Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today

2216 points by paraschopra 7 days ago | 411 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!

firefoxd 7 days ago | next |

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

dang 7 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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)

dsiroker 7 days ago | prev | next |

(Co-founder of Optimizely here) Congrats! It was fun competing with you

paraschopra 7 days ago | root | parent | next |

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.

murukesh_s 7 days ago | root | parent | next |

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...

waonderer 5 days ago | root | parent | next |

I think that's more skewed towards the AI startups. Other startups have rather seen a dip in recent times, at least in India.

abhimanyue1998 7 days ago | root | parent | prev |

AI inference is expensive, hence, funding is needed. In future, when AI infra becomes cheaper, we will see more bootstrapped AI startups too.

richardfeynman 7 days ago | prev | next |

@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.

shostack 7 days ago | root | parent | next |

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.

vectoral 7 days ago | root | parent | next |

I haven't dug into this much--out of curiosity, what do you think are some of the most useful things you can learn?

withinboredom 7 days ago | root | parent |

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.

tiborsaas 7 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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.

jacob_rezi 7 days ago | root | parent | prev |

wanna join Rezi? we dont have a marketing team but get 4K signups a day

pryelluw 7 days ago | root | parent | next |

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.

rwalling 7 days ago | prev | next |

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.

ExxKA 7 days ago | root | parent | next |

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.

paraschopra 7 days ago | root | parent | prev |

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!

mattfrommars 7 days ago | prev | next |

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?

paraschopra 7 days ago | root | parent |

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!

mattfrommars 7 days ago | root | parent | next |

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?

paraschopra 7 days ago | root | parent | next |

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.

plinkplonk 7 days ago | prev | next |

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?

paraschopra 6 days ago | root | parent | next |

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.

nfm 7 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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.

chii 7 days ago | root | parent | prev |

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).

tikkun 7 days ago | prev | next |

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."

paraschopra 7 days ago | root | parent | next |

Thanks for linking it here.

If there are any AI researchers or engineers in Bangalore/India lurking here, please consider applying.

crypto2025 5 days ago | root | parent |

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.

captn3m0 7 days ago | root | parent | prev |

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.

nexarithm 7 days ago | prev | next |

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!

paraschopra 7 days ago | root | parent |

What would you like to know about the process?

rexreed 6 days ago | root | parent | next |

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.

paraschopra 6 days ago | root | parent |

I've written a lot of my lessons here: https://invertedpassion.com/free-book-mental-models-for-star...

sillysaurusx 6 days ago | root | parent | next |

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!

paraschopra 6 days ago | root | parent |

Comparison with PG's essays is a great honor. His essays are what inspired me to go down the startup journey myself.

elevatedastalt 7 days ago | prev | next |

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?

paraschopra 7 days ago | root | parent | next |

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.

mooreds 7 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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.

bigiain 7 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

Just as a counter point, private equity seems to have helped WPEngine become so successful that Mullenweg has totally lost his mind over it.

swozey 7 days ago | root | parent | next |

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.

sillysaurusx 6 days ago | root | parent | next |

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.

swozey 5 days ago | root | parent | next |

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.

bigiain 5 days ago | root | parent | prev |

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.

sillysaurusx 4 days ago | root | parent | next |

Thanks so much! This was exactly what I was hoping for. I really appreciate all the detail you went into, and the followup links.

weareqed 3 days ago | root | parent | prev |

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

bigiain 3 days ago | root | parent |

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".)

weareqed a day ago | root | parent |

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

bigiain 7 days ago | root | parent | prev |

This brand new drama (well, August/Sept vintage drama) reveals a _lot_ about Mullenweg.

I, for one, am happy to specifically call him awful.

stackghost 7 days ago | root | parent | prev |

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".

dahart 6 days ago | root | parent | next |

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-...

prewett 6 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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.

l2silver 7 days ago | prev | next |

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?

dang 7 days ago | prev | next |

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

ulf-77723 7 days ago | prev | next |

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.

paraschopra 7 days ago | root | parent |

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!

shostack 7 days ago | root | parent | next |

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?

paraschopra 7 days ago | root | parent |

When you don't have enough data, doing usability tests and understanding + applying best practices can help you avoid common mistakes.

mixmastamyk 6 days ago | root | parent | prev |

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.

duxup 7 days ago | prev | next |

Congratulations.

I'm curious... what do people do after something like this?

Vacation?

jborden13 7 days ago | root | parent | next |

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.

duxup 7 days ago | root | parent | next |

It is interesting how many stories in a way involve running or moving away from the lifestyle that ... bought them a new lifestyle.

jborden13 7 days ago | root | parent | next |

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...

jacob_rezi 7 days ago | root | parent | next |

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)

jborden13 7 days ago | root | parent |

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.

csallen 7 days ago | root | parent | prev |

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.

jborden13 7 days ago | root | parent |

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.

hipadev23 7 days ago | root | parent | prev |

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.

sebmellen 7 days ago | root | parent | next |

There is a luxury class at both ends of the economic spectrum, as Veblen observed.

taneq 7 days ago | root | parent | next |

The trick is to attain leisure while also having the resources to live safely and comfortably.

tasuki 6 days ago | root | parent |

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.

taneq 6 days ago | root | parent |

> 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.

tasuki 5 days ago | root | parent |

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 :)

tasuki 7 days ago | root | parent | prev |

*leisure, I suppose. I'd love to read more on that. Is that from "The Theory of the Leisure Class"?

klik99 7 days ago | root | parent | next |

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

sebmellen 7 days ago | root | parent | prev |

Thank you for correcting. I can no longer edit the parent comment and was sleep deprived while writing it.

But yes!

Grosvenor 7 days ago | root | parent | prev |

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.

misiti3780 7 days ago | root | parent | prev |

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.

klik99 7 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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.

criddell 7 days ago | root | parent | next |

> 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.

sky2224 7 days ago | root | parent | next |

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.

criddell 7 days ago | root | parent |

> 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?

9rx 7 days ago | root | parent |

> 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.

dr_kiszonka 7 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

> 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.

applied_heat 7 days ago | root | parent | next |

What would you do with $50k that would make such a difference in your life?

dr_kiszonka 7 days ago | root | parent | next |

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.

Sohcahtoa82 7 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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.

mschuster91 7 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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.

climb_stealth 7 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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.

ge96 7 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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

Dansvidania 7 days ago | root | parent | prev |

I’d buy a house, myself..

WJW 7 days ago | root | parent |

For 50k?

20after4 7 days ago | root | parent | next |

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.

conductr 7 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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.

servercobra 7 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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!

mrsilencedogood 7 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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).

sevensor 7 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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…

pton_xd 7 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

> 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.

duxup 7 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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.

WA 7 days ago | root | parent | prev |

> 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?

nojvek 7 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

> 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.

klik99 7 days ago | root | parent |

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.

thwarted 7 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

> 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?

klik99 7 days ago | root | parent | next |

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.

Take8435 7 days ago | root | parent | prev |

> I find it’s really interesting how people act when the financial pressure gets suddenly removed.

Agreed. It should happen to more & more people.

paraschopra 7 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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.

zafka 6 days ago | root | parent |

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!!!

samiv 7 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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.

Klonoar 7 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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.

gregschlom 7 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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.

anonzzzies 7 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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.

dylan604 7 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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

soheil 7 days ago | root | parent | prev | next |

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.

phtrivier 7 days ago | prev | next |

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 !

speakfreely 6 days ago | root | parent | next |

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.

gigatexal 7 days ago | prev | next |

This post made my day. What a dope shoutout to everyone. Congrats to you! and your team and everyone who got paid.

Congrats again!

paraschopra 7 days ago | prev | next |

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 :)

mooreds 7 days ago | prev | next |

Congrats. Thanks for closing the loop. So many stories/comments on the internet are left unresolved; it is nice to see a loop closed.

tincholio 7 days ago | prev | next |

Congrats man! Just as a side note, "paras" means best, in Finnish, so that'd make you the Best Chopra!

ignoramous 7 days ago | prev | next |

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.

paraschopra 7 days ago | root | parent |

- 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!)

ignoramous 6 days ago | root | parent |

> 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

devops000 7 days ago | prev | next |

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?

sedatk 7 days ago | prev | next |

Congrats! Was the "Show HN" feedback useful, and did it affect how you developed the product?

paraschopra 7 days ago | root | parent |

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.

mikepalmer 7 days ago | root | parent |

> 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!

havercosine 7 days ago | prev | next |

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...

sakerbos 7 days ago | prev | next |

That's an epic win! 15 years of the startup grind/rollercoaster is impressive, well done!

jarek83 6 days ago | prev | next |

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!

nojvek 7 days ago | prev | next |

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.

indus 6 days ago | prev | next |

@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?

paraschopra 6 days ago | root | parent |

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.

indus 6 days ago | root | parent |

Amazing!

Good luck with whatever you are planning to do next.

Hmu, if you are in the Bay Area next.

igauravsehrawat 6 days ago | prev | next |

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.

patio11 7 days ago | prev | next |

Congrats! Thrilled for you and the team.

paraschopra 7 days ago | root | parent |

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.. :)

harisenbon 7 days ago | prev | next |

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.

paraschopra 7 days ago | root | parent | prev |

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 :)

williamjinq 7 days ago | prev | next |

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?

notcrazylol 7 days ago | prev | next |

@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

paraschopra 6 days ago | root | parent |

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.

romanzubenko 7 days ago | prev | next |

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.

dockerd 6 days ago | prev | next |

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?

paraschopra 6 days ago | root | parent |

>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.

seba_dos1 7 days ago | prev | next |

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.

paraschopra 6 days ago | root | parent |

Actually, no.

I feel inspired and excited about life and what experiments this money can help me do (which otherwise wouldn't get funded).

XCSme 7 days ago | prev | next |

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!

barunbuilds 6 days ago | prev | next |

Congratulations! VWO was my GrowthX assignment so I’ve always followed your story - super inspirational!

singhshashi 7 days ago | prev | next |

Many Congratulations! Yours has been an inspirational journey for others in India looking to build for the world.

srirangr 7 days ago | prev | next |

Congrats Paras! Great to see a bootstrapped success story from someone that I have been following for over a decade. Kudos!

senordevnyc 7 days ago | prev | next |

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!

keiferski 7 days ago | prev | next |

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.

Anisa_Mirza 6 days ago | prev | next |

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!

brianwawok 6 days ago | prev | next |

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).

giorgioz 6 days ago | prev | next |

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...

gk1 7 days ago | prev | next |

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!

silexia 7 days ago | prev | next |

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.

xyst 7 days ago | prev | next |

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.

amendegree 7 days ago | prev | next |

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?

paraschopra 7 days ago | root | parent |

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.

ellis0n 6 days ago | prev | next |

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?

kylegalbraith 7 days ago | prev | next |

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.

wbond 7 days ago | prev | next |

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!

manish_gill 7 days ago | prev | next |

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.

paraschopra 7 days ago | root | parent |

I think the plan is to keep growing profitably, but I'm also curious and keen to learn how private equity runs a company.

manish_gill 7 days ago | root | parent |

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 :)

xp84 7 days ago | prev | next |

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!

DelightOne 7 days ago | prev | next |

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?

deadbabe 7 days ago | prev | next |

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?

paraschopra 7 days ago | root | parent |

I wasn't involved in day to day that much, and felt it was the right time to pass the baton.

deadbabe 6 days ago | root | parent |

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?

neilv 7 days ago | prev | next |

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?

paraschopra 7 days ago | root | parent |

- 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).

igleria 7 days ago | prev | next |

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)

ExxKA 7 days ago | prev | next |

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.

actionable 7 days ago | prev | next |

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!

7e 7 days ago | prev | next |

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.

howon92 7 days ago | prev | next |

Congrats! What made you not want to take any investments and what was the most counter intuitive thing that made you succeed?

paraschopra 6 days ago | root | parent |

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.

dzonga 7 days ago | prev | next |

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.

myuzio 7 days ago | prev | next |

I love how wholesome the comments are, probably the most wholesome thread about startups I've ever seen. congrats :)

myflash13 7 days ago | prev | next |

Wow, what an inspiring story? Care to share any stats, such as team size, when you hit your first ARR milestones, or anything else?

ignoramous 7 days ago | root | parent | next | 

  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/

sureglymop 7 days ago | root | parent |

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.

paraschopra 7 days ago | root | parent | prev |

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 :)

sebastiennight 7 days ago | root | parent |

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!

soheil 7 days ago | prev | next |

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

paulpauper 7 days ago | root | parent |

3 letter .com. pretty impressive to get one of those

soheil 7 days ago | root | parent |

meh if you're racking up $100k/mo you could probably afford one. Here are some auction on Godaddy:

  wmr.com $5,000 Min. Offer
    
  pox.com $95,000 Buy Now
    
  otp.com $100,000 Min. Offer

shreezus 6 days ago | prev | next |

Well-deserved. Congratulations on the exit, and looking forward to seeing what you build next!

jdbohrman 7 days ago | prev | next |

Congratulations that's amazing. What are your next steps from here? Planning to continue or take a break?

pkondle 7 days ago | prev | next |

Congrats Paras. I used VWO long time back and came away impressed. Looking to hear more great things from you.

FlyingSnake 7 days ago | prev | next |

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.

kopirgan 6 days ago | prev | next |

Congrats! This is really inspiring considering its based on internal accrual without external funding.

dcdgo 7 days ago | prev | next |

Really inspiring to hear your success story Mr. Chopra. I showed it to my coworkers and we're all impressed.

sainib 7 days ago | prev | next |

Congratulations Paras! Great milestone. Please share more details for your journey and learnings as a blog post.

Pete-Codes 6 days ago | prev | next |

That's a fookin crazy exit!

Always like seeing these stories. Will mention it in my High Signal newsletter.

advaitruia 7 days ago | prev | next |

Congratulations! This is great - one of the few globally successful SaaS cos from India with an exit!

paul7986 7 days ago | prev | next |

Very nice and congrats.

Yet sharing the cost of the sale I'd be concerned about doing that on the public Internet.

leuren 7 days ago | prev | next |

Congrats! I did a lot of work with VWO back in 2017 and 2018. Great platform, and deserved.

cushychicken 7 days ago | prev | next |

Nothing to add except more congratulations to you.

That’s a huge exit and you deserve to be incredibly proud of it.

justmarc 7 days ago | prev | next |

I remember you launching this! I even used it and it was one if not the best at the time!

Well deserved.

newusertoday 7 days ago | prev | next |

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.

MikeTaylor 7 days ago | prev | next |

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.

vixen99 7 days ago | root | parent |

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?

shahzaibmushtaq 7 days ago | prev | 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.

jsfunfun 7 days ago | prev | next |

relax and then find your way past the cash, and to being rich: love and beauty with you family

thiago_fm 7 days ago | prev | next |

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!

didip 7 days ago | prev | next |

Congratulations. Now tell us stories when things were hard and you almost gave up. Bet you have a lot of stories like this.

prashp 7 days ago | prev | next |

[flagged]

vosper 7 days ago | root | parent | prev |

Maybe they would find those activities fulfilling? It’s their life, and wealth, after all.

jorams 7 days ago | root | parent |

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

nanoflite 7 days ago | prev |

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.