Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today
Hello HN,
I'm Paras Chopra, founder of VWO. We're an A/B testing platform that was born here as a Show HN in 2009: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=876141
Today, I sold the company to a private equity firm for $200mn.
It's covered on TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/23/everstone-acquires-bootstr...
I was a 22 year old fresh graduate when I launched VWO on HN and got initial users. Feedback from people like @patio11 helped me get to PMF. And now, 15 years later, "site:ycombinator.com" is what I appended when I wanted to search for advice on what to keep in mind while selling my company.
Thank you HN for sharing inspiration and wisdom all along. I honestly don't think I would have been an entrepreneur had it not been for hacker news.
Every single day, HN is the first website I open! I'm feeling very grateful towards the community. Thanks @dang, and thank you Paul Graham for your essays and for creating this beautiful corner of the internet!
My employer picked vwo over my own custom in house ab testing tool [0]. I was so pissed!
Congrats, yours was the better tool.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23471050
There's no higher praise than "I built my own; yours was better"!
Well said! Honesty is best.
Here's that earlier thread - thanks for pointing it out!
Thank HN: My startup was born here and is now 10 years old - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23466470 - June 2020 (128 comments)
It's quite amusing that the same person is the top comment in both threads
Almost! It's 'firefoxd' vs 'foxfired', lol
Edit: Ah no, you're right, seems he made a second account.
Thanks!
hello ex-boss! congrats :D
Awesome dude
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(Co-founder of Optimizely here) Congrats! It was fun competing with you
Dan, thank you! I has been fun competing with you.
I remember the golden days :)
I've been following your journey post Optimizely! Hope your new ventures turn out to be equally fun and fulfilling.
I think it was a time when bootstrapping was a thing.. I feel its scary for new startups to bootstrap since the last decade with huge fundings, especially with funding in billions becoming a normal with the ongoing AI craze.
https://news.crunchbase.com/ai/largest-ai-startup-funding-de...
I think that's more skewed towards the AI startups. Other startups have rather seen a dip in recent times, at least in India.
AI inference is expensive, hence, funding is needed. In future, when AI infra becomes cheaper, we will see more bootstrapped AI startups too.
Congrats to you both!! Paras- you guys were always one of the ones we looked up to when starting Amplitude way back in 2012.
Thanks Spencer! You've built an amazing product, we're hugely inspired by Amplitude.
Optimizely as in Episerver?? I thought Optimizely was Episerver's rebrand.
Episerver bought Optimizely and then took the name.
Oh what a strange decision. But that makes more sense than yhe reverse.
Why "was"?
Optimizely also sold to private equity many years ago. Presumably the founderts aren't there any more.
@paras - I worked at Optimizely in the early days and led online marketing there from 2012 - 2016. I remember seeing your team copy our SEM strategy, so I added Hindu gods (shiva, vishnu, et al) to the UTM query params in our ads for your guys to dissect / get a laugh from.
Congrats on the exit. really nice to see.
As a fellow marketer I've totally done similar stuff to send messages to whomever is digging through their utms.
More usefully though, you can learn a shocking amount about a company from their utms and event data.
I haven't dug into this much--out of curiosity, what do you think are some of the most useful things you can learn?
Most importantly, you can often find out WHY a campaign exists with stuff like utm=small-biz.
If they’re a competitor, congrats, you just found a potential niche you may have overlooked. If you look at what events they send to their analytics, you can uncover what they know and don’t know about app usage or ad performance.
this guy gets it.
How does one copy SEM strategy? How do you reverse engineer based on ads and utm_tags? How do I even know that you are doing it right so it's worth copying?
I good with API docs and weird bugs but this is beyond me.
Haha, I'll ask around if they ever figured out the query parameters :)
wanna join Rezi? we dont have a marketing team but get 4K signups a day
Friendly heads up that some thumbnail in your landing page are not loading. Specifically the ones that link to the sample resumes for a given title. The one for CTO and the one for compliance coordinator failed to load.
thanks for this kind offer, but i'm working on something else.
Physics, no doubt.
Are you hiring engineers? I would love to join.
Bravo, @paraschopra What an incredible journey. I remember when you launched. I hadn't realized it was 16 years ago!
I'll hit you up privately with an invite to tell your story on Startups for the Rest of Us. It's a fitting place for a bootstrapper like yourself.
I should have guessed this was your handle Rob :) I listen to your podcast whenever I need a boost, but somehow never made the connection that you are one of "us", here.
If you'd like to get some scandi guys on your show, I am a GP at www.likeminded.vc, and connected into the community around Copenhagen and the nordics.
Awesome! Yes, indeed 16 years is a long period. But I was lucky to have been exposed to HN during the early years. I remember interacting with you!
Congrats!
What made you commit and build this project when you were 22 year old vs million others SAAS you could have built at that time? Say, a CRM to compete with Salesforce, or a new web based Excel or web based Photoshop tool?
This was my 5th startup. During my college days I kept launching startups (Kroomsa, Precimark, MyJugaad.in). Failure of all these made me introspect and I realized I was trapped into the engineer's fallacy: build things without knowing or caring about how to market them. This pushed me to learn marketing and I fell deeper into the rabbit hole.
So, my next attempt was build a marketing suite as I was learning a lot about what works and what doesn't. But even that turned out to be a dud as I put too many features into it. But I did launch it on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=876141 and got a few users.
Users found the UX too complicated and I got feedback to focus on 1 among the 10s of features I had added. See this comment by @patio11
>because you pack an AWFUL lot onto that first screen
So as my next iteration, I picked A/B testing and made a visual editor to make creation of A/B tests stupidly simple and that took off because it allowed marketers launch A/B tests without being reliant on developers.
This product, Visual Website Optimizer (VWO), took off!
Thanks for this. To get it straight, you decided to go for marketing niche has it was an industry that obsessed you.
From their, feedback allowed to focus on one thing and do it well. This makes sense as you probably stretched yourself too thin. But the thing I don't get is, what was the trigger/pivot that made you go for 'A/B/ testing and not another segment of marketing niche?
At that time, weren't there other players in A/B segment who were far more established? What competitive edge did you see that made you go all in in A/B and which eventually took off?
I picked A/B testing because I discovered the most used product (Google Website Optimizer, now defunkt) was pretty crappy.
As an engineer, I couldn't figure out how to use it and it was meant for marketers.
So I sensed an opportunity within the A/B testing niche. In fact, the name Visual Website Optimizer comes from the fact that it did with Google Website Optimizer did, but visually (in an editor, instead of HTML code).
Optimizely started at the same time as us. They went to YC and raised a bunch of money. We remained bootstrapped.
It sounds like making it stupid simple and easy for non developers was the w.
Do you have any advices for someone about to learn marketing as dev same as your younger self?
Awesome. For others, I see that Paras is now running https://turingsdream.co/ "an AI hackhouse running a six-week residency for coders and researchers who're interested in AI. The hackhouse is in Bangalore, India and you can join it either in-person, or in a hybrid fashion."
Thanks for linking it here.
If there are any AI researchers or engineers in Bangalore/India lurking here, please consider applying.
Hey paras I'm a doctor sitting in Australia. But have some analytical and coding skills and can have 3 startups which all failed to scale. I'm full time grinder and wokring on 505b2 FDA approval system. Off patient medications into market a knowledge graph system designed to convince the fda. I'd like to Jon the 6 week finger bleeder.
I attended Paras’a talk at the last graduation day for the residency. I’m amazed at how he was able to do all that, while dealing with the acquisition due diligence.
This might be a dumb question, for which apologies in advance, but isn't 200 million a little low for a company with $ 50 million revenue? But maybe not, -- the profit is say $20 million and the acquirers are paying 10 X annual profit?
It's not a dumb question.
But what I learned in this process is that companies are valued after incorporating many factors (liquidity, earnouts, future involvement, growth rate, profit, retention, current market mood, etc. etc.) and multiples we see reported in media are obviously sit at the outlier curves.
I got a good deal overall (not just monetarily), and that's what I was shooting for.
Annual growth rate is typically a big factor in PE acquisition multiples. At a 4x multiple of ARR, I’d hazard a guess that this was on the lower side.
at $20mil profit, that's a 40% margin, which is quite high, even for a tech company (tho for a startup, which can be nimble and agile, it's not impossible).
Are you planning to write blog post of the journey? It is always joyful to read about process and details about such acquisitions. I remember couple shared in HN and got lots of interest such as waze.
Congratulations!
What would you like to know about the process?
I'd love to learn about PMF and which posts from HN were most helpful. Even a few pointers in the thread here would be awesome.
I've written a lot of my lessons here: https://invertedpassion.com/free-book-mental-models-for-star...
Your post https://invertedpassion.com/your-30-second-pitch-shouldnt-be... applies not just to business but to life in general. Talking about someone else and focusing on what they want is how to make friends (and other benefits).
I really like your site. It’s kind of the inverse of pg: not really essays, but still focused and numerous, even if short. It manages to be general without being shallow: there are so many interesting topics that it’s hard not to get pulled in, which for me was reminiscent of stumbling on pg’s essays in 2007.
Thanks!
Comparison with PG's essays is a great honor. His essays are what inspired me to go down the startup journey myself.
This is great, thanks both for writing these down and sharing!
Anything other than programming would be super helpful. There are a lot of software engineers who are able to build great products. Also knowing how to market and sell them is where only a few shine.
I've written a lot of my lessons here: https://invertedpassion.com/free-book-mental-models-for-star...
Congratulations!
Just curious, usually being purchased by a Private Equity firm spells a death knell for the company. Of course at the right price it makes sense that you wanted to sell it away, but what are your thoughts about what will happen to the company now?
My co-founder is continuing and so is rest of the leadership team. So, I'm expecting company and its culture to remain as is.
It depends on the type of private equity too. There are absolutely firms that want to milk a profitable business by shutting down investment.
There are others that are all about growth.
Just as a counter point, private equity seems to have helped WPEngine become so successful that Mullenweg has totally lost his mind over it.
And WordPress can thank CPanel and the tens of thousands of customer support and sysadmins that supported millions of WordPress users at $9/mo for a decade and have never once interacted or known who Mullenweg is.
And they can thank mysql.. and apache.. and php..
Take your money and be happy.
I met some of the worst people (CEOs) working in webhosting. Some truly awful people became very rich.
edit; I thought this was referencing old drama. This is brand new. www.reddit.com/r/wpdrama. I don't know anything about Mullenweg, I don't mean to sound like I'm calling him awful specifically.
Could anyone summarize the drama? I’ve been poking around the subreddit, and it’s clear something is going on (https://www.reddit.com/r/WPDrama/s/7931urG9ho) but it’s not clear what he actually did.
https://www.reddit.com/r/WPDrama/s/7eoTXQnwhh is as close to an explanation as I’ve found, but it seems tangential to whatever kickstarted the drama in the first place.
I don't know the minutia and I'm thankfully nowhere near the webhosting industry any longer but Wordpress dominated my life for almost 20 years- I'm pretty sure it can be summed up with "WPEngine is taking all of our enterprise/etc business and I'm mad.." And he's trying to get rid of the opensource (he dropped their monthly dedicated hours from I think 2k-4k to 45, just 45 hours) to funnel people to wordpress.com.
Which, honestly I really do get from his end money wise, because I have friends in that industry who are worth hundreds of millions today from lucky breaks, timing, etc. and I'm still a wee-engineer.
But he made those choices, he was always the CEO. I didn't start with the funding my rich friends had.
Its hard to get the full picture of Mullenweg's behaviour in a summary, but I guess the TL;RD from my point of view goes something like:
Matt decides WPEngine are making "too much money" and "not contributing enough" buy selling hosting for WordPress, an open source (GPLv2 or later) project. He tries to blackmail them (using legally questionable trademark claims) to the tune of something like 8 million bucks a year or he'll"go nuclear" on them. WPEngine pushes back, and Mullenweg does his best to destroy WPEngine's reputation and business starting with his WordCamp conference keynote, and following on by blocking access to the wordpress.org theme/plugin repo/website for WPEngine and all their hosting customers sites, meaning millions oi WP sites could not install new plugins or get critical security updates. WPEngine lawyers up to get that access back, and to seek damages. During the drama, it come to light that contrary to most people's understanding, wordpress.org is not owned by the WordPress Foundation, but is personally owned and operated by Mullenweg, and there is zero accountability for Mullenweg who owns Automattic (a WP hosting company and direct competitor tp W|PEngine), owns the wordpress.org website (a critical piece of infrastructure hard coded into WordPress core), and the WP Foundation board consists of a guy who sold his WordPress related company to Mullenweg a decade or so ago, a finance person with no visible track record of ever having anything to do with software or open source or WordPress, and Mullenweg himself.
There's way more, but my TL;DR is likely already TL.
This covers it in detail (scroll down and start from the first September 20th, 2024 entry for the "current drama)
https://www.joeyoungblood.com/technology/timeline-of-wordpre...
And a long list of what happened and when, backed up with links: https://github.com/bullenweg/bullenweg.github.io
That used to exist at bullenweg.com until Mullenweg sicced his lawyer on it.
Thanks so much! This was exactly what I was hoping for. I really appreciate all the detail you went into, and the followup links.
know exactly you feeling on bullenweg, had to tread really carefully writing this: https://weareqed.com/wp-engine-matt-mullenweg-the-wp-drama/ Been asked to make it skip straight to the latest, will insert a button later
Just a comment from the first couple of paras there:
> Wordpress.org (WP.org) – Open source software, partially created & owned by Mullenweg
I feel that's wrong?
WordPress is an open source software project and the most popular CMS on the web.
(and it's probably worth mentioning that Mullenweg (and others) originally forked it from b2/cafepress, especially in the context of Mullenweg claiming WPEngine should be "giving back to the Word>Press community" in exactly the way he didn't do for the b2/cafepress community.)
wordpress.org is the main repository of the WordPress code and the home for a huge portion all the community contributed themes and plugins. It is hard coded into the WordPress core source code making it difficult to avoind or replace for most users. The website itself is exclusively and personally owned by Mullenweg, not the WordPress Foundation.
(And it might be worth explaining that he can and has banned people from logging in based on his personal drama, which removes the ability for theme/plugin authors to provide update and security fixes. Mullenweg has also "stolen" plugin urls, for example replacing WPEngine's wildly popular Advance Custom Fields plugin with his own "Secure Custom Fields".)
I appreciate everything you've said, but here's the problem with most of what you've said. Yes, I could write an entire post on what wp is, I only need a brief synopsis initially for the reader, because everything else becomes apparent as you read on. like: " it's probably worth mentioning that Mullenweg (and others) originally forked it from b2/cafepress" - In the intro for the 2 others for the wp foundation:"Mark Ghosh – Has known Mullenweg from his days of forking B2 (pre- Wordpress, around 2003-4"
"The website itself is exclusively and personally owned by Mullenweg, not the WordPress Foundation." See post on timeline Oct22nd, although most wouldn't have known this prior to Bulleweg actually announcing it
" Mullenweg has also "stolen" plugin URLs" - See timeline posts Oct 15th-22nd regarding ACF and other plugins
Lots of the info you've flagged is actually there, and I get that most wont read into all the info. Hope this helps
This brand new drama (well, August/Sept vintage drama) reveals a _lot_ about Mullenweg.
I, for one, am happy to specifically call him awful.
private equity + a whole lot of commons to encircle
Stylistic note: "knell" is a word for a sound, like the ringing of a solemn type of bell.
So something can't be said to "spell a death knell".
Please don’t forget about 2nd definitions of words, and idioms. The stylistic note here is to be really careful when language policing. From what I’ve seen, it’s almost always wrong and backfires looking bad on you to claim other people’s word choices are incorrect. I know this from plenty of experience being knocked off the high horse. ;) But language is broader and more fluid than we imagine, and it’s quite fun to be a student of the way language works and changes over time. In English it gets even more fun when tracing etymologies through the other languages where our words came from and see the weird subtle ways the meanings change.
knell (noun) 2: “an indication of the end or the failure of something” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/knell
spell (verb) 2: “to add up to / MEAN”, 3: “come to understand” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/spell
Examples of the idiom ‘spell a death knell’:
https://www.npr.org/2020/05/28/862658646/the-latest-u-s-blow...
https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/gladstone/spe...
https://www.mca-marines.org/wp-content/uploads/Machine-Learn...
https://www.protectingtaxpayers.org/international/to-shield-...
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/death-kn...
This page has a couple examples that use the phrasing “spelling” a death knell:
> If it does, it almost spells the death knell of a great number of football clubs throught the country.
> Indeed, it may spell the death knell of the other place.
If it sounds strange in US English, could it be a way of wording that’s more common in UK English?
I believe that back when the church was the center of English village life, they would ring the low bell when someone died. Being a village, you'd know when someone was ill. The bell was audible throughout the village, and probably to most of the surrounding fields, so having seen them struggle through their sickness, you'd know who had just died.
Anything, words included, that could metaphorically convey that the death-struggle was now finished. (Ironically, though, the death knell of things like companies is usually sounded before they are actually dead, and rather when the company is ill but the writer thinks that death is inevitable.) Although I don't like "spell a death knell" because the rhyme has an awkward rhythm, and it would be better to "sound" the knell.
"X spells Y" means "X results in Y". It was used correctly.
Hey Chopra,
Thanks for sharing, this is really inspiring!
Just wondering, for other bootstrappers, if you do end up selling for, I don't know, $200 million letsay, how does that money generally get split? What percentage of the company did you own before selling, and what were the tradeoffs when selling ownership?
The TechCrunch article the OP linked above mentions this:
> Chopra, who owned 71% of Wingify before the acquisition, will retain a minority stake in the firm, one of the sources said.
Thanks
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I put this post in the second-chance pool* as soon as I found out about it, but given that the startup is India, I think Paras might also be, in which case he may be offline for a while! (Edit: and will have rather a lot of responses waiting for him when that changes...)
* https://news.ycombinator.com/pool, explained at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308
Yes, thank you! I was indeed sleeping and just woke up.
Congrats!
What have been your highest highs and lowest lows during this journey?
When Google discontinued their A/B Testing tool - was it surprising for you?
How has the CRO landscape changed out of your perspective in the last 15 years? 1st party tracking, serverside testing, etc.
I think the low was covid - with budget cuts, we had a sudden revenue drop and didn't know when or whether it will recover at all. But thankfully as we had been profitable from day 1, we didn't lay off anyone.
The high is every time we launched a new feature that set the industry standard. (For example, integrating heatmaps into A/B tests and migration from frequentist to bayesian statistics).
Another high has always been our annual international trips - we had been taking our entire company to a vacation every year. As a company, Wingify team has vacationed together in Thailand, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Dubai, Nepal, and Goa. Most recently, ~400 people partied together on a boat in Bangkok, and it was a high!
Yes, Google discontinuing their A/B testing tool was a surprise (but a pleasant one obviously).
CRO over the last 15 years has shifted in maturity. It started with testing red v/s green buttons in 2010 but now it is a full blown science with observations, hypothesis, prioritisation, experimentation and personalization!
What do you think of the increasingly sparse measurement data available to marketers and the rise of needing to focus on measuring incrementality through statistical experiments when smaller companies may not have enough data to obtain statsig results?
When you don't have enough data, doing usability tests and understanding + applying best practices can help you avoid common mistakes.
400 people? Oh, so not a tiny company after all? I was imagining a duo and perhaps a contractor or two.
How did you handle all these employees? Maybe some were family members.
Congratulations.
I'm curious... what do people do after something like this?
Vacation?
I bought a steel bike, grabbed my hammock, and went on a 4 day 250 mile solo adventure through the Texas hill country.
Riding through empty valleys at sunset with a herd of deer pacing alongisde me was enough to break me into tears. It's what I needed to move on.
It is interesting how many stories in a way involve running or moving away from the lifestyle that ... bought them a new lifestyle.
When something consumes you so rabidly and ferociously for so long, and then is just gone (poof), it leaves you searching. Searching for recovery and meaning.
It's 4 years later, and I'm still searching...
Zuckerberg said something along the lines of if he would have sold facebook, he would have gone on to build another facebook Is that how you feel? Ive spent the past 10 years building my company, I dont feel like another venture could compare (for now)
I wouldn't, at least not in its current incarnation. I started mine in 2008, after a 2007 Supreme Court decision. For cpg brands, we built a SaaS for e-commerce dealer base compliance and management.
Ultimately, because competition eventually grew like crazy, I don't think the market timing is worthy of trying to rebuild it at this point. Maybe some analog for AI instead of e-commerce.
Oddly, after looking at your profile, it looks like I've been building the last few years in the same space as you. But product market fit has been elusive.
My discovery having gone through something similar: If something made you happy and gave you purpose before, it probably will again. So just do it again.
The second time around, you may discover that finding success, getting rich, etc., wasn't actually the reason you were doing it.
Getting rich was never the reason. I was a solo bootstrapper who rarely got paid for a decade+. If it was about the $ I would've dipped week one of the startup.
My issue is product market fit. I've been building different ideas for the past few years, but traction has eluded me.
Out of curiosity, what have you built? Also, do you enjoy the process of building things?
I love building things - it's my passion in life. I loathe when I build something and it doesn't get traction. I'm all for learning, but I'm truly here for the traction. Here's a list of some things I built in the past few years:
- AI Agent Generator: Created no-code platform for customizable AI agents with a MidJourney & RAG/VectorDB document and crawled website integration.
- AI-Enabled Town: Crawled all of my tourist town's destinations, retail stores and their products and then tied them into a React Shopify sales channel. Built an agent to interact with and it links to products and locations as it chats.
- Job-Matching Browser Extension: Developed Chrome/Firefox extension to analyze job fit and generate multilingual resumes/cover letters in 26 languages.
- Job-Searching Agent: Developed MacOS and Winows Electron app to perform a number of searches on popular job website and stream a list of jobs and a % of how the user matches up, so they can focus their time applying instead of sifting through job descriptions.
Well, you don't need a million dollars to do nothing, man. Take a look at my cousin: he's broke, don't do shit.
There is a luxury class at both ends of the economic spectrum, as Veblen observed.
The trick is to attain leisure while also having the resources to live safely and comfortably.
Is it? I have friends who have very little money. Ok, they live safely, but not comfortably by any stretch. They value their leisure and live a good life.
I'm also friends with people who became very rich. In their own ways, they all continue working hard.
> Ok, they live safely, but not comfortably by any stretch.
> They value their leisure and live a good life.
There's an inherent contradiction here unless you believe you can live a 'good life' (which I would expect to be free from excessive discomfort?) while also living 'not comfortably by any stretch'.
You also have to consider what 'safely' means here. Sure, it means walls and a door so that you don't freeze to death or get eaten by dingoes or (insert local hazard here), but beyond the immediate, it also means having resources to obtain medical aid if required, ensure food supply and other necessities even in the face of unforeseen circumstances, etc.
It's possible to 'live a good life' with no resources while everything goes in your favour but it rapidly gets awful if that changes.
On your second point, I'd imagine that the people who became very rich did so because they're constitutionally unable to just relax and coast.
I don't see the "inherent contradiction". Discomfort, as long as it's chosen and not imposed, is not much of a problem.
Yes, wrt safety it's hazy. Eastern Europe, so it's reasonably safe, and also we don't take safety as seriously as the Westerners. Our medical aid is all right. They have enough money to eat, but you'd be surprised how cheap and basic a diet can be.
> It's possible to 'live a good life' with no resources while everything goes in your favour but it rapidly gets awful if that changes.
Oh. It's possible to suffer even with infinite resources. Things can go horribly wrong. Health problems. Death. Other kinds of trauma.
> On your second point, I'd imagine that the people who became very rich did so because they're constitutionally unable to just relax and coast.
Yes, though some are learning and have improved a lot :)
*leisure, I suppose. I'd love to read more on that. Is that from "The Theory of the Leisure Class"?
I don't remember that particular observation being in the book since it's very much about the upper class, but that book is amazing. I used to keep an rss feed of new project gutenberg books and when that popped up I read it just based on the name and was amazed how pertinent it was a hundred years later. I haven't read anything else by him, but that one is absolutely worth it. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/833
Also since it was written when the vestiages of european feudal system still had some tiny amount of power, some of the observations about lords who owned massive estates but had no money and would refuse to take on any work, considering it "beneath them" while they starved was fascinating. It's both of it's time and timeless
Thank you for correcting. I can no longer edit the parent comment and was sleep deprived while writing it.
But yes!
Haha, I almost never reply on HN. But the Office Space ref made my day <3
my favorite quote in the whole movie
I celebrate the [movie's] entire catalog
Yeah but if you had a million dollars you could do two chicks at the same time.
and if you were a millionaire, I bet you could hook that up. Chicks dig dudes with money.
Steel is real. And comes in colors other than black! :)
Even stainless steel ;)
Did you read Caro's books on Lyndon Johnson yet? If you have not, stop what you are doing and read them, especially the first two. He spends a lot of time talking about Hill Country. I suspect you will find them very interesting having spent so much time there.
I met someone who was an early employee at King about a year after they were acquired for 5.9b - it’s a little different since he wasn’t involved with the sale, but he was still processing the insane amount of money he had. A year on he hadn’t moved out of his small apartment, still contracted, still used the same cheap phone, and hadn’t started investing beyond just the normal mutual funds/bonds/etc. it struck me as the smartest move, take your time to come up with a plan and don’t just dive into recklessly spending it.
I also know a founder couple I was close friends with who had a sizeable exit, who moved to Costa Rica where they could spend little and focus on writing, a side interest that ended up leading to their next company.
I find it’s really interesting how people act when the financial pressure gets suddenly removed.
> I find it’s really interesting how people act when the financial pressure gets suddenly removed.
It seems so strange to me to hear stories about people suddenly coming into a bunch of money and not finding contentment or even ending up depressed. If I could afford to retire today, I would do it in a heartbeat and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't run out of things I want to do.
When the lotto gets to be above $1 billion, I'll usually buy a ticket because it's fun to imagine the life I could have with that money. Lots of it would be spent on hiring experts to teach me things.
It's almost analogous to having a video game totally completed for you in a way. Everything is "done" for you essentially since you just buy your way out of problems at that point.
Before coming into that amount of money, you can be distracted by the survival aspects of living in society where you're just trying to make money and live comfortably. There isn't any necessity to have to figure out what you truly want out of life or what your passions are.
Once you do have money, now you have to face that. You have to truly find who you are. Otherwise, you're depressed or you go and blow all the money on things to distract you from finding who you are.
> There isn't any necessity to have to figure out what you truly want out of life or what your passions are.
I most certainly don't have life figured out and I'm not particularly passionate about much but I do know as a 54 year old, I'm on the downward side of this mountain and there's so many things that are interesting to me. I'd love nothing more than to be a full time dilettante, living my life quarter-by-quarter, exploring a new topic every 3 months.
I guess what I'm really wondering is how some people with more money than they will ever need don't wake up in the morning excited to work on some topic they find interesting. A certain portion are just depressed or dealing with some other mental illness, but isn't the typical person interested in lots of stuff that they don't pursue due to life getting in the way?
> isn't the typical person interested in lots of stuff
They might be, but is the typical person interested in doing it alone? Everyone else still has their lives getting in the way. They can't realistically skip going to work because you want to spend time with them. While some people are comfortable exploring life by themselves, I suspect the typical person is not.
You could use that newfound wealth to buy friends, but then you're effectively back to managing a business again, assuming business is the source of money per the grander discussion here. If that is what drives you, you are apt to do everything you can to avoid the exit in the first place and thus not ending up in this situation. Like Zuckerberg once said, if he sold Facebook he would focus on building another tech company and therefore there is no point in selling the one he already has.
Even still, if you do go down that road, and you want people of quality rather than grifters trying to scam you, to fill that role you are going to need some semblance of marketable goals for them to get behind. "Played friend for Richie Rich" doesn't advance their career or look good on a resume. They don't have the luxury of not having to worry about that kind of thing. Now you are truly back where you started, which, again, questions why walk away in the first place?
It might not be impossible to find something to keep you going, but it is easy to see how it could be really hard.
> When the lotto gets to be above $1 billion, I'll usually buy a ticket because it's fun to imagine the life I could have with that money.
I buy lotto tickets for the same reason! Their expected value is very low but the maximum value is thought-provoking. For me, $50k would be life-changing. One billion is hard to imagine.
What would you do with $50k that would make such a difference in your life?
It feels strange to write about this, but resolving a health issue, paying off debt, and escaping the nerve-wracking cycle of short-term, low-paying gigs would be life-changing. I am the sole breadwinner, working 50-60 hours a week just to stay afloat, so I don't have the time to prepare for interviews and pursue a stable career.
There are many people like me.
Likely drowning in debt.
When you're living paycheck-to-paycheck, even just $10K in credit card debt at 30% is enough to keep you down. ~$250/month merely pays the interest.
Maybe there's medical stuff that needs to get done. Maybe the car needs fixing. Maybe you haven't gone on vacation in YEARS and it's taking a huge toll on mental health. I mean, consider how many people work jobs that don't offer ANY PTO, so even going on a stay-cation costs money due to lost wages.
50k is enough to comfortably live on for a year even in Germany, much more so in other countries. Allows you to completely change perspectives or to pivot your entire career.
I know someone who paid off their credit card debt with an inheritance of roughly that size. It completely changed their outlook on life. Before every month was a struggle to just stay on top of the credit cards. Now they are debt-free and are actually able to save a bit of money every month. And for example able to go eat out without struggle.
Mind you by hn standards this is on a miniscule income. Still, many people are struggling hard and a windfall like this can make a huge difference in quality of life.
Sadly for me it'd pay half my debt off
edit: with that in mind, leanfire is on my mind since I'm single/don't actually need much to live
I’d buy a house, myself..
For 50k?
Found a place in a rural part of Missouri for $60k at the end of 2019. Everything has more than doubled in value since then. I had no idea what was about to happen when I signed that paper… but I’m sure glad I didn’t wait even a few months. Literally moved in February 2020 just in time to get really familiar with the new surroundings.
Decent new houses are USD 30k in Natal, RN, Brazil. More like USD 100k for beachfront property.
Yes why not. Hell, there are places in the world where you can buy whole villages for $50k!
For just a few k more. But I should not that I don’t live in the us.
I'd use that money to pay for private math lessons.
As somewhat of a counterpoint, my experience was we often romanticize these things that we’d like to do if only we had the time/money/etc. But sometimes you’ll find once you do have the opportunity to explore those things, it’s not as interesting as we had hoped. It might keep you busy for a year or so, but then boredom and lack of fulfillment rear their head again. I think this is why serial entrepreneurship is a pretty common thing.
I buy lotto tickets because my friends do a pool. I'm not sure I'd be happy with the money, but I am very sure I'd be very unhappy if I was a schmuck who didn't put in a very small amount (to me) of money to be in the pool. I consider it insurance more than anything!
Imo, it's mostly because our brains are still hunter-gatherer brains. While things like language acquisition and culture-instilling do fundamentally change us, our base hardware is still pre-currency pre-agriculture (pre-pretty-much-everything) hunter-gatherer. In Sapiens, it's noted that if a homo sapiens from 100k years ago ended up on an autopsy table in the modern day, you would never know anything was amiss anatomically. You might notice the teeth are unusually straight and free of decay (pre-grain diet, with huge amounts of chewing strengthening the jaw and allowing teeth to properly align), well-trained body with low body fat, and similarly free of many of the scourges of our modern diet and lifestyles). But that's it.
So, people suddenly get taken out of "the grind" which was their only approximation of the drive-reward cycle that their brain depends on. So what now? Unfortunately, they've been freed to confront man's ultimate foe: philosophy. And lots of people aren't cut out or ready for that. (One could even say most philosophers aren't, given how much many of them suffered).
Talk to some retired people. The loss of identity can hit you right in the ego. You might think retirement sounds great, but I’ve known several people who thought that, and then un-retired. Other people seem to do just fine; I’m not sure if it’s temperament or something else. And then again, there are some people who just fade away…
> It seems so strange to me to hear stories about people suddenly coming into a bunch of money and not finding contentment or even ending up depressed. If I could afford to retire today, I would do it in a heartbeat and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't run out of things I want to do.
Different goals. If your goal is pursuing hobbies or a certain lifestyle, work is a means to achieve that. Getting money just lets you skip the work part.
Their goal is creating a successful business. Having money and leaving the business means now they have no goal.
Agreed, I think I could find things to dedicate my time to that would be fulfilling. I'm not surprised, but maybe I do wonder what is in those folks lives who can't find something.
Having said that ... I'm also not in that situation, you never know.
> If I could afford to retire today, I would do it in a heartbeat and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't run out of things I want to do.
You probably underestimate the little voice that will show up at some point, aksing what is the point in doing that thing?
> hadn’t started investing beyond just the normal mutual funds/bonds/etc
You'd be surprised how far you get ahead with S&P 500 + Treasury inflation adjusted securities.
It's really hard to beat S&P500. Most funds after fees don't beat it. If S&P500 goes to shit, inflation adjusted securities give you guaranteed returns.
The richest IMO people are those who live a modest lifestyle only from their interest, never having to touch the principle. Maximizing who and what they spend their time on.
Yeah I didn't mean to talk that down, it's just the most no-brainer thing to do. As in, it's so obviously a good idea that any good portfolio will have a chunk devoted to that.
> I met someone who was an early employee at King about a year after they were acquired for 5.9b - it’s a little different since he wasn’t involved with the sale, but he was still processing the insane amount of money he had
Is there a word missing in this? How did they join after acquisition and have a meaningful financial windfall? And being an early employee?
It's very ambiguously phrased in multiple ways because I don't edit my HN posts, but it is technically correct, just vague! He was one of the first employees at King, and I met him a year after King was acquired. The "they" in "after they were acquired" is ambiguous which I think led to your confusion.
Related:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_flies_like_an_arrow%3B_...
Linked from the above:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_ambiguity
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antanaclasis
They met a year after.
> I find it’s really interesting how people act when the financial pressure gets suddenly removed.
Agreed. It should happen to more & more people.
Well, I posted a thank you note on HN and went to sleep!
I was financially independent even before this sale (benefit of running a bootstrapped company is that it _has_ to be profitable). Moreover, I had been gradually reducing my operational involvement in the company for years by grooming the team.
So, day to day, not much changes.
But I do have a nice chunk to do crazy-ass experiments in future, which I fully intend to do.
Congratulations Paras!! When I first started this post I was going to comment: Congratulations on your overnight success!! but held off :) Anyhow, I love that your plan is to do crazy ass experiments. I hope to read about them in the near future. I plan to do similar things, albeit with a slightly smaller budget-but sometime constraints can make you more creative. All the best!!!
“I am rich and I have no idea what to do”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42579873
[flagged]
Just because the company was sold for a bunch of money doesn't mean the people (yes even the founders) got a huge payout. Liquidation preference and other schemes can make sure that when the investors get their money there's nothing to left to share between other share holders including the founders.
(Not saying that this is the case here, just pointing that out)
EDIT: As some are already pointing out, yes the title says "bootstrapped". I missed that initially, so apologies.
To note as well the Techcrunch article specifically says 71% ownership.
This particular OP notes they were bootstrapped. That term might mean any number of things here, but I would imagine they had less exposure to losing out.
Or at least, I hope they did. What a fantastic win for them.
The title of this post literally says "bootstrapped"
I have a couple of friends in this exact situation. In their mid-thirties, no kids. They bought a very very nice house in the mountains after their startup got acquired, and spend most of their time travelling around the world. It's pretty awesome.
I had this 25 years ago when I was 25; the amount was lower but it was enough to never do anything ever again. I went hiking, got 1 billion ideas during walking for new companies and products, so started making some of them. Still am.
please share if there is something you can show to public.
I would hope some time off is possible, but I could totally see myself self-funding the next thing immediately after that time off. I'm guessing the bootstrapping types would get bored and look for the next thing
He is already running a hacker house in bangalore with cohorts of researchers and practiontioners getting together - https://turingsdream.co/
so probably it's picking one of those ideas or investing in it!
Typically PE deals require the founders to very much stay involved in the daily operations of the business unless they are near retirement age and that is the primary motive they are selling in the first place.
I'll be involved as a director on the board, but won't have operational involvement.
I know one founder that worked a few days a week at the company and took a lot of vacations.
Good for you ! Are you completely exiting the company, or will you still run the product, if only in part ? Are you leaving a team behind ?
I'm very curious about how to approach such a moment. There are so many horror stories where an acquisition ends up being "bad news" for teams and users alike - I hope this won't be the case here !
It's very common in transactions of this size that the seller "rolls" some equity, I.e. retains some ownership moving forward. The buyer likes this because it theoretically keeps them invested in the future of the company and the seller potentially gets a second bite when the PE firm flips the business.
linked TC story says "owned 70%... retaining a small ownership"
This post made my day. What a dope shoutout to everyone. Congrats to you! and your team and everyone who got paid.
Congrats again!
Congrats. Thanks for closing the loop. So many stories/comments on the internet are left unresolved; it is nice to see a loop closed.
I also want to thank my co-founder Sparsh for building the company with me. He deserves as much congrats as it's coming my way! (He sometimes lurks here on HN)!
Couldn't have built Wingify without him!
He'll continue to be associated with the company as the CEO and I feel rested knowing that :)
Thanks
Congrats man! Just as a side note, "paras" means best, in Finnish, so that'd make you the Best Chopra!
"Paras" in Sanskrit means "someone who, by their touch, turns anything into gold."
It's also Persian for "money"
Extremely strong nominative determinism at play here across multiple languages.
This is awesome, thanks!
Great run, Paras!
If I may:
- Did VWO ever apply to YC?
- Do you foresee PE asset stripping (crashing & burning) VWO eventually?
- What's next (5y time period)?
Thanks.
- No, never applied to YC.
- Not expecting this to happen
- I plan to explore starting a fundamental AI lab from India (China has Deepseek, US has OpenAI and Anthropic, Japan has Sakana - India doesn't have one yet!)
> explore starting a fundamental AI lab from India
I saw the back & forth between you and Aravind (pplx.ai) on Twitter. Impactful if you'd go down the FOSS route [0]. How soon are you expecting to start working on this? Are you hiring?
[0] I co-develop FOSS security tools for Android and considering building more to counter fraud (local languages is a barrier): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42785568
Could you share your Revenue and EBITDA of last 3 years? I am interested to understand multiplies. Did you sell all-cash or 51% cash + other?
what an intrusive, nosy question!
Some founders are very open about these things. It doesn't hurt to ask. They might even have a public blog about they can link to.
I mean.. the guy posted on a public forum "I just made $142M!"
Congrats! Was the "Show HN" feedback useful, and did it affect how you developed the product?
Yes, yes, so much yes.
Without the feedback, this wouldn't have happened.
I've learned that what kills startups isn't so much a bad product, but lack of feedback. You can iterate your way out of a valley if you know which way is up.
> You can iterate your way out of a valley if you know which way is up.
love this, I think this is my new personal motto!
Paras, as a an Indian founder, I've watched your journey for few years now. You are an inspiration and a thoughtful leader. Your "Mental Models for Startup Founders", is a very well written mirror for every founder to look into.
Hope you get some nice time off and go back with vigour to Turing's Dream now...
That's an epic win! 15 years of the startup grind/rollercoaster is impressive, well done!
Congrats on the successful exit and your journey to it!
I must say I always hated your tool for how it hijacks page rendering. I took long battles with our marketing team, as we fought for every single millisecond of loading times, and VWO introduction just thrown this all into the bin. And I wanted to put up a negative review on gartner but they never let it through - I guess it was because of the $25 USD gift card campaign, so the paid campaign would not backfire the product. Which of course made me hate your tool even more.
But that aside, I'm really glad (envy?) that the tool was successful for you!
Sorry about that! We now have server side testing option where A/B tests trigger from the backend.
VWO was bootstrapped? wow!
Some of the PMs I worked with loved showing off what VWO could do with a few clicks. Great tool.
Congrats on $200M!
Paras, You're now an inspiration for millions of devs, especially from India on what is possible to build bootstrapped.
Congrats! You all have done excellent work. As much as my tastes towards user experiments has changed, I've read your papers and you all really put forth a good product.
I've been publishing my work that never got PMF. Maybe it'll give you some inspiration for a later endeavor. You were one of my "competitors".
https://blog.graphicalmethods.com/ai-persona-media-testing-a...
Thank you!
@paras: Congrats! If you remember we met in Palo Alto when you were thinking about moving to the Bay Area -- I spilled my tea which soiled your t-shirt :-)
This is a fantastic outcome. Why not keep going?
Yes, sir I do remember :)
Why not keep going? Well, everything comes to an end eventually. Projects are kind of like that - they start and they end.
Amazing!
Good luck with whatever you are planning to do next.
Hmu, if you are in the Bay Area next.
Congrats! Thrilled for you and the team.
Thanks Patrick!
This couldn't have happened without you. You have impacted more people than you may realize.
I distinctly remember when I asked your feedback on my $9/mo plan, you told me to go for $99/mo. Baffled on how can someone pay so much for what I just coded, I settled for $49/mo. Should have listened to you.. :)
Congratulations!
I just checked when I started using VWO, and found a really nice exchange between you and me from Fri, Dec 11, 2009.
VWO is still the absolute best split testing tool out there. You deserve all the success.
This here speaks so much more to the success. Actual customers praising the product.
Wow, Dec 2009 is literally when I had launched the MVP of VWO. So cool to hear this story from you! Brings back so many memories of anxious excitement and working till 3 am :)
You deserved it Paras!!
Have distinct memories when you hired people from my College, to organizing hackathons, to your slack group and your newsletter had been inspirational.
Say hi to Varun from my side.
Congrats! I’m also bootstrapping my SaaS business and hope to reach your level one day!
Curious about your next steps—are you taking a break, or planning to build another startup?
I plan to start an AI lab from India. I sense an opportunity - India's way behind China and US.
@paraschopra congrats! Where and how did you go about learning marketing for startups? I am also currently building one and would love some pointers :) Thank you
You may not like this answer but the best starting point is to define marketing in the particular context and market in which your product exists. Marketing is so highly contextual that sometimes I don't even like the word.
Amazing outcome, congratulations! Back in 2015 working at Gusto as the first growth engineer I remember reading vwo blog to understand how a/b testing works.
All of our initial growth came from either word of mouth or the content I was churning out on a daily basis.
Must be sad to have to let things you built go, especially knowing how often selling them starts a downward spiral leading to their demise.
Actually, no.
I feel inspired and excited about life and what experiments this money can help me do (which otherwise wouldn't get funded).
Congrats @paraschopra ! This is an incredibly inspiring story for many of us.
A couple of questions:
>What would be your one piece of advice for someone looking to bootstrap a company?
Hire only when your revenue exceeds costs. Might be hard but this instills the discipline of always operating at a profit.
>How can one identify B2B problems worth solving? And how do you go about acquiring and selling to those customers?
Look for inefficiencies in workflows. If you save companies time or effort in a big way, they will pay up. To acquire customers, you need to super-precise emails (I never did outbound but I'm unsure my style of content marketing will fly today)
>If you were starting today, which domain would you choose? The one you feel most passionate about. But remain open to significant pivots. First idea never works, but it is essential to choose something you can really get into.
Congratulations Paras! Given that I know you IRL, it's so nice to see your post here!
JFYI for those who have seen similar posts on HN earlier, one of them (2020) from earlier was from Paras when his company got pretty successful already: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23466470
Congrats!
I am curious where do you think VWO is heading now? If people buy it, they expect growth, I assume. I guess the plan is to expand? Either through marketing or extending the product scope?
I was surprised by this:
> Delhi-based Wingify has grown from a two-person startup into a profitable global software provider with over 6,000 clients
So 6000 clients is enough for a $50mn/year revenue? Enterprise is where the money at!
Congrats Paras! Great to see a bootstrapped success story from someone that I have been following for over a decade. Kudos!
I really appreciate this post, especially after some of the recent ones about how we're in a startup winter. I'm bootstrapping a project on the side (although I acquired it as a POC, didn't build from scratch), and whether it's "realistic" or not, stories like this are still inspiring. Thank you!
Good luck!
Many Congratulations! Yours has been an inspirational journey for others in India looking to build for the world.
Congratulations! VWO was my GrowthX assignment so I’ve always followed your story - super inspirational!
And now, 15 years later, "site:ycombinator.com" is what I appended when I wanted to search for advice on what to keep in mind while selling my company.
There is a ton of great advice and information in the HN archives, so much so that it could be a startup idea itself.
15 years is such a long time. I understand why bootstrapped path takes longer than the VC path, I wonder if there are stats on average time from start till sale both bootstrapped vs VC. (On like year 8 of bootstrapped here).
VWO vs Optimizely was the biggest internal debate back in 2017. Enemies were made, heads rolled...
Congrats!
Haha, yes - we were neck to neck often.
Paras - this friggin awesome! As a 2x yc founder, who has chewed her share of glass trying to make something(s) people want, your bootstrapped story is inspiration for so many of us fellow founders. Congrats!
Thank you!
Congrats Paras. VWO has been my go-to A/B testing platform ever since everyone else either pivoted upmarket into six-figure “experience management platforms” or shut down (Google Experiments). I hope this won’t change!
I'm hopeful that VWO will continue to stay true to its roots!
So happy for you! Great job on growing to 50mil! I’m curious how this process got started, did you approach them or did they reach out? Are you still gonna be involved day to day, or are you taking a much deserved break?
I had been reducing my day to day involvement for a few years, and then we hired an investment banker who drove the process. I won't be involved day to day anymore.
I have thought about selling to PE as well, I founded my company in 2009 as well. But I have seen too many times how PE breaks promises made to customers and employees and I think it is unethical to sell to them.
Congrats on the exit, but PE is going to saddle the company with unnecessary debt, extract as much value it can, charge “consulting fees”, then strip it for parts in bankruptcy.
Customers are going to feel the squeeze in 1-2 years.
Congrats!!
Ahrefs says you reached 3.4mln backlinks and 18k linking websites: https://ahrefs.com/website-authority-checker/?input=https%3A...
How did you achive such incredible numbers?
I noticed you localized the landing pages to English/Spanish/German/Portuguese. I did that too when founding polyblog.io and multilocale.com but never got results incredible as yours. I noticed you use Yoast SEO, the sitemap.xml is not localized and you also didn't add localized meta tags. I suspect those localization "best practises" in reality matter very little compared to the sheer incredible amount of backlinks you got...
I love writing, perhaps that's the trick?
Congratulations! You’re the best! It would be a great tradition to donate to a random startup after each exit. Why isn’t this part of startup culture? Any PG-like article about that?
I along with my wife have been running Escape Velocity grants where we give no-conditions grant to young people under 25 who show promise.
https://invertedpassion.com/escape-velocity-grant/
Plan to accelerate it.
It's common for founders who have exited to become angel investors. Donating to a startup probably doesn't make a heap of sense though.
Question - What is typically the future of companies that are acquired by Private Equity firms?
As a former employee of VWO who worked there for ~3 years, I'm curious about the future of the company.
I think the plan is to keep growing profitably, but I'm also curious and keen to learn how private equity runs a company.
Saw your posts. It's reassuring to hear that the leadership team will continue to operate the company!
Good luck with everything, Paras. Have fun running the AI Lab :)
Just want to say congratulations on the journey and reaching such a massive accomplishment!
Seeing a post like this on HN with all of the positive comments and thoughts is truly an inspiration.
Totally random, but did you use Flourishlib (PHP) at some point ~15 years ago? Your name sounded familiar from a long-ago open source project.
Either way, congrats on your hard work and success!
Wow, i vaguely recall using it!
Hey, cool! Former VWO customer here (it was my previous company). You guys made a good product and had a good revenue team selling it as well. Thrilled that you had a great exit!
Congratulations!
I've got a small question. How do you deal with people asking for open sourcing your product/code, claiming they don't want to use a product they don't control?
Enterprises don't ask that. We never got that request.
I’m sure you made a lot of money on this exit, but given that your company was sold for so much it must mean you had already been making good money before the sale? Why sell?
I wasn't involved in day to day that much, and felt it was the right time to pass the baton.
I find I can barely bring myself to sell off stocks in a company that’s doing well, unless my future outlook has changed.
Did you anticipate there are changes coming that will require these businesses to radically change their products in order to survive?
Congrats! Questions:
* Are you happy with the journey, and the time horizon to exit?
* As advice to the impatient, do you have any insight into whether a sufficiently big exit could've been sooner?
- Yes, I'm very happy!
- Advice, paradoxically, is to not gun for an exit. Only companies that don't need an exit get an exit. (It's sort of like dating).
The HN dream. Congrats and enjoy the fruits of your labor :D
Enjoy your early retirement (that is what I would do in your case, spending the rest of my life enjoying things now that money is not a problem)
Incredible. Congrats, enjoy the fruits of your hard work!
Congratulations Paras! Awesome to hear a story like this and impressive that you managed to build such a strong company in such a short time.
Congrats Paras, I remember when I first found out about VWO in 2012.
An amazing outcome and a testament to you and the value of staying the course over 15 years!
For every one of these, there are 100 which are miserable failures, where the founders would have been better off with a career at FAANG.
Congrats! Since it seems you're based in India, I hope you can continue to invest in other promising Indian startups in the coming years!
Yes, I'm running https://turingsdream.co and intend to do a lot more of helping others going forward.
Wow, what an inspiring story? Care to share any stats, such as team size, when you hit your first ARR milestones, or anything else?
[0] clicky: https://vwo.com/blog/vwo-evolution-10-years/
I checked out the explainer video from 15 years ago in the linked blog post. It's crazy but this would still get me interested even today! Wow.
We hit our first million in 18 months when we were ~10 (I think).
My first milestone was $1000 (my salary before starting Wingify). The first month I launched, made $4000 and it kept doubling from there for a while.
I remember being glued to the customer and revenue chart for the first few years. I had even coded a small utility to make a small ka-ching sound on my laptop whenever we get a new customer :)
Ha ha, I had coded the same kind of utility in 2007 in my first business, to send me an SMS whenever there was a purchase. (and my phone was set up to go "ka-ching!" for SMSes from that number)
Turns out I had a bug in my code, and I got a text every time someone visited the page, which meant at the end of launch day I had lost money by paying more in SMS fees than I made in sales for the day!
Congrats! What made you not want to take any investments and what was the most counter intuitive thing that made you succeed?
We were always profitable and growing at a sustainable pace, so never needed funding.
Most counter intuitive thing was to not think I was missing out on anything as we didn't have VCs backing us.
congrats. for the things you achieved and the things you didn't do.
you could've given many reasons of not starting e.g i'm in India - I need to move to the US etc, I can't access capital, too young etc. there's a lot of competitors etc. but you took the plunge anyway and got handsomely rewarded for it.
congrats for your inspiring journey.
the key was my naivety as a 22 year old. I honestly didn't know any of the reasons why it couldn't work!
I love how wholesome the comments are, probably the most wholesome thread about startups I've ever seen. congrats :)
Here is what the site looked like initially - so don't be scared that everything has to look perfect and shiny.
Plans start at $49/month
https://web.archive.org/web/20140701054439/https://vwo.com/
and now
$393 per month, billed annually
https://vwo.com/pricing/
They sure did listen to @patio11
3 letter .com. pretty impressive to get one of those
meh if you're racking up $100k/mo you could probably afford one. Here are some auction on Godaddy:
Congratulations Paras!
I’ve been following your story since it’s inception and it’s incredible what you’ve achieved.
Best of luck for your next endeavours.
Wow, payoff after 15 years. Congratulations!
So I just need 2 more years :D and then +$49.98m/year revenue will come
Congratulations that's amazing. What are your next steps from here? Planning to continue or take a break?
Congrats Paras. I used VWO long time back and came away impressed. Looking to hear more great things from you.
Really inspiring to hear your success story Mr. Chopra. I showed it to my coworkers and we're all impressed.
Congratulations Paras! What are your plans next? Do you have to stay, new venture or just chill and enjoy?
Congratulations Paras! Great milestone. Please share more details for your journey and learnings as a blog post.
Congrats! This is really inspiring considering its based on internal accrual without external funding.
Well-deserved. Congratulations on the exit, and looking forward to seeing what you build next!
Congratulations! This is great - one of the few globally successful SaaS cos from India with an exit!
Happy for you - congratulations Paras, Sparsh and VWO. Did the (long-term) employees make anything?
This is a big event for not just Paras and myself, but many in the team :)
Yes, they did.
Very nice and congrats.
Yet sharing the cost of the sale I'd be concerned about doing that on the public Internet.
That's a fookin crazy exit!
Always like seeing these stories. Will mention it in my High Signal newsletter.
Congratulations! This is such a great story. I’ve followed you for years and your success is inspiring
Is it the final goal to get acquired?
Perhaps we can change the goals if death wasn't going to acquire us all.
Nothing to add except more congratulations to you.
That’s a huge exit and you deserve to be incredibly proud of it.
Congrats! I did a lot of work with VWO back in 2017 and 2018. Great platform, and deserved.
Congrats Paras! ps: Your mental models blog/book should be taught in business schools.
Thanks! I've updated them and they'll be published as a book (+ released online) this year.
This is a big achievement. Used the tool along against Hotjar and the likes and loved VWO.
Curious as to whether you had people hounding you for money after posting this.
I remember you launching this! I even used it and it was one if not the best at the time!
Well deserved.
Congrats! I used VWO extensively in a previous life as a "growth hacker".
i remember reading your blog and following your journey in the initial years it was quite inspirational and i learned so many things along the way thanks to you and @patio11. Thanks for sharing and be open about it.
Congratulations to you! It's great to see the hard work coming to fruition.
Huge, huge respect and Congrats!! Enjoy it and continue doing great work!
This is what HN community is all about. Wholesome posts like this one :)
What a great story & ending. I’m very happy for you - congratulations!
Well done! Some good questions here; hope you get a chance to answer them.
Long time user. Great product. Strong willed execution. Congrats to you!
Following you since very long, your journey is so inspiring!
Congrats! Would be interesting to see the growth rate of the company.
Congrats Paras. It's been fun to follow along the VWO journey!
Congratulations Paras, you made it! Looking forward to your next gig!
Congratulations Paras!
Been following you for a while on Twitter, love the book recos!
Congratulations! I remember using VWO in 2013, outstanding product!
Congratulations, @paraschopra! A great and well-deserved outcome :)
16 years+ for $200mn minus costs. Still pretty good, grats :)
Massive congrats! Good to see the dream is still alive and well!
What an incredible achievement! Congratulations @paraschopra
Founder of statsig here- congrats. Super inspiring story.
Thanks! Vijaye
I'm so so sorry for all your employees right now.
why?
Wow congrats Paras! such an inspiring journey you had..
How tragic that the goal of startups isn't to make something useful but to get acquired (with consequent inevitable dismemberment and shuttering). Well done on the $200M, I guess.
Tragic? I don't follow that. If the goal isn't to make something useful in one way or another then why would a startup enterprise ever get acquired?
Is "makes the producer a lot of money" the only factor you consider when thinking of a good product?
Congrats and inspiring to hear your journey! :)
Daaamn. RIP to your DMs as the kids say. Congrats!
Fantastic, inspiring post. Congratulations x 200!
Congrats! Do you have any idea what to do next?
After reading the words of VWO founder and the wholesome responses/comments, I can say that Humility at its finest.
Congrats to Paras Chopra, and I applaud everyone for this gesture.
Wow! I used you back in the day. Good work, Paras.
Congratulations! Did you reach out or did they?
Just upvoted the original post, you earned it
Mega congratulations. Great community here.
Proved again, you can just do things.
Congrats Paras, really happy for you!
this is the kind of stuff that motivates me to push through. cheers man, you are an inspiration.
relax and then find your way past the cash, and to being rich: love and beauty with you family
That's awesome.. huge congrats!
Inspiration for all of us. Congrats!
Congratulations; really impressive.
Great VWO, Kudos to the founders!
Off to /r/fatfire for you
Lets gooooooo!! Congrats man!
Congrats Paras – amazing story!
Congratulations @paraschipra
Congratulations! Well done.
Congrats, this is amazing!
Congrats! Thats wonderful.
Will patio11 get a share?
i owe him!
This means he wont?
Congratulations Paras :)
Amazing, congrats man!!
Impressive, congrats!
Nice win, Congrats!
Why did you sell it?
Inspiring. Congrats!
Big congratulations!
what an impressive story, please accept my praise!
Why"startup"? It's just a businesses, nothing special
Eh? Did you really need to comment this?
Congrats, Paras!
Congratulations!
Congrats Paras !
Congratulations!
Congrats Paras!
Congrats Paras.
Congratulation!
what a sweet message. Congratulations!
Wow! Congrats!
Holy shit, you've made it!
You are an inspiration for us, those who haven't made it. I've been around for a similar time and never even ran my own company.
I hope one day to hit a homerun like you did. You deserved it. Cheers!
so inspiring, congratulations!
Congrats!
Congrats
Congrats~~
Congrats
Another overnight success - after 16 years of work.
Well done, very inspiring.
amazing story! congrats!
inspirational stuff man!
Can I borrow $5? (joke)
Congrats on the success!
Congratulations. Now tell us stories when things were hard and you almost gave up. Bet you have a lot of stories like this.
Yep, but over time they make you stoic and that stoicism helps outside of startups too.
congratulations
so proud of you
Holy shit you killed it! Congratulations.
You are an inspiration for us, that didn't make it (yet).
Good luck!
wow congrats!!
congrats
Another brick in the wall
15 years in tech is like a month in crypto
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Please don't take HN threads in sour and bitter directions like that. We want curious conversation here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Maybe they would find those activities fulfilling? It’s their life, and wealth, after all.
For what it's worth gp is a reference to this post[1], in which the author does not.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42579873
Texas hills are also an option, if Himalayas are not in your backyard :)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42806991
This guy has taken the (conceptual) step beyond viscerality-as-a-salve:
https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2025/01/22/deat...
I see, thanks. I wasn't aware of the reference :)
A lot of bootlicking in the comments.
Sorry guys, this is sad news for the world. You just made the divide between ultra rich and ultra poor larger. And please, don't start complaining on how hard it was.
You do the same when you accept your salary every month. Start by giving that up.