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Thank HN: My startup was born here and is now 10 years old

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Re: Thank HN: My startup was born here and is now 10 years old

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent >1 year building a new dating app. Somebody posted a dating app idea on reddit that closely matches what I built. I messaged the author asking for feedback on my design. They didn't reply and even downvoted my comment on their thread. 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…

Not too derail this thread too much but I like the idea for your app, I made something similar for platonic friendships a while back and still am a big believer in the idea! How much traction have you gotten with your app?

Cool. Can you share a link?

I haven't launched my app anywhere yet. I struggled with devops tooling, started to get burned out, and now lockdown.

Re: Thank HN: My startup was born here and is now 10 years old

#102

First of all congratulations. A lot of Show HN start enthusiastically and then a year later the domain name doesn't resolve anymore. I'm glad you kept jabbing. In 2011, we were knee deep in google products. We used Google Analytics and the now defunct Google Web Optimizer (no not the one in GA). Our business team wasn't too happy about using GWO. There was something in the script triggered bounce rates in Google Anal…

Thanks for recommending VWO. And sorry about replacing your internally built a/b testing tool :)

Re: Thank HN: My startup was born here and is now 10 years old

#103
post #34

Well done Paras! You have come a long way since you asked me questions about http://elem.com/~btilly/effective-ab-testing/ . I'm glad that it was part of your journey!

Ben, your thought process on A/B testing has been a big influence. The deck of yours on effective A/B testing (above) is pure gold.

Re: Thank HN: My startup was born here and is now 10 years old

#104
post #33

Somewhat meta, but great to see that most of the accounts on the original thread are still active. I haven't got a successful startup to show for it, but I have been on HN for more than 10 years, and feel like it has played a significant role in forming my worldview. I hope we'll still be here in another 10 (or 30) years, nitpicking each other's ideas!

Yes, this is one community I've been checking every single day for the last 10 years. I wish it remains the same for the years ahead.

I love that now there's a dedicated "Show HN" page on the top!

Re: Thank HN: My startup was born here and is now 10 years old

#105

Hope I’m not too late for some one to see my post. This is a huge inspiration and an amazing story. I’m genuinely curious - not being a smart ass. Isn’t 250 employees a lot for the number listed ($20M+)? $2M of rev a month divided by 250+ people is only 7-8K a month. I guess if the majority are overseas that can work?

Yes, we're comfortably profitable as we're based out of India.

Having a big team is the reason our customer support [1] is best in industry. We have a large team of dedicated and passionate people ready to guide customers for all their problems.

[1] https://vwo.com/why-us/customer-success/

Re: Thank HN: My startup was born here and is now 10 years old

#106

Hope I’m not too late for some one to see my post. This is a huge inspiration and an amazing story. I’m genuinely curious - not being a smart ass. Isn’t 250 employees a lot for the number listed ($20M+)? $2M of rev a month divided by 250+ people is only 7-8K a month. I guess if the majority are overseas that can work?

It’s a great revenue given that they’re based in India and more so because they are self-funded.

Re: Thank HN: My startup was born here and is now 10 years old

#107
post #89

Wow, small world. I had a brief exchange with you when you were an intern at IISc in the summer of 2006 and came to a talk of mine. At that time you were interested in the cognitive abilities of bacteria, but looks like you took a different but equally successful path. Congratulations!

I remember! That internship stint at IISc ended up with this paper on modeling a gene network in E. coli: https://bit.ly/3flh6nh

Re: Thank HN: My startup was born here and is now 10 years old

#108
post #19

Hey Paras, This is very encouraging and exciting. Congratulations. Would you please share with us your user acquisition journey and also how you determined pricing and the various pricing tiers. 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

There are a few podcasts and interviews about the initial days of VWO. You may find the following resources helpful:

[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

Re: Thank HN: My startup was born here and is now 10 years old

#109

Congrats paras. I've been a big fan of your original work but I was rather disappointed to see your recent work like https://pushcrew.com which is everything that is wrong with the internet today. 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 us…

I understand why push notifications could be annoying, but the intent was to see if they could replace emails with bite-sized ephemeral information. Guess that's not happening.

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.

Re: Thank HN: My startup was born here and is now 10 years old

#110
post #52

Congrats on your hard work Paras! As someone whose company/employer has used VWO for years now, it's by far the best A/B testing solution on the market, and a seriously powerful piece of kit that a lot of companies have really overlooked the potential in. Interesting to hear that it was first posted on Hacker News as well.

Thank you for your kind words!
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