Bootstrapped Wingify moves to a bigger office and hits 1600+ customers
Published in 2012, this chronicle by @paraschopra details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Charging customers from day one acts as the ultimate filter for building software that solves genuine, high-urgency problems.
Keeping fixed overhead low and leveraging lean infrastructure allows founders to stay alive until market tailwinds kick in.
Small, repetitive improvements in customer retention and conversion rates yield massive returns over multi-year horizons.
Community Debate Themes:
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
CATEGORY Bootstrapping & MRR →
HISTORICAL ERA Web 2.0 Genesis (2007–2013)
COMMUNITY SCORE 104 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 42 comments
I am a raving fan of VisualWebsiteOptimizer.com (VWO) and highly recommend using or trying their A/B product over any other. Paras truly cares about his product, responds personally to inquiries although I am sure that as the business grows he may not be able to do that as much. It was clear to me from day 1 as an early customer (1st test deployed Sept 2010) that he truly cares about his customer, listens to his customer, and works insanely hard for his customer as does his entire team; and you can not put a price tag on that, in my opinion.
Now go subscribe to VWO and take his team to 2000+ customers! It will be beyond worthwhile for your website and business. It has been for mine.
Thank you for building a phenomenal product @paraschopra and team!
Paras's (founder of Wingify) blog posts on
Sorry your cool web app is probably not going to make money
http://paraschopra.com/blog/entrepreneurship/webapp-is-not-going-to-make-money.htm ↗
How to find startup ideas that make money
http://paraschopra.com/blog/entrepreneurship/how-to-find-startup-ideas-that-make-money.htm ↗
might be appropriate given his stunning success (congrats Paras)
The other great thing about Wingify is that they aimed from the beginning at a global product vs a 'localized' knock off of an existing American product.
As a long time user of VWO, I'm very impressed and pleased with their success.
Early on, perhaps about 2 years ago, I reached out to Paras asking for an API so our internal dashboard could show the status and performance of all running tests.
Within a few days, there was a private (or non-published) API ready to go. Since then, my business and I have been using it daily.
Disclaimer: I even supplied a testimonial for their homepage after frustrating experiences with Google and Omniture. :)
As a user, I pretty much have to chime in here & say this is well deserved success.
It's a great product & pretty much the best customer support I've ever encountered. Every time I've needed it, I was in contact (email & skype) with Someone Who Knows and not afraid of treading into the gray area between your problem & their problem.
I like the VWO guys. I was kind of an ass and ranted about some issues in their JS on twitter recently and they reached out to me and addressed the issues I was encountering. Very responsive, look forward to seeing what they can come up with.