211–220 of 414 posts
Congrats Paras. VWO has been my go-to A/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!
Congrats! What have been your highest highs and lowest lows during this journey? When Google discontinued their A/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.
I think the low was covid - with budget cuts, we had a sudden revenue drop and didn't know when or whether it will recover at all. But thankfully as we had been profitable from day 1, we didn'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/B tests and migration from frequentist to bayesian statistics). Another high has always…
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.
@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.
As a fellow marketer I'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.
VWO vs Optimizely was the biggest internal debate back in 2017. Enemies were made, heads rolled... Congrats!
Amazing outcome, congratulations! Back in 2015 working at Gusto as the first growth engineer I remember reading vwo blog to understand how a/b testing works.
Congratulations! I've got a small question. How do you deal with people asking for open sourcing your product/code, claiming they don't want to use a product they don't control?
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'm curious about the future of the company.
Great run, Paras! If I may: - Did VWO ever apply to YC? - Do you foresee PE asset stripping (crashing & burning) VWO eventually? - What's next (5y time period)? Thanks.
- 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't have one yet!)
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?