Thread by @paraschopra

How do you bootstrap a $20mn+ 💰 business in 10 years?

Without any VC/angel funding.

(A thread on how @vwo's evolution)

1/ We celebrated @VWO's 10th birthday last week.

In 2010, VWO was launched as the world’s first A/B testing tool with the now industry-standard visual editor for making website variations.

Here's a story of how that happened.

2/ Not may know, but the reason my company's name is @wingify (which is different than the product name VWO) is because the first product was actually called Wingify.

It looked like this (2009 screenshot)

3/ It was the year 2009 and I was fresh out of college.

Having attempted several startups during my undergraduate days and seeing all of them flop, I had come to realize the value of marketing and started learning about it.

4/ However, the more I read about marketing, the more I fell in love with it.

After a while, it dawned on me that perhaps my next startup should be about marketing.

And that is how Wingify was born.

5/ I launched Wingify on @newsycombinator from where we got initial 15-20 users.

The feedback I got from those users was overwhelmingly clear: I was trying to do too many things in one product and it was damn confusing.

Here's the show HN thread (2009): news.ycombinator.com/item?id=876141

6/ So, acting on this feedback, I decided to focus on one feature of the product (A/B testing) and do it really well.

That's how "Visual Website Optimizer" (aka VWO) was born and the very first version (in 2010) looked like this.



Notice the cute panda!

7/ Somehow people loved it!

I'm forever in gratitude towards @patio11 who not only gave crucial early feedback but also devoted an entire blog post on VWO titled "Bringing A/B Testing To The Fortune 5 Million": kalzumeus.com/2009/12/09/bri…

Thanks @patio11!

8/ THE FIRST CUSTOMER

The initial users for VWO were the same people who had tried the previous Wingify version of the product. In contrast to how they felt about Wingify, since the very beginning people loved the simplicity and speed that VWO afforded them for A/B testing.

9/ @sparshgupta and I remembered that our goal in 2010 was to make $1000 dollars in the first month and when we launched paid plans, within the first week we were half way to our goal.

Here's the chat log of us celebrating our fifth customer, for a total revenue of $555 :)

10/ In fact, we did 4x of our goal and ended making $4000 in the first month.

Each month after that, we kept growing and within 8 months of launching paid plans, we were doing >$25,000 monthly revenue.

A snippet from a very early deck.

11/ THE FIRST HIRE

We were growing fast and the support load was getting too much for the two of us, in early 2011 we decided to hire our first hire and shift to an office.

(Until then, I was working from my home in Delhi and Sparsh was contributing remotely from London).

12/ Quickly within a year, our team grew from 3 to 7 and @ankneo (who heads @wingify_engg now) joined the team.

Here's a pic of us writing cards to our customers. Physically emailing 900+ cards was quite an ordeal.

13/ The VWO team has continued expanding ever since then.

In the pic, you can see @chinchang457, @SiddharthDeswal, @sparshgupta, @ankneo and other early employees.

(If I'm not mistaken, @sia_steel is taking the picture!)

14/ Now, @VWO is 250+ people. It’s incredible to see more and more people in our team photos each passing year.

This photo is from our #million2billion party in 2016 to celebrate us hitting a million dollars monthly revenue.

15/ Along the way, we evolved the VWO product.

Here's v2.0 of the product with a new design (and without the panda of v1.0)

16/ But because we were (and still are) bootstrapped, we retained our goofiness.

Instead of panda, we now had a hamster.

If you were an early VWO user, you'd remember it spinning while your page loaded in the editor.

17/ Nobody asked us to do so, but we collaborated with @sumitdrew for making an interactive comics to explain what A/B testing is.

Check it out here: vwo.com/comics-guide-t…

18/ Along the way, we realized that successful A/B testing isn’t just a matter of creating two versions of it and hoping one of them works out.

It requires a prioritized pipeline of user research-backed hypotheses.

So we acquired @Navilytics to expand our suite.

19/ Today, VWO offers all that it takes to do successful A/B testing.

It's the world’s only platform for end-to-end conversion rate optimization.

20/ WHAT LIES NEXT FOR VWO?

Honestly, I feel like we’re just getting started.

I'm asking: what if we’re starting a new company today and then given the people, financial, technology and brand resources we have now, what opportunity can we address in the next 10 years?

21/ We keep debating how will experimentation happen in next ten years and why can’t we be the ones who make it possible.

Needless to say, I’m as stoked today as I was ten years ago.

22/ Hopefully, instead of being 20 year olds discovering the ways of the world, the now 30 year old something I can much more confidently and decisively lead VWO into creating the future of experimentation.

Stay tuned for our next 10 years!

23/ The blog version of this tweet is here: vwo.com/blog/vwo-evolu…

Hope you like our journey :)

Tag your founder / entrepreneur friends who may also enjoy reading this story of a bootstrapped business.

24/ Also, thanks @paulg -- your essays inspired me to get into startups and your creation (@newsycombinator) help launch my business.

Your impact goes far and wide!