Congrats on the successful exit and your journey to it!

Congratulations! This is such a great story. I’ve followed you for years and your success is inspiring

&gt; explore starting a fundamental AI lab from IndiaI saw the back &amp; forth between you and Aravind (pplx.ai) on Twitter. Impactful if you&#x27;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): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42785568">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42785568</a>

- 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&#x27;t have one yet!)

Great run, Paras!If I may:- Did VWO ever apply to YC?- Do you foresee PE asset stripping (crashing &amp; burning) VWO eventually?- What&#x27;s next (5y time period)?Thanks.

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

Incredible. Congrats, enjoy the fruits of your hard work!

“I am rich and I have no idea what to do”<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42579873">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=42579873</a>

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&#x27;m guessing the bootstrapping types would get bored and look for the next thing

&gt; 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&#x27;m pretty sure I wouldn&#x27;t run out of things I want to do.When the lotto gets to be above $1 billion, I&#x27;ll usually buy a ticket because it&#x27;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.

&gt; 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 hadIs there a word missing in this? How did they join after acquisition and have a meaningful financial windfall? And being an early employee?

&gt; hadn’t started investing beyond just the normal mutual funds&#x2F;bonds&#x2F;etcYou&#x27;d be surprised how far you get ahead with S&amp;P 500 + Treasury inflation adjusted securities.It&#x27;s really hard to beat S&amp;P500. Most funds after fees don&#x27;t beat it. If S&amp;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.

&gt; I find it’s really interesting how people act when the financial pressure gets suddenly removed.Agreed. It should happen to more &amp; more people.

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&#x2F;bonds&#x2F;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.

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&#x27;s pretty awesome.

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

Steel is real. And comes in colors other than black! :)

Did you read Caro&#x27;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.

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&#x27;s what I needed to move on.

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.

The title of this post literally says &quot;bootstrapped&quot;

To note as well the Techcrunch article specifically says 71% ownership.

Just because the company was sold for a bunch of money doesn&#x27;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&#x27;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 &quot;bootstrapped&quot;. I missed that initially, so apologies.

please share if there is something you can show to public.

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.

I&#x27;ll be involved as a director on the board, but won&#x27;t have operational involvement.

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.

He is already running a hacker house in bangalore with cohorts of researchers and practiontioners getting together - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;turingsdream.co&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;turingsdream.co&#x2F;</a>so probably it&#x27;s picking one of those ideas or investing in it!

I know one founder that worked a few days a week at the company and took a lot of vacations.

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!!!

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.

Congratulations.I&#x27;m curious... what do people do after something like this?Vacation?

Hey paras I&#x27;m a doctor sitting in Australia. But have some analytical and coding skills and can have 3 startups which all failed to scale. I&#x27;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&#x27;d like to Jon the 6 week finger bleeder.

Thanks for linking it here.If there are any AI researchers or engineers in Bangalore&#x2F;India lurking here, please consider applying.

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.

Awesome. For others, I see that Paras is now running <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;turingsdream.co&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;turingsdream.co&#x2F;</a> &quot;an AI hackhouse running a six-week residency for coders and researchers who&#x27;re interested in AI. The hackhouse is in Bangalore, India and you can join it either in-person, or in a hybrid fashion.&quot;

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&#x27;t be involved day to day anymore.

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?

Perhaps we can change the goals if death wasn&#x27;t going to acquire us all.

Congratulations to you! It&#x27;s great to see the hard work coming to fruition.

I really appreciate this post, especially after some of the recent ones about how we&#x27;re in a startup winter. I&#x27;m bootstrapping a project on the side (although I acquired it as a POC, didn&#x27;t build from scratch), and whether it&#x27;s &quot;realistic&quot; or not, stories like this are still inspiring. Thank you!

Yes, I&#x27;m running <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;turingsdream.co" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;turingsdream.co</a> and intend to do a lot more of helping others going forward.

Congrats! Since it seems you&#x27;re based in India, I hope you can continue to invest in other promising Indian startups in the coming years!

Congratulations Paras, you made it! Looking forward to your next gig!

I&#x27;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.

Anything other than programming would be super helpful. There are a lot of software engineers who are able to build great products. Also knowing how to market and sell them is where only a few shine.

What would you like to know about the process?

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!

Congratulations! Did you reach out or did they?

linked TC story says &quot;owned 70%... retaining a small ownership&quot;

It&#x27;s very common in transactions of this size that the seller &quot;rolls&quot; 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.

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&#x27;m very curious about how to approach such a moment. There are so many horror stories where an acquisition ends up being &quot;bad news&quot; for teams and users alike - I hope this won&#x27;t be the case here !

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

I mean.. the guy posted on a public forum &quot;I just made $142M!&quot;

Some founders are very open about these things. It doesn&#x27;t hurt to ask.  They might even have a public blog about they can link to.

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?

I checked out the explainer video from 15 years ago in the linked blog post. It&#x27;s crazy but this would still get me interested even today! Wow.

<pre><code> Today, we&#x27;re a team of 250+ people and seen that initial &quot;Show HN&quot; grow into a $20mn+ bootstrapped business (no VC funding). If anyone&#x27;s interested in reading more, I&#x27;ve blogged this journey (from launch to now) on our website [0]
</code></pre>
from: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23466470">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23466470</a> (2020)[0] clicky: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vwo.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;vwo-evolution-10-years&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vwo.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;vwo-evolution-10-years&#x2F;</a>

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 &quot;ka-ching!&quot; 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!

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 :)

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

Yes, thank you! I was indeed sleeping and just woke up.

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...)* <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;pool">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;pool</a>, explained at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26998308">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26998308</a>

It&#x27;s quite amusing that the same person is the top comment in both threads

Here&#x27;s that earlier thread - thanks for pointing it out!Thank HN: My startup was born here and is now 10 years old - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23466470">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23466470</a> - June 2020 (128 comments)

There&#x27;s no higher praise than &quot;I built my own; yours was better&quot;!

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]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23471050">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23471050</a>

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.

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?

I wasn&#x27;t involved in day to day that much, and felt it was the right time to pass the baton.

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?

Wow! I used you back in the day. Good work, Paras.

So I just need 2 more years :D and then +$49.98m&#x2F;year revenue will come

Wow, payoff after 15 years. Congratulations!

Congratulations!  I remember using VWO in 2013, outstanding product!

All of our initial growth came from either word of mouth or the content I was churning out on a daily basis.

Amazing outcome, congratulations! Back in 2015 working at Gusto as the first growth engineer I remember reading vwo blog to understand how a&#x2F;b testing works.

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?

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.

I think the low was covid - with budget cuts, we had a sudden revenue drop and didn&#x27;t know when or whether it will recover at all. But thankfully as we had been profitable from day 1, we didn&#x27;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&#x2F;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&#x2F;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&#x2F;s green buttons in 2010 but now it is a full blown science with observations, hypothesis, prioritisation, experimentation and personalization!

Congrats!What have been your highest highs and lowest lows during this journey?When Google discontinued their A&#x2F;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.

Congratulations Paras!Been following you for a while on Twitter, love the book recos!

Really inspiring to hear your success story Mr. Chopra. I showed it to my coworkers and we&#x27;re all impressed.

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

Holy shit you killed it! Congratulations.You are an inspiration for us, that didn&#x27;t make it (yet).

Holy shit, you&#x27;ve made it!You are an inspiration for us, those who haven&#x27;t made it. I&#x27;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!

Another overnight success - after 16 years of work.Well done, very inspiring.

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:&gt; Delhi-based Wingify has grown from a two-person startup into a profitable global software provider with over 6,000 clientsSo 6000 clients is enough for a $50mn&#x2F;year revenue? Enterprise is where the money at!

- Yes, I&#x27;m very happy!- Advice, paradoxically, is to not gun for an exit. Only companies that don&#x27;t need an exit get an exit. (It&#x27;s sort of like dating).

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&#x27;ve been sooner?

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

Well done! Some good questions here; hope you get a chance to answer them.

Massive congrats! Good to see the dream is still alive and well!

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&#x27;t get is, what was the trigger&#x2F;pivot that made you go for &#x27;A&#x2F;B&#x2F; testing and not another segment of marketing niche?At that time, weren&#x27;t there other players in A&#x2F;B segment who were far more established? What competitive edge did you see that made you go all in in A&#x2F;B and which eventually took off?

Do you have any advices for someone about to learn marketing as dev same as your younger self?

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&#x27;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&#x27;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 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=876141">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=876141</a> 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&gt;because you pack an AWFUL lot onto that first screenSo as my next iteration, I picked A&#x2F;B testing and made a visual editor to make creation of A&#x2F;B tests stupidly simple and that took off because it allowed marketers launch A&#x2F;B tests without being reliant on developers.This product, Visual Website Optimizer (VWO), took off!

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?

meh if you&#x27;re racking up $100k&#x2F;mo you could probably afford one. Here are some auction on Godaddy:<pre><code> wmr.com $5,000 Min. Offer
 
 pox.com $95,000 Buy Now
 
 otp.com $100,000 Min. Offer</code></pre>

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

Here is what the site looked like initially - so don&#x27;t be scared that everything has to look perfect and shiny.Plans start at $49&#x2F;month<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20140701054439&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vwo.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20140701054439&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vwo.com&#x2F;</a>and now$393 per month, billed annually<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vwo.com&#x2F;pricing&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;vwo.com&#x2F;pricing&#x2F;</a>They sure did listen to @patio11

Congrats! Would be interesting to see the growth rate of the company.

private equity + a whole lot of commons to encircle

And WordPress can thank CPanel and the tens of thousands of customer support and sysadmins that supported millions of WordPress users at $9&#x2F;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&#x2F;r&#x2F;wpdrama. I don&#x27;t know anything about Mullenweg, I don&#x27;t mean to sound like I&#x27;m calling him awful specifically.

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

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.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dictionary.cambridge.org&#x2F;dictionary&#x2F;english&#x2F;death-knell#google_vignette" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dictionary.cambridge.org&#x2F;dictionary&#x2F;english&#x2F;death-kn...</a>This page has a couple examples that use the phrasing “spelling” a death knell:&gt; If it does, it almost spells the death knell of a great number of football clubs throught the country.&gt; Indeed, it may spell the death knell of the other place.If it sounds strange in US English, could it be a way of wording that’s more common in UK English?

&quot;X spells Y&quot; means &quot;X results in Y&quot;.  It was used correctly.

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” <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.merriam-webster.com&#x2F;dictionary&#x2F;knell" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.merriam-webster.com&#x2F;dictionary&#x2F;knell</a>spell (verb) 2: “to add up to &#x2F; MEAN”, 3: “come to understand” <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.merriam-webster.com&#x2F;dictionary&#x2F;spell" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.merriam-webster.com&#x2F;dictionary&#x2F;spell</a>Examples of the idiom ‘spell a death knell’:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2020&#x2F;05&#x2F;28&#x2F;862658646&#x2F;the-latest-u-s-blow-to-chinas-huawei-could-knock-out-its-global-5g-plans" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.npr.org&#x2F;2020&#x2F;05&#x2F;28&#x2F;862658646&#x2F;the-latest-u-s-blow...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.couriermail.com.au&#x2F;news&#x2F;queensland&#x2F;gladstone&#x2F;spell-a-death-knell-worry-over-groups-300000-event&#x2F;news-story&#x2F;15792bc7ea8f1ba176bfabf01428f17a" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.couriermail.com.au&#x2F;news&#x2F;queensland&#x2F;gladstone&#x2F;spe...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mca-marines.org&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;Machine-Learning.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mca-marines.org&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;Machine-Learn...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.protectingtaxpayers.org&#x2F;international&#x2F;to-shield-taxpayers-from-luxury-trips-and-corporate-scams-defund-the-u-n&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.protectingtaxpayers.org&#x2F;international&#x2F;to-shield-...</a>

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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t like &quot;spell a death knell&quot; because the rhyme has an awkward rhythm, and it would be better to &quot;sound&quot; the knell.

Stylistic note: &quot;knell&quot; is a word for a sound, like the ringing of a solemn type of bell.So something can&#x27;t be said to &quot;spell a death knell&quot;.

My co-founder is continuing and so is rest of the leadership team. So, I&#x27;m expecting company and its culture to remain as is.

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?

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!

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 &quot;us&quot;, here.If you&#x27;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.

Bravo, @paraschopra What an incredible journey. I remember when you launched. I hadn&#x27;t realized it was 16 years ago!I&#x27;ll hit you up privately with an invite to tell your story on Startups for the Rest of Us. It&#x27;s a fitting place for a bootstrapper like yourself.

What a great story &amp; ending. I’m very happy for you - congratulations!

Yep, but over time they make you stoic and that stoicism helps outside of startups too.

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

Long time user. Great product. Strong willed execution. Congrats to you!

What an incredible achievement! Congratulations @paraschopra

Congrats! I used VWO extensively in a previous life as a &quot;growth hacker&quot;.

The TechCrunch article the OP linked above mentions this:&gt; Chopra, who owned 71% of Wingify before the acquisition, will retain a minority stake in the firm, one of the sources said.

Hey Chopra,Thanks for sharing, this is really inspiring!Just wondering, for other bootstrappers, if you do end up selling for, I don&#x27;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?

Congratulations, @paraschopra! A great and well-deserved outcome :)

&gt; 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!

Yes, yes, so much yes.Without the feedback, this wouldn&#x27;t have happened.I&#x27;ve learned that what kills startups isn&#x27;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.

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

Very nice and congrats.Yet sharing the cost of the sale I&#x27;d be concerned about doing that on the public Internet.

The HN dream. Congrats and enjoy the fruits of your labor :D

Saw your posts. It&#x27;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 :)

I think the plan is to keep growing profitably, but I&#x27;m also curious and keen to learn how private equity runs a company.

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&#x27;m curious about the future of the company.

This here speaks so much more to the success. Actual customers praising the product.

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 :)

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.

Congrats. Thanks for closing the loop. So many stories&#x2F;comments on the internet are left unresolved; it is nice to see a loop closed.

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&#x27;re now an inspiration for millions of devs, especially from India on what is possible to build bootstrapped.

VWO vs Optimizely was the biggest internal debate back in 2017. Enemies were made, heads rolled...Congrats!

Optimizely also sold to private equity many years ago. Presumably the founderts aren&#x27;t there any more.

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.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.crunchbase.com&#x2F;ai&#x2F;largest-ai-startup-funding-deals-2024" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.crunchbase.com&#x2F;ai&#x2F;largest-ai-startup-funding-de...</a>

Congrats to you both!! Paras- you guys were always one of the ones we looked up to when starting Amplitude way back in 2012.

Dan, thank you! I has been fun competing with you.I remember the golden days :)I&#x27;ve been following your journey post Optimizely! Hope your new ventures turn out to be equally fun and fulfilling.

Episerver bought Optimizely and then took the name.

Optimizely as in Episerver?? I thought Optimizely was Episerver&#x27;s rebrand.

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

Enterprises don&#x27;t ask that. We never got that request.

Congratulations!I&#x27;ve got a small question. How do you deal with people asking for open sourcing your product&#x2F;code, claiming they don&#x27;t want to use a product they don&#x27;t control?

Thanks Patrick!This couldn&#x27;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&#x2F;mo plan, you told me to go for $99&#x2F;mo. Baffled on how can someone pay so much for what I just coded, I settled for $49&#x2F;mo. Should have listened to you.. :)

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.

thanks for this kind offer, but i&#x27;m working on something else.

Are you hiring engineers? I would love to join.

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

Haha, I&#x27;ll ask around if they ever figured out the query parameters :)

I haven&#x27;t dug into this much--out of curiosity, what do you think are some of the most useful things you can learn?

As a fellow marketer I&#x27;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.

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&#x27;s worth copying?I good with API docs and weird bugs but this is beyond me.

@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 &#x2F; get a laugh from.Congrats on the exit. really nice to see.

Just upvoted the original post, you earned it

Daaamn. RIP to your DMs as the kids say. Congrats!

Mega congratulations. Great community here.

You do the same when you accept your salary every month.  Start by giving that up.

Sorry guys, this is sad news for the world. You just made the divide between ultra rich and ultra poor larger. And please, don&#x27;t start complaining on how hard it was.

Nothing to add except more congratulations to you.That’s a huge exit and you deserve to be incredibly proud of it.

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!

I&#x27;m hopeful that VWO will continue to stay true to its roots!

Congrats Paras. VWO has been my go-to A&#x2F;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!

That&#x27;s an epic win! 15 years of the startup grind&#x2F;rollercoaster is impressive, well done!

Why&quot;startup&quot;? It&#x27;s just a businesses, nothing special

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.

This is a big achievement. Used the tool along against Hotjar and the likes and loved VWO.

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!

Congrats Paras. It&#x27;s been fun to follow along the VWO journey!

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.

at $20mil profit, that&#x27;s a 40% margin, which is quite high, even for a tech company (tho for a startup, which can be nimble and agile, it&#x27;s not impossible).

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.

It&#x27;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&#x27;s what I was shooting for.

This might be a dumb question, for which apologies in advance, but isn&#x27;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?

Hello HN,I&#x27;m Paras Chopra, founder of VWO. We&#x27;re an A&#x2F;B testing platform that was born here as a Show HN in 2009: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=876141">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=876141</a>Today, I sold the company to a private equity firm for $200mn.It&#x27;s covered on TechCrunch: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2025&#x2F;01&#x2F;23&#x2F;everstone-acquires-bootstrapped-indian-startup-wingify-for-200m&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2025&#x2F;01&#x2F;23&#x2F;everstone-acquires-bootstr...</a>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, &quot;site:ycombinator.com&quot; 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&#x27;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&#x27;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!

Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today