Picture this

Everpix began as the brainchild of Latour, a 34-year-old French entrepreneur who sold his first company to Apple in 2003. That company, PixelShox Studio, made motion-graphics software that was later renamed Quartz Composer. It became a key part of OS X, powering the operating system's screen savers and iTunes visualizations, among other applications.

At Apple Latour met Kevin Quennesson, a fellow French computer scientist who joined Apple in 2006 and became the project lead for Quartz Composer. Quennesson's background is in math and physics; his name is listed on six patents related to motion graphics, image processing, and graphical user interfaces.

“The more photos he took, the less likely he was ever to look at any one of them ever again.”

By 2009 both men had left Apple and were working at Cooliris, which makes photo viewing software. Latour set up an office for Cooliris in Japan, and after spending some time traveling through Asia with his girlfriend, he became frustrated with how difficult it was to store and organize all the photos he was taking. He discussed an early idea for a product with Quennesson, who was interested in using math and science to create better photo software.

Quennesson had noted that the more photos he took, the less likely he was ever to look at any one of them ever again. "People take more and more photos, but paradoxically, they become more and more disconnected from them," he said last month in a conference room at their co-working space. "You don’t want to go back to this whole life that you’ve captured, which is counterintuitive. It's the most important thing — it’s your life! So there’s this obvious problem."

In August 2011, Latour incorporated under the name 33cube Inc. so they could refine his prototypes. In June, after searching for designers on the portfolio site Dribbble, they came across Wayne Fan, who worked at a San Francisco firm doing interaction and visual design. Fan, too, felt frustrated by photo software, and they brought him on as a co-founder. "We give consumers these tools like iPhoto or Aperture or Lightroom, which are basically artifacts of this bygone era," Fan said. "Why would anyone need to rate a vacation photo from one to five stars, or flag them? Or have a histogram with levels? That’s crazy."

To give the team a deadline, Latour entered the startup competition at TechCrunch Disrupt. They spent the next few months building a prototype of their service, which they were now calling Everpix. Many of its most distinctive features were in place from the start. The service seamlessly found and uploaded photos from your desktop and from online services, then organized them using algorithms to highlight the best ones.

The software was fast, the design was clean, and the service was simple to use. "The best part about Everpix may be its 'set it and forget it' nature," TechCrunch noted at the time. "After the one-time installation and configuration, there’s nothing else you have to do." To the team's surprise, Everpix became a finalist at the competition. (They lost the $50,000 first prize to Shaker, a bizarre kind of Second Life-meets-Facebook social network that raised $15 million and hasn't been heard from in a year.)

Everpix had gotten started with small investments from former Apple executive Bertrand Serlet and 500 Startups, the incubator run by former PayPal executive Dave McClure. In the wake of Disrupt it raised money from investors including Index Ventures, Strive Capital, and Picasa co-founder Michael Herf, for a total of $1.8 million. "The use case was incredibly compelling," said Nuno Gonçalves Pedro, managing director at Strive. "The product really looked very robust. And finally, we really liked the team."

Everpix had acquisition discussions after Disrupt with Facebook and Dropbox, among others, but waved them all away: the founders wanted to create this service on their own terms. They spent the next six months building their product in a public beta before releasing what they considered to be the true Everpix 1.0 this March. A free option let you see all your photos from the past year, or longer if you connected your desktop computer to the Everpix iOS app. For $4.99 a month or $49 a year, the service would let you store an infinite amount of photos. A feature called Flashbacks sent users daily emails of their photos from the same day in prior years, which led to a huge spike in the number of users who returned to Everpix daily. Critics raved. But it had taken the company longer to get there than investors would have liked. “At that point, it had been one and a half years since we started,” Latour said. “Which is a huge amount of time for a startup to have a full-featured product.”

While the team obsessed about perfecting the service, the founders paid less attention to the subject investors care about most: growth. Everpix built some features for sharing photos, but there was little else in the product to help it spread to other people. At one point, the team considered requiring a user's friends to create an account to download any photos that the user shared with them. It was a surefire way to boost signups — but also felt like the sort of ugly, needy design choice that the team prided itself on avoiding. The idea died.

And so at a time when successful photo apps were attracting users by the millions, by March the company had attracted fewer than 19,000 signups. Everpix had spent almost nothing to advertise the service, not that it could have afforded to pay for much. The company had spent almost all of its $1.8 million building the service.

As May approached, Everpix was going broke.