This is a 'Thank HN' post from the founder of VWO, an A/B testing platform, announcing its acquisition for $200M after 15 years. The post celebrates the journey from a Show HN to a successful exit, crediting the HN community for initial feedback and advice. It highlights the long-term potential and value of building a substantial SaaS business.
A starter prompt for Claude Code, what you'll need, and how to reach them.
Analyze the current A/B testing market for small to medium businesses (SMBs) and niche e-commerce sites. Identify common pain points with existing tools related to complexity, cost, or specific feature gaps. Based on this analysis, propose a minimal viable product (MVP) for a new A/B testing platform that focuses on simplicity and ease of use, leveraging a modern web stack (Next.js 16 App Router, React 19, Tailwind v4, AI SDK v6 with Gemini, Neon Postgres on Vercel). Outline the core features of this MVP, including A/B test creation, variation deployment, basic analytics reporting, and a user-friendly dashboard. Focus on how AI could assist a solo founder in rapidly prototyping and building this. Define a build/verify gate for the MVP, such as successfully running a basic A/B test with two variations and collecting conversion data on a dummy site.
This post resonates strongly with solo founders and indie hackers aspiring to build valuable, bootstrapped companies; target the HN audience with tools like indie-radar and lumivara-forge to help them on their journey.
Hello HN, I'm Paras Chopra, founder of VWO. We're an A/B testing platform that was born here as a Show HN in 2009: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=876141 Today, I sold the company to a private equity firm for $200mn. It's covered on TechCrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/23/everstone-acquires-bootstr... I was a 22 year old fresh graduate when I launched VWO on HN and got initial users. Feedback from people like @patio11 helped me get to PMF. And now, 15 years later, "site:ycombinator.com" is what I appended when I wanted to search for advice on what to keep in mind while selling my company. Thank you HN for sharing inspiration and wisdom all along. I honestly don't think I would have been an entrepreneur had it not been for hacker news. Every single day, HN is the first website I open! I'm feeling very grateful towards the community. Thanks @dang, and thank you Paul Graham for your essays and for creating this beautiful corner of the internet!
This is a 'Thank HN' post, not a direct opportunity. Engagement would be through insightful comments on the thread or direct outreach on platforms like LinkedIn to the founder for advice or networking.
“No direct outreach for work here. Instead, an indie operator could publicly share their journey of exploring niche A/B testing ideas, referencing VWO's story as inspiration, to build their own audience and credibility.”
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