Visual Website Optimizer featured in India's national newspaper | Hacker News Reader

Visual Website Optimizer featured in India's national newspaper

epaper.timesofindia.com

88 pointssushi21 comments

This is a very recent development among media housed in India; they have suddenly started realizing that people here are actually earning money by doing a "valid" business on Internet. You can also find lot of bloggers being covered by national newspapers very frequently. I say, this is a very good move because more than anything else it will help in reducing the tabooness of leaving a secure job for doing a startup.

Congrats.

Times of India is world's largest circulating English newspaper [1], however "The Hindu" carries the banner of "India's national newspaper".

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_circulation#World_new...

Ah didn't know about it. That makes it even better! We got featured in world's largest circulating English newspaper.

Congrats.

I can't help to think that the discussion that was on here a while back have something to do with it all.

HN have turned into quite an impressive ecosystem (even if my assumptions about your success is wrong :) )

Thanks! I can't thank HN community enough for the guidance and support. I remember doing Ask HN about 1.5 years ago and got great feedback (especially from patio11, webwright and others). Now even though we're still bootstrapped; team has grown to 6 (earlier it was me alone). At the time of Ask HN there were 0 users, now we have paying customers including Microsoft, Groupon, Mitsubishi and other big brands. It's been an awesome ride! (Hint: May is also 1 year anniversary of our paid plans and we are planning something very special)

The best thing about our business is that we earn in USD but the expenses here (in India) are less by a factor or so. Hence even without raising VC funding we can afford to hire top talent, let them tackle challenging problems (servers doing 1.6 billion pageviews per month) and pay them really well (at par with Google, Yahoo, etc). Can't wait to see what's in store ahead...

Could you share what was the process like? TOI people contacted you or you contacted them? phone interview? email? Really interested in knowing this. Thanks.

[Edit] I myself was contacted by a national hindi newspaper, but it didn't work out.

Sure, a fellow entrepreneur (Pallav from FusionCharts -- awesome guy, has an interview on Mixergy) connected me to the journalist who had covered them. The journalist called and we then exchanged lot of mails and phone calls. Then he went radio silent and now out of nowhere, we got a story!

Great. Thanks :)

Congrats! Curious - what is your technology stack?

LAMP stack with nginx as load balancer and Varnish as cache layer. Redis as queue. And, of course, how can I forget most helpful memcache

And, oh btw our test designer and actual A/B test execution relies a lot on jQuery and JavaScript.

Thanks, 1 billion+ impressions are impressive. Would love to hear more about some of the technical challenges you face. Perhaps a blog post sometime on that? :)

Yeah, I think a blog post would be interesting. We scaled from having 1 server to now application spread across 19 servers (most are Apache 2G RAM; 2 varnish caches 4G each; 1 load balancer 4G. We are going to add one more load balancer soon.)

Congrats paras, you are a big inspiration for every startup especially in India.

I second that :)

Is Google Website Optimizer really 5 years old?

Yep, it was launched in 2006. Here is the launch announcement: http://techcrunch.com/2006/10/18/google-launches-website-opt...

Congrats! Way to go! You guys have a product with great potential.

I can say that seeing your current implementation.

great job paras!

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