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Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today

#231

Post by paraschopra »

mattfrommars wrote: post #221
paraschopra wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ab…

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't get is, what was the trigger/pivot that made you go for 'A/B/ testing and not another segment of marketing niche? At that time, weren't there other play…

I picked A/B testing because I discovered the most used product (Google Website Optimizer, now defunkt) was pretty crappy.

As an engineer, I couldn't figure out how to use it and it was meant for marketers.

So I sensed an opportunity within the A/B testing niche. In fact, the name Visual Website Optimizer comes from the fact that it did with Google Website Optimizer did, but visually (in an editor, instead of HTML code).

Optimizely started at the same time as us. They went to YC and raised a bunch of money. We remained bootstrapped.

Re: Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today

#232

Post by csomar »

dr_kiszonka wrote: post #73
criddell wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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'm pretty sure I wouldn't run out of things I want to do. When the lotto gets to be above $1 billion,…

> When the lotto gets to be above $1 billion, I'll usually buy a ticket because it's fun to imagine the life I could have with that money. I buy lotto tickets for the same reason! Their expected value is very low but the maximum value is thought-provoking. For me, $50k would be life-changing. One billion is hard to imagine.

I'd use that money to pay for private math lessons.

Re: Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today

#233

Post by paraschopra »

tikkun wrote: post #8

Awesome. For others, I see that Paras is now running https://turingsdream.co/ "an AI hackhouse running a six-week residency for coders and researchers who're interested in AI. The hackhouse is in Bangalore, India and you can join it either in-person, or in a hybrid fashion."

Thanks for linking it here.

If there are any AI researchers or engineers in Bangalore/India lurking here, please consider applying.

Re: Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today

#234

Post by paraschopra »

shostack wrote: post #212
paraschopra wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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?

When you don't have enough data, doing usability tests and understanding + applying best practices can help you avoid common mistakes.

Re: Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today

#235

Post by 20after4 »

mattfrommars wrote: post #221
paraschopra wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ab…

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't get is, what was the trigger/pivot that made you go for 'A/B/ testing and not another segment of marketing niche? At that time, weren't there other play…

It sounds like making it stupid simple and easy for non developers was the w.

Re: Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today

#238

Post by lalwanivikas »

paraschopra wrote: post #193
firefoxd wrote: post #31

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]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23471050

Thanks!

hello ex-boss! congrats :D
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