Thank HN: My startup was born here and is now 10 years old
I'm Paras Chopra, founder of VWO. We're an A/B testing platform that was born here as a Show HN in 2009.
As a 22 year old fresh out of college, I had launched an early prototype of a marketing platform in 2009 here, got initial users from HN (including patio11) who gave their feedback that my product was trying to do too many things. Their inputs are what that led me to focusing on one thing (A/B testing) and that's how I built and launched "Visual Website Optimizer"(now called VWO). Here's that Show HN thread from 2009: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=876141
I can't thank this community enough - without Hacker News, VWO wouldn't have existed. 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: https://vwo.com/blog/vwo-evolution-10-years/
For any early stage entrepreneurs / indie hackers reading this, I'm sharing my story to let you know that you don't need connections, funding or breakthroughs to build a successful business. All you need is a hunger to make it happen and a community (like this one) to give you honest feedback for iterating on your product. If you are what Paul Graham calls as relentless resourceful, you will build a successful business.
So, thank you HN! Thanks @patio11 for your feedback and initial shoutouts in 2009. And thanks Paul. Beyond YC funding, you've impacted lives of many other folks (like me) through your essays and by making Hn happen.
PS: I don't know if this post will get any attention on HN today, but I felt like I had to do this :)
133 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 187 ms ] threadI want to highlight that it's not as clear-cut as this: "If you are what Paul Graham calls as relentless resourceful, you will build a successful business."
I know there are people reading who consider themselves relentless and resourceful, yet are not successful after perhaps a decade or more of trying. The mental health impact of long-term failure can be crushing (I've been there).
They should understand that there is an element of luck involved, and if they didn't make it to $20MM straight from college, that doesn't mean they're worthless or can't make it anymore. The experiences of dead-ends and failures can be channeled into something that will set them apart, but it takes honesty. Luck is not a one-way thing: you need to be in a position to take advantage of the luck that comes your way, and mentally ready to jump on it.
However there are tons of people who likely "made the right moves" but were simply not as lucky or lacked resources to make success happen. If anything, this recent pandemic should shed light on how certain events are beyond any one individual's control.
The reality is that yes, luck plays a role, but success isn't a coin-flip. It's more like poker, where luck dominates individual hands, but good decisions dominate the long-game.
I didn't mean it that way. Luck plays a huge role in success. But a back story will help explain why I said what I said.
Even in 2009, VWO wasn't my first attempt at a startup. Eve since I read Founders at Work in high school, I was inspired to do a startup of my own. So when I entered college in 2004, I immediately went about trying to do startups. Over the four years, I did 3 different startups (Kroomsa, MyJugaad.in, Precimark) and all of them failed. Then I launched Wingify (precursor to VWO) and that also didn't fly. Finally, my fifth attempt was VWO which led to this.
So, from my own experience, it seems luck is a function of how many shots you take and how much you learn from those failures.
I absolutely believe that the asymptotic result of being relentlessly resourceful is success (of some reasonable degree).
So many Indian sites are using your technology to make web browsing a nightmare for visitors and spam unsuspecting readers with web notifications.
I hate such popups and modals created by pushcrew like the fact it forces users to optin to these notifications on articles. It was not what the web notification api was designed for.
There are many clones of PushCrew now and I suspect you may be seeing those. We're evolving the product towards being a thoughtful part of website experience. I hate unsuspecting popups too.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dating/comments/exzcsm/dating_app_i...
There are all kinds of people in the world. I'm glad HN exists.
HN mods: Thanks for your hard work.
HN commenters: Thanks for being kind.
I haven't launched my app anywhere yet. I struggled with devops tooling, started to get burned out, and now lockdown.
Any other stories in your journey would be appreciated e.g Growing your team, sales and marketing
* Edit - Added more areas I would need your input from
[1] My very first interview in 2012: https://mixergy.com/interviews/chopra-visual-website-optimiz...
[2] A relatively recent one: https://inc42.com/startups/wingify-paras-chopra-saas-startup...
[3] I've been blogging about many lessons I've learned on my blog https://invertedpassion.com
And thanks for writing up your story. I bet there's another 22-year old kid lurking in here somewhere and getting inspired to start something.
Also, love BetterExplained.com - without it, I would have never developed an intuition of exponential and logarithm functions. You do a great job at that.