Congrats, this is amazing!
Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today
191–200 of 414 posts
Re: Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today
#192Congratulations! 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?
Stylistic note: "knell" is a word for a sound, like the ringing of a solemn type of bell. So something can't be said to "spell a death knell".
"X spells Y" means "X results in Y". It was used correctly.
Re: Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today
#193My employer picked vwo over my own custom in house ab testing tool [0]. I was so pissed! Congrats, yours was the better tool. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23471050
Thanks!
Re: Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today
#194(Co-founder of Optimizely here) Congrats! It was fun competing with you
Dan, thank you! I has been fun competing with you.
I remember the golden days :)
I've been following your journey post Optimizely! Hope your new ventures turn out to be equally fun and fulfilling.
Re: Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today
#195@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 / get a laugh from. Congrats on the exit. really nice to see.
Haha, I'll ask around if they ever figured out the query parameters :)
Re: Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today
#196Congrats! 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?
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'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'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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=876141 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
>because you pack an AWFUL lot onto that first screen
So as my next iteration, I picked A/B testing and made a visual editor to make creation of A/B tests stupidly simple and that took off because it allowed marketers launch A/B tests without being reliant on developers.
This product, Visual Website Optimizer (VWO), took off!
Re: Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today
#197Bravo, @paraschopra What an incredible journey. I remember when you launched. I hadn't realized it was 16 years ago! I'll hit you up privately with an invite to tell your story on Startups for the Rest of Us. It's a fitting place for a bootstrapper like yourself.
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!
Re: Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today
#198Congrats Paras. It's been fun to follow along the VWO journey!
Re: Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today
#199Congratulations! 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?
My co-founder is continuing and so is rest of the leadership team. So, I'm expecting company and its culture to remain as is.
Re: Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today
#200I 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
Yes, thank you! I was indeed sleeping and just woke up.