That's a fookin crazy exit!
Always like seeing these stories. Will mention it in my High Signal newsletter.
Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today
331–340 of 414 posts
Re: Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today
#332Great 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.
- 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't have one yet!)
> explore starting a fundamental AI lab from India
I saw the back & forth between you and Aravind (pplx.ai) on Twitter. Impactful if you'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): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42785568
Re: Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today
#333Are 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!
What would you like to know about the process?
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.
Re: Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today
#334(Co-founder of Optimizely here) Congrats! It was fun competing with you
Optimizely as in Episerver?? I thought Optimizely was Episerver's rebrand.
Re: Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today
#335Congrats!!
Ahrefs says you reached 3.4mln backlinks and 18k linking websites: https://ahrefs.com/website-authority-checker/?input=https%3A...
How did you achive such incredible numbers?
I noticed you localized the landing pages to English/Spanish/German/Portuguese. I did that too when founding polyblog.io and multilocale.com but never got results incredible as yours. I noticed you use Yoast SEO, the sitemap.xml is not localized and you also didn't add localized meta tags. I suspect those localization "best practises" in reality matter very little compared to the sheer incredible amount of backlinks you got...
Re: Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today
#336@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.
wanna join Rezi? we dont have a marketing team but get 4K signups a day
Are you hiring engineers? I would love to join.
Re: Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today
#337Re: Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today
#338You deserved it Paras!!
Have distinct memories when you hired people from my College, to organizing hackathons, to your slack group and your newsletter had been inspirational.
Say hi to Varun from my side.
Re: Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today
#339Proved again, you can just do things.
Re: Thank HN: My bootstrapped startup got acquired today
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