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HOT TOPICS
- The Accelerator Conundrum
- The Startup Velocity Question
- Platform as a Service
- Man and Superman
- Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS)
- The Future: End of Capitalism
- Capitalism 2.0
Wingify
Best of Bootstrapping: Solo Founder Bootstrapped to $7M in India
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Paras Chopra is Founder and Chairman of Wingify, a company that builds web analytics and optimization technology to include its flagship product Visual Website Optimizer. Here is our conversation from 2013. Sramana: Paras, let’s start with the very beginning of your story. Where were you born
Best of Bootstrapping: Solo Founder Bootstrapped Wingify to $7 Million in India
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Paras Chopra is Founder and Chairman of Wingify, a company that builds web analytics and optimization technology to include its flagship product Visual Website Optimizer. Here is our conversation from 2013. Sramana: Paras, let’s start with the very beginning of your story. Where were you born
Solo Founder, Bootstrapping to $7 Million in India: Wingify CEO Paras Chopra (Part 7)
Sramana: What are your primary customer acquisition methods? Paras Chopra: We are starting to do a mix of marketing and sales. For the longest time we focused solely on our content marketing. We have tried AdWords, Salesforce and even LinkedIn marketing programs. What has worked for us is content marketing. Sramana: This is the case
Solo Founder, Bootstrapping to $7 Million in India: Wingify CEO Paras Chopra (Part 6)
Sramana: It sounds like you had a very good conversion rate. Paras Chopra: The conversion rate was around 10%. I also got some hate mail from users who expected the product to be free forever. They told me I should be ashamed of myself for charging money and pointed out that Google’s products were free.
Solo Founder, Bootstrapping to $7 Million in India: Wingify CEO Paras Chopra (Part 5)
Sramana: What timeframe was all of this work occurring? Paras Chopra: I started coding the second version in December of 2009. Sramana: You basically bootstrapped Wingify using your paycheck, correct? Paras Chopra: Yes. I spent about $20 for a domain name and really had no major expenses. I really just invested my time. My living
Solo Founder, Bootstrapping to $7 Million in India: Wingify CEO Paras Chopra (Part 4)
Sramana: Did you build the entire project yourself or did you hire people to help you? Paras Chopra: I paid about 50,000 rupees for a website design. I did a very basic product design myself. I launched the website on Hacker News, and the feedback I received was horrible. Nobody understood what I was trying
Solo Founder, Bootstrapping to $7 Million in India: Wingify CEO Paras Chopra (Part 3)
Sramana: Obviously you don’t have a background in marketing. Typically we see people getting into a field with fairly significant domain knowledge and then building a product using that domain knowledge. You seem to have come into marketing optimization without real knowledge of marketing. How did that work? Paras Chopra: Looking back I think I
Solo Founder, Bootstrapping to $7 Million in India: Wingify CEO Paras Chopra (Part 2)
Sramana: When did you graduate from college, and what did you do after you graduated? Paras Chopra: I graduated in 2008. Even though I studied biotechnology, I remained very involved with computers the entire time. My area of concentration for biotechnology was computational biology. In that specialty I would model biological problems using computer programs.
