Paras Chopra is a New Delhi, India based technology entrepreneur and founder of Visual Website Optimizer. With a background in computational biology, machine learning, online marketing and web technologies, Paras started "Wingify" in early 2009. The company's aim is to make website optimization tools which produce results without requiring a degree in rocket science.

The tool is loved by clients like Microsoft, Foursquare, Threadless, Aweber with more than 7000+ users. Lets learn more about 'Visual Website Optimizer' and its founder's journey from conceiving the idea of starting Wingify till present in the interview below:

Paras, lets start with a brief introduction of yours. A bit about your background-what motivates you? What inspires you?

I'm a hacker, in its purest form. I love tweaking things to make them work. Be it code, marketing or  business strategy, I enjoy working on challenging problems and solving them creatively.

Tell us about the inception of your company 'Wingify'. What is its mission?

The mission of the company is to help businesses make more money online. We want to make tools that companies can use to:
 a) bring more traffic on the website
 b) convert that traffic into customers.

Visual Website Optimizer is an easy to use A/B testing tool featuring point-and-click test designer and WYSIWYG editor for creating variations.

How did this idea occur to you?

I used other A/B testing solutions which were really basic and hard to use. So I saw an opportunity to create an A/B testing tool that was dead-simple to use for marketers (who don't even know HTML/CSS).

'VWO' has a great number of users and its users include many well known agencies and businesses. Did you ever think it would turn out as popular as it is now?

Nope, my original goal was to earn equivalent to my monthly salary. Luckily that goal was achieved within first week of launching paid plans.

Share your pre-launch experience of VWO with our readers. What do you find the best thing you did that has led to its success.

I think launching it in closed beta and sending exclusive beta coupons for blogs to share with their readers was the best strategy I used.

What is the best indicator of one's business's success?

Revenue and profitability! Number of users, pageviews, investment -- no metric comes close to actually making money. Why do businesses exist? To create a profit! Businesses should be assessed only this metric.

On what promotional method(s) you mostly rely on? What do you think about 'Social Media as a promotional tool'?

Write good content on blog and bring traffic using social media. That's the marketing strategy.

Share the best incident that you encountered on this journey from conceiving the idea till present.

There's an interesting story of how we got on TechCrunch. They covered our well funded Silicon Valley based competitor and not us, even when I had mailed them a couple of times. I raised this issue on s popular forum where they noticed this and finally covered us.

Would you like to share with us about you future goals or lifetime goals?

No specific goal -- just solve interesting problems that create value for the people and myself.

What is your vision for 'VWO' as a whole? Where do you project to see it, let's say, 5years from now?

VWO would be the most popular A/B testing tool that all enterprises use.

Many of the young aspiring entrepreneurs would draw inspiration from you. What message do you have for them?

Go for the market, not for the idea. Competition is good. Here's a blog post that I wrote:

http://paraschopra.com/blog/entrepreneurship/how-to-find-startup-ideas-that-make-money.htm.

Paras, thanks for talking to us. It was pleasure to have you on E-junkie. We wish all the very best!

Check out Visual Web Optimizer.

Visit Paras's website.


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