loom over a VPS because they're not going after people who know what a VPS is. They're going after your mom, grandma, etc.
I think the photo management space is like blog platforms. They die so rapidly, I don't want to invest the considerable time to try out a new startup. Dropbox bought out Snapjoy and now Loom. Everpix is gone. I guess Picturelife is still around.
I'm sorry, but I think these startups just give other startups a bad name.
I'm the CEO of Picturelife and I wouldn't dream of rolling over like this so easily. We have thousands of customers and just killing our service would be such an assault on their trust.
All these services you mention are just taking the easy way out. There's a long road ahead for us and we'll going to keep making the product and experience better for people, no matter what.
"I'm the CEO of Picturelife and I wouldn't dream of rolling over like this so easily."
I'm sorry, but I don't believe you. If someone waves $10M in front of you, you're going to take it. I think that's ok and I don't think it's (exactly) giving anyone a "bad name" (in the moral sense). It does mean that I'm going to be hesitant to put my photos into a startup again.
Are you willing to put out a guarantee? Are you willing to refund 100% of the money I paid in the last year if you sell and the service is shutdown? I'm betting there is some kind of legal instrument available to me, as a user, to soften the blow when this inevitably happens.
Hi @enjo, see the reply I gave @pnathan to answer some of this.
But in general I can tell you that we really are driven by much more than money here. A few times we've gotten to consider the idea of having a small financial outcome, and we keep coming back to the same thing: if we all became millionaires and then went out to start another company, what would we do?
If we're being truthful with ourselves, it's still doing Picturelife. There's just not another idea we're passionate about, and working on something we're not passionate about sounds like a terrible, terrible time. So we're just not going to take any easy roads here. If it ever gets tough, we're going to toughen up. When things get really good, we're going to dream bigger.
Maybe it's that we've all been around the block a bit -- both of my co-founders have already had great companies (OMGPOP and Threadless) -- but we really don't want to be doing anything else.
We love our customers, we love our work, we love the challenge. Selling out for 10M to Dropbox frankly sounds like a shit time to us, and we wouldn't do it.
As a Picturelife customer with over 200gb of pictures backed up, and as an Everpix refugee, I really hope this turns out to be the case. If Picturelife disappears, I'm not going to start over somewhere else.
I recently became aware of Picturelife, and the Everpix shutdown prompts me to ask: is Picturelife profitable?
Everpix looked really great, and I was very close to signing up, but then they shut down. I'm glad I didn't just to see them shut down.
I know you say you wouldn't roll over so easily (which is great!) but it ultimately comes down to whether you have a viable business, which Everpix clearly did not. If I sign up for Picturelife, will it survive without outside investment or some miracle? Is it on a stable trajectory?
Thanks for any insight you can provide. Your service looks great :)
Thanks and great question. Picturelife is not yet profitable but is headed in that direction. If all goes to plan, we can get to profitability by the end of the year. Nothing is a done deal, but that's the plan and I have a very, very high degree of confidence, based on current and history growth trends, that we can pull it off. Hope this helps!
I wonder if it's possible to do an AMA or something here? There's clearly a market need and a lot of folks have felt burned. I bet HN would be interested to know that you taught yourself to code and have been one of the main devs on Picturelife.
I would love to do an AMA sometime. To be honest, I've just been a long-time lurker on HN (6.7 years a member!), but I sorta wouldn't know the best way/time to go about doing one. Any tips?
Can you promise in writing enforceable by a court that Picturelife or whoever might buy it will supply services, guaranteed, or face up to penalties?
Because you - like me - will probably be happy to be bought out for sums of money over a certain number. (let's say, 1 billion). And unless you have a fairly hardcore contract with me, I'm not willing to bet your service won't be wound up by the acquirer.
So my pictures are on my hard drive and an external drive.
It's a good question and something I've thought about.
I have a half-written blog post from a few months ago (proof: http://note.io/1lde2HC ) that tries to address this. My idea was that every SAAS startup should start with an exit plan for its customers that would be legally viable in the case of acquisition, being shut down, or any other scenario. Basically a set of software tools and policies that are clear from the get-go, so you aren't waiting to see what they'd do in that case.
We're working on some pretty major releases here so I haven't gotten a chance to finish the post (and publish a plan ourselves) but it's something I think about a lot.
Very very very happy Picturelife user here. Your S3 support is the icing on the cake — but please charge me a flat fee for using your software with my own storage. I want to pay for this great storage but your pricing model only prices on usage.
You're not selling me a utility — you're selling me your fantastic product. Let me pay for it!
I just signed for Picturelife to take a look at the interface. I said to myself "I'd use this if I could host the images myself" and closed the tab... then I came back to HN and saw your comment that it does support S3. A "host your own" plan would have been an instant purchase for me if it was available.
Ha! Thanks -- love that you're asking to pay for it. For now our custom S3 support is a gift. In the future we may change that (and grandfather folks in). In any case, thanks for being a fan.
I'm sure he is serious, and I'd actually take him up on it. That's out of self interest - if people can freeload, then it means you are less likely to survive in the long run. So how about a license fee? Maybe $39-69?
That's kind of the point of this thread, in fact. If you don't charge enough, then you won't survive, and your users lose. I would be uneasy using an important service without paying for it (but I do like the idea of my data living in my own s3 bucket).
Well, our company's PayPal address is linked to nate@picturelife.com -- if anyone wants to pay us for the custom S3 service they are already using, and we are giving away for free, they can feel free!
Like I said, as we take another look at pricing (we are in the middle of it now) we will think about what to do on a more formal level.
I can't wait. I wouldn't expect to pay a fee related to the size of my library (I am doing that to S3) but wouldn't hesitate to pay a moderate monthly or one-time fee for the product.
I also once phone interviewed with Picturelife but it was cut off because the recruiter organizing our interaction was an asshat. I'm very happy where I ended up (Heroku), but would have loved to work on Picturelife, fwiw.
Thanks! We never "launched" -- just one day we had a website and our beta friends started inviting other friends, and then we just grew from there. Looking back, though, that was a dumb idea. We shoulda done a mega big PR launch :)
I hope you realize comments cannot be deleted after a hour or so. So you either speak the truth or will hurt your public image so bad in a few months/years.
Speaking of your promise... What is "so easily"? Does it have 6 or 9 trailing zeros?
I am totally fine with this. I've been living on the Internet for a long time. I've always been comfortable saying exacting how I feel and what I believe and letting there be a permanent record of it. There are definitely comments on blogs from 7 years ago that I wish I never said, but I'd never dream of deleting them. It's part of being an open, honest person in the 21st Century.
As for what's "So easily," it's not just about money. What I mean is this... if something's not working, DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. What you'll see from Picturelife in the next few months is us hustling like crazy, putting out major releases and taking risks. "So easily" to me is trying one thing, seeing that it's not working, and then taking someone's offer to make the pain go away. It's like watching someone get dunked underwater and not fight to get free. If someone wants to get free, you could tell, because you'd see a lot of splashing and fighting to survive.
So "so easily" to me means fighting. And that's what we're doing, and that's what you're going to see us do a lot of from now and into the future.
I just looked at your site, and I couldn't find answers to a couple of key things. First, what if I have more than 300GB of photos and videos (I do)? Second, what platforms do you support syncing on?
serious question: is this your sole decision to make? what about investors/other owners? I respect that may be your personal opinion, but the company's opinion may not necessarily match it. just being real.
btw, did you go along with the sale of omgpop?
Totally not my sole decision. If there were an offer on the table it would be my fiduciary responsibility to let the Board know, and we as a group would vote along with other shareholders with voting rights.
It's a bit more complicated than that, though, and management always has the most control. For instance, it's because of this mentality we're not just shopping ourselves around for little exits -- and so offers like these never have to be decided on. We also chose Spark as a VC because we knew they wouldn't want a small outcome either. They invested in Twitter, Tumblr, and more. We, and they, are looking to build something big and meaningful. A VC like Spark is going to have a lot more patience than some other VCs -- and so it increases our chances of staying independent.
As for the OMGPOP question, I was never a part of it. My co-founder Charles Forman founded it and left the company a year before its sale... so he could start Picturelife with me and Jacob. As it turns out, 3 of our core team members were also at OMGPOP and later joined us at Picturelife, after the company sold to Zynga.
I'd just finished getting set up on Everpix & syncing everything I have when they announced it was going to close down. It's a shame - it was the most impressive option I'd seen so far.
It's definitely makes me think twice about which service I use next.
I've got a pretty big Aperture library, so it will take a long time to sync everything. Loom offered a Aperture import feature, so I was toying with trying them out.
I just save everything to Amazon Glacier that's not the current year. Current year + library files are dumped into S3 ... rinse and repeat.
For photos, I am using Adobe Lightroom and organize files into folders by year/month/day/subject during import. Edited GoPro videos go to YouTube etc and originals/edits straight to Glacier.
This takes a bit of effort to set up but works great great.
I think this is the first time in recent history that a company actually took care of its users after acquisition. Most of the time after the deadline to export your content, it's a big "fuck you" to the customer. At least Loom is making it easy to transfer content to Dropbox and is providing users with the same space on Dropbox as well free for a year. I can respect that.
For those who missed it, this is a company that also acquired Condoleeza Rice on its board recently. Yes, Dropbox, aka 'next' according to a few NSA slides that have been making the rounds, is now taking advice from Condoleeza 'Warrantless Wiretapping' Rice. Run away. Sprint.
Well, this is awfully disappointing. I'm in the process of migrating my stuff off of Dropbox due to the Dr. Rice issue (only problem is a lot of apps use it as their sole syncing service); I have no desire to move gigabytes of photos into Dropbox's control.
Happy for the guys who got acquired....BUT thinking as a consumer, this type of thing makes me very nervous about relying on teeny tiny SAAS businesses for anything long term.
Shutdown an entire service, and roll over to the guys that say you will work on a service that was your competitor till today.
Seems like people don't care much about their sweat and tears these days.
People invest sweat and tears for something -- quite often material security/wealth -- I don't see how fully committing to the new source of security/wealth is undervaluing what they invested previously. Heck, wasting that previous investment by not doing so would seem more like not caring about it.
When you realize that everything (and I mean everything...maybe not always directly, but in some way it is one of the prime motivators) in this world revolves around money, you stop being surprised at these things.
What about Snapjoy? This is not the first photo related sight that Dropbox has picked up. So far I have not been impressed with Dropbox's photo efforts. Why should we think this will be different?
The other day when Carousel was announced, loom was mentioned in a hn thread as a competing service. It's offering was certainly compelling in many ways, and had me weighing switching. If I didn't have such a giant library, I probably would have on the spot. Now, in a way, I'm thankful I don't have to, and I hope they integrate the positives that loom had over Dropbox/Carousel. This is the first acquisition I've read about in a while that has me excited as a user.
Do you find Dropbox works for you with a giant library?
I have ~1.5Tb of photos at this point, which seems too big for any of their accounts.
How do you have it set up?
Ha, is "giant" relative or what... I am currently at ~98% of my 215GB Dropbox account and am stressing about what to do. The next tier doesn't seem cost effective for me and I don't have much room for clearing house.
One thought I have is converting a sizable portion of old Canon CR2 raw files to adobe DNG since I've noticed that reduces filesize by roughly 20% for the files that I have. This isn't really a long term solution though and I'm actually kind of unsure of what to do. I keep hoping that I can hold out long enough until Dropbox's gb/price get's halved again. Then I'd likely be set for some time.
I really can't think of a cloud service for ~1.5TB of photos. Have you found anything that would suit your purposes?
I also use crashplan for offsite archiving of my photo library, but I really, really, like having the entirety of my photo catalogue accessible everywhere. Excessive, sure, but definitely nice.
With loom, I am hoping they integrate the jpg rendering of raw files into their photos views on web/mobile.
What is your access pattern on that 215GB? Is there any of it that you don't touch for at least a month? There has been a lot of work in the past on hierarchical storage managers for Enterprise types but perhaps there is a market for one for regular users. Something that moves your data constantly into S3 or Glacier and then if you haven't used it on DropBox for a month it deletes it there, only to bring it back if you look for it.
There is definitely a huge drop off for access to files after a certain age. I'd say after a month there is really very little need for me to access them directly. After that, it is sporadic for when I would want a specific file.
A benefit of Dropbox/Carousel (+ Lightroom locally), is I can fly through all 215GB via thumbnail representations without having to call the file explicitly. If there were some mechanism to offload storage to s3 or glacier, while retaining the nice UI afforded by the Dropbox/Lightroom clients, I would be all over that.
This may or may not be relevant to you but for a long time I was auto-converting my CR2 files to DNG during Lightroom import (without embedding the original CR2 in the DNG since I was doing it for space savings as you are thinking of doing) and now I kind of regret it because the "Digital Lens Optimizer" that ships with recent versions of Canon's DPP is actually really good at pulling out image detail that Lightroom or ACR doesn't give me in the demosaicing process on photos taken with Canon lenses (since only those have 'DLO' profiles). And DPP doesn't support DNG loading.
Granted, Lightroom/ACR still do a very good job of rendering RAW files, so the difference isn't that great without pixel-peeping, but it might be something you want to think about when it comes to switching formats.
I've since gone back to importing the plain CR2s as my on-disk RAW format -- in practice CR2s are more universally useable than DNG files since not everything can read DNG whereas since you can always go from CR2->DNG, everything that can read DNG is covered by CR2s.
I definitely had bought into the adobe dng idea of it being the superior format for compatibility, but didn't consider there might be situations where something could read CR2 better than dng.
My library is not as big as 1.5T but it won't fit in any standard cloud offering as well.
One of the advice I received was to batch export to JPG to have a small and easily sharable copy, and keep all the originals in Glacier or other cost effective backup that doesn't need to be accessed too often. I haven't done it yet but it seems to be a reasonable approach.
I reckon this "big companies hoovering up smaller ones" phenomenon will eventually cause the startup economy to die. None of the services are reliable; they come up, start their services with a "no warranties, use at your own risk and we go away at our own disposal" policy; then some big company like Google, Facebook or the newfangled giant Dropbox buy them out and mix them into themselves. The service is gone. The users have to recover. The only acquisitions I can recall, which did not disrupt users recently was that of Instagram's and Vine's (also WhatsApp, but that's too recent to be sure, isn't it?). But the wonted story is that money is poured onto the owners, and the services get killed. Now, I am not an entrepreneur, and am not that knowledgeable about business topics, but I can see that people become less likely to invest in startups each day, every time news of these kinds hit the headlines. Sad, that is.
I was considering signing up for Loom a while ago. It was great value prop for a problem that pretty much everyone runs into eventually. However, there were a few red flags that made me think they were going to go the way of Everpix. Good to see they didn't completely shut down, but I'm also glad I didn't bother spending time with them.
I see that dropbox (a YC portfolio co) bought 2 other YC portfolio cos. I know it's a stretch, but does YC actively pitch smaller portfolio companies to their more successful portfolio companies? Keep the cash in the family.
It's great to see how photo storage solutions get faster, prettier and cheaper. Now it's time to make them smarter. Most people I know feel swamped with photos as there are no decent tools to clear this photo-mess.
iCloud photos work much better than Loom. Loom is buggy. And it will suck more at Dropbox, just like what happened to Mailbox (seriously, what has Mailbox been doing for 6 months after iOS 7 has been released?!).
Since paying Dropbox is not an acceptable solution for me, I've asked Loom to refund the money I paid them (perhaps foolishly, I signed up for the $50-per-year plan and paid up front).
So far, they've refused: "Thanks for writing and we appreciate your position. Unfortunately, I am very sorry but I cannot offer you a refund at this time."
"This app is in development mode and cannot accept more users. Contact the app developer and ask them to use the Dropbox API App Console to apply for production status."
Awesome. Loom should consider changing that landing video image though on their homepage. It just...something seems...not right. Or maybe make that iPad more prominent.
"If you switch to Carousel, you will have the exact same amount of free space you had in Loom. Any referral bonus you received on Loom will be preserved into your new Dropbox account as well."
See: https://loom.com/migrate
"It’s been a long road and we feel that we have come a long way in solving this problem. We are elated to announce the next step in this journey"
"It’s been an immensely exciting journey and we are humbled by the support we received along the way."
http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/