Bootstrapped Wingify moves to a bigger office and hits 1600+ customers | Hacker News Reader

Bootstrapped Wingify moves to a bigger office and hits 1600+ customers

visualwebsiteoptimizer.com

104 pointsparaschopra42 comments

I am a raving fan of VisualWebsiteOptimizer.com (VWO) and highly recommend using or trying their A/B product over any other. Paras truly cares about his product, responds personally to inquiries although I am sure that as the business grows he may not be able to do that as much. It was clear to me from day 1 as an early customer (1st test deployed Sept 2010) that he truly cares about his customer, listens to his customer, and works insanely hard for his customer as does his entire team; and you can not put a price tag on that, in my opinion.

Now go subscribe to VWO and take his team to 2000+ customers! It will be beyond worthwhile for your website and business. It has been for mine.

Thank you for building a phenomenal product @paraschopra and team!

Thanks James! I remember you being one of the earliest customers of VWO. With expanded team, we're baking lots and lots of interesting new features. But I will make sure the customer experience remains #1 priority even as we grow :)

I'd like to chime in as well: VWO is awesome, and Paras' support rocks.

Paras's (founder of Wingify) blog posts on

Sorry your cool web app is probably not going to make money

http://paraschopra.com/blog/entrepreneurship/webapp-is-not-g...

How to find startup ideas that make money

http://paraschopra.com/blog/entrepreneurship/how-to-find-sta...

might be appropriate given his stunning success (congrats Paras)

The other great thing about Wingify is that they aimed from the beginning at a global product vs a 'localized' knock off of an existing American product.

The link for "Sorry your cool web app is probably not going to make money" is: http://paraschopra.com/blog/entrepreneurship/webapp-is-not-g...

fixed. thanks. sorry about that. too much time without sleep.

I've been using Optimizely, but after hearing from about VWO from COUNTLESS people I think I'm going to make the switch.

Plus, bootstrappers should support other bootstrappers, eh?

I'd be keen to hear the difference from someone who has used both in anger. I'm with VWO (because it gets mentioned around here so much - so I went there first) and it's awesome but it's always good to keep your options open.

Congrats, Paras!

As for a comparison, Optimizely uses Akamai which has 100,000 nodes in 75 countries. VWO uses Cloudfront and does two round-trips. Cloudfront has 32 points of presence in 12 countries.

Optimizely response time: Slowest: 289ms, Average: 65ms, Slowest: 19ms VWO response time: Slowest 1983ms, Average: 276ms, 171ms

Source: http://till.klampaeckel.de/blog/archives/100-Shopping-for-a-...

Unique features to Optimizely that VWO does not have:

- Mobile web support & editor

- Dynamic text insertion

- Staging server support

- Human-readable results

- Documented API

- Advanced developer tools

- Cross-browser testing for Chrome, Safari, Firefox, IE, iOS, and Android

- One-click integrations with Google Analytics, Omniture SiteCatalyst, KISSmetrics, MixPanel

- Implementation is 1-line of code vs 21 lines of code

- Pricing starts at $19/mon vs $49/mon

- Optimizely comes with a 100% money back satisfaction guarantee with 99.999% service level agreement

- Optimizely support offers web, phone, email, and a dedicated account manager, as well as the CEO's direct cell for Platinum customers

In terms of adoption by the top 10,000 websites on the internet Optimizely is 6x bigger than VWO.

Sources: http://trends.builtwith.com/analytics/Optimizely http://trends.builtwith.com/analytics/Visual-Website-Optimiz...

Note: I co-founded Optimizely and used Google Website Optimizer, Omniture Test&Target, and VWO but by no means an expert in their products.

Thanks Dan. Appreciate you pitching in. However, actually, you have old statistics. We recently rolled out a dynamic, custom built CDN that sped up our response times by 7x. Our average is now 45ms. We spent a lot of time perfecting our system. See the details here: http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/geo-dis...

Plus, you are wrong about almost all of your points:

- We do have a well documented API. Many customers use it on a daily basis to integrate VWO into their systems. http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/announc...

- Our 21 lines of code is unique as it provides an asynchronous fail safe method. With 1-line of code, websites still have a theoretical single point a failure where code is fetched from your servers/CDN. If your code isn't able to get fetched for any reason, standard timeout of browser (30 seconds) applies and since it is synchronous page load stalls. With our asynchronous approach, we completely decouple the dependence (even if it doesn't look elegant, it certainly is much preferable to our customers). Here are the details: http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/asynchr...

- I'm not sure what you mean by Human-readable results. Certainly we have some great looking reports that our customers love. 50+ case studies on our websites is a testimony to that http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/case-studies.php In fact, one independent website that tracks UI from color blindness perspective says we have one of the best charts out there http://wearecolorblind.com/example/visual-website-optimizer/

- We offer developer CSS/JavaScript API that allows complete modification of a website without touching any backend code

- Our tests run on mobiles as well, a lot of our enterprise customers regularly test their mobile landing pages

- We have one-click integration for Google Analytics, and have plugins for KISSMetrics, SiteCatalyst, etc.

- ALL employees of Wingify (including me the CEO and our CTO) do support for all levels of customers (not just enterprise ones). In fact, support is bed rock of our offering. My number is there on our about us page http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/about-us.php

According to best of my knowledge, apart from cross-browser previews I do not think there is any feature that VWO lacks. You may want to cross-check your facts. Our backend delivery infrastructure prioritizes on speed and fall-back rather than elegance of how the code looks.

However, you did not mention the features VWO has that Optimizely currently lacks:

- Usability testing. Our users can get quantitative feedback and improvement ideas on what they should be A/B testing http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/geo-beh...

- Heatmaps and Clickmaps to show where people are clicking on their pages. Our customers LOVE This feature and some solely use VWO for its heatmap functionality http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/ab-test...

- Enterprise security options such as whitelisting office IPs for login and realtime activity notifications to administrator http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/hallowe...

- Free 30 day trial without requiring a credit card.

- Numerous other small features that I won't go into (test labels, test organization, frequently used goals, roles/permissions, account management, reports exportable to CSV/PDF, etc.)

It's great to see multiple products in the market trying to solve this problem and I admire your ability to do so without a large team or any funding. It's unclear how the market will grow in the future but we're thrilled to see Optimizely grow +397% amongst the top 10,000 websites in the last year to over 2,500 happy customers.

I'm glad to see you are focusing on improving your response time. Unfortunately hitting live servers serving dynamic content in 5 locations is never going to be able to beat 100,000 edge-cached nodes in 75 countries serving static content when it comes to response time and reliability.

According to the link you provided it looks like Pingdom reports VWO response times as:

VWO Slowest Average: 352ms

VWO Overall Average: 207ms

VWO Fastest Average: 45ms

According to Pingdom, Optimizely response times are:

Optimizely Slowest Average: 95ms

Optimizely Average: 65ms

Optimizely Fastest Average: 19ms

Here is a head-to-head comparison of Optimizely vs. VWO including response time and feature differentiation: http://i.imgur.com/BRTxC.png

To clarify some of the points you might have misunderstood:

- Here is a demo showing the Optimizely visual mobile editor: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HucXw_egPRs

- Documentation of Optimizely one-click integrations: http://support.optimizely.com/customer/portal/articles/58188...

- The Optimizely API is publicly available at: https://www.optimizely.com/docs/api

You are right we don't currently offer ancillary features like heatmaps and usability testing. We've been focused on offering the best possible experience for A/B and multivariate testing.

Did Optimizely make that graphic? The support comparison is deceptive. You are comparing the basic plan of VWO to the platinum plan of Optimizely. And comparing lines of code is meaningless. In fact for the reasons outlined above by paras, a 21 line implementation which does not block the site load is more beneficial to most users.

@paras: Your response times do not look good. Why are you using a homegrown pseudo CDN instead of a real one like akamai or limelight ? Also why not make your API docs public ?

The reasons for having a homegrown CDN is mentioned in the article. The major reason though is that our URL matching (determining whether to run a test or not on a particular URL) is complex, and CDNs cannot handle that.

Reason API doc is not public is because API is on demand right now, but anyone can use it. They just have to request for a key from us.

I still don't get why the docs cannot be public. Stripe for example has public API docs.

Hey Dan,

I am a bit confused.

You Say - 100% money back satisfaction guarantee

Your Terms say (https://www.optimizely.com/terms) - 4.B. No Refunds. You may cancel your Member account at any time; however, there are no refunds for cancellation. In the event that Optimizely suspends or terminates your account or this Agreement, you understand and agree that you shall receive no refund or exchange for any Optimizely Property, any unused time on a subscription, any license or subscription fees for any portion of the Service, any content or data associated with your account, or for anything else.

Also couldn't locate the SLA on your site, can we have the link?

We offer our 100% money-back satisfaction guarantee prominently on our pricing page located at https://www.optimizely.com/pricing

All plans come with a 30 day FREE trial and a 100% Satisfaction Money Back Guarantee.

Our SLA is part of the Mutual Services Agreement contract we have with customers.

I do see it being prominently listed in Pricing page, but the "Terms of Service" is a binding contract which I have to agree to while I signup, don't you think they should be consistent.

Is this SLA done individually with each customer after they signup?

Good point and we'll clarify the terms of service and make our SLA more prominent.

I've said it before and I'll say it again (because Paras and his team deserve it): I tell people about VWO as the prime (and possibly, the only) example of an Indian startup with a truly global product.

Edit: Sorry, forgot Zoho.

Kayako, FusionCharts, BrowserStack, FreshDesk are other great Indian software companies that I admire. (The first 3 are bootstrapped too, as far as I know).

As a user, I pretty much have to chime in here & say this is well deserved success.

It's a great product & pretty much the best customer support I've ever encountered. Every time I've needed it, I was in contact (email & skype) with Someone Who Knows and not afraid of treading into the gray area between your problem & their problem.

I like the VWO guys. I was kind of an ass and ranted about some issues in their JS on twitter recently and they reached out to me and addressed the issues I was encountering. Very responsive, look forward to seeing what they can come up with.

As a long time user of VWO, I'm very impressed and pleased with their success.

Early on, perhaps about 2 years ago, I reached out to Paras asking for an API so our internal dashboard could show the status and performance of all running tests.

Within a few days, there was a private (or non-published) API ready to go. Since then, my business and I have been using it daily.

Disclaimer: I even supplied a testimonial for their homepage after frustrating experiences with Google and Omniture. :)

excellent. with 1600+ paying customers that means they are clearing over $1M in revenue/year. ($49 being cheapest plan * 1600 = 80k/month)

Our enterprise customers pay thousands of dollars per month, so it is well over $1M :)

Thats awesome. I remember when you launched on HN not long ago. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=876141

Yep, that was for the original prototype called Wingify (which I had to completely discard. Horrible user experience). Based on feedback from initial users of the prototype, then I had built Visual Website Optimizer and had launched on HN http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=991252

congrats on the excellent progress!

Considering the listed plans alone are $49, $129, $249, $729, $900, $1,700 I'm willing to bet annual revenue is many, many, MANY multiples higher than $1 million.

And that's not taking into account all the custom enterprise plans on the very high end.

Really inspirational and motivational stuff for us entrepreneurs just starting with out SaaS apps to see this - and it's all done without giving away a chunk of ownership.

Thanks and good luck, Paras.

That's what I figured as well. But was just looking at the bare minimum. glad to see they are a profitable and young business.

Congratulations @paraschopra. Really great to the success of your company/products.

Thanks man. We're very excited about building a great software company and staying bootstrapped as long as we can :)

Hey Paras, What was your methodology for customer development, customer acquisition in the early days of your startup? Or, did you build for yourself? What are the distribution channels you currently use?

Main methodology was guest blogging. I contributed exhaustive articles in publications such as Smashing Magazine, CopyBlogger, etc. The articles were purely educational in nature, taught people what A/B testing was and VWO was introduced as one of the of the new tools to do A/B testing easily.

The second big focus was on passion for feedback from early customers and incorporating that into the product. Really, our product is driven mostly by customer feedback and that is why our customers love talking about it.

I plan to write comprehensively about it. But I do keep posting my experiences on my blog http://paraschopra.com/blog/

There's something about bootstrapped companies that I really like. I've always thought if I began a start-up, it would be without any venture capital.

It seems so many successful small internet businesses lately are attacking meta-problems for the benefit of small internet businesses. Sort of like Levi selling bluejeans to gold miners in California.

congratulations Paras. Great bootstrapping!

Thanks :)

Congrats, Some questions :-) Are you incorporated in US? If not what do you use for payments?

Nope, we're an India based company. We use 2checkout for payments.

congrat Sparsh

-- from Trung

Thanks Trung, good to see you on HN :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com