Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today | Hacker News Reader

Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today

2,246 pointsparaschopra396 comments

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!

View on HN

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

Thanks!

hello ex-boss! congrats :D

Awesome dude

(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...

Congrats to you both!! Paras- you guys were always one of the ones we looked up to when starting Amplitude way back in 2012.

Optimizely as in Episerver?? I thought Optimizely was Episerver's rebrand.

Episerver bought Optimizely and then took the name.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

“I am rich and I have no idea what to do”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42579873

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.

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.

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 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."

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!)

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!

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.

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.

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:

    1. What would be your one piece of advice for someone looking to bootstrap a company?
    2. How can one identify B2B problems worth solving? And how do you go about acquiring and selling to those customers?
    3. If you were starting today, which domain would you choose?

>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.

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.

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?

  Today, we're a team of 250+ people and seen that initial "Show HN" grow into a $20mn+ bootstrapped business (no VC funding). If anyone's interested in reading more, I've blogged this journey (from launch to now) on our website [0]

from: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23466470 (2020)

[0] clicky: https://vwo.com/blog/vwo-evolution-10-years/

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 :)

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

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?

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!

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

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.

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