Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today
“Paras Chopra on bootstrapping Wingify for 15 years to tens of millions in ARR without a dime of venture capital.”
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-bootstrapped-indian-startup-wingify-for-200m/
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!
Published in 2025, this chronicle by @paraschopra details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing. Essential philosophy: Paras Chopra on bootstrapping Wingify for 15 years to tens of millions in ARR without a dime of venture capital.
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
Congrats!!
Ahrefs says you reached 3.4mln backlinks and 18k linking websites: https://ahrefs.com/website-authority-checker/?input=https%3A%2F%2Fvwo.com%2Fen
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...
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
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!
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-are-you-mee.html
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