Love, Passion & Obsession: The Wingify Story
A young boy falls in love. And like most love stories, he battles countless odds, fails multiple times but stays relentless in his pursuit for well over a decade. Finally, Lady Luck smiled on gritty Paras Chopra who, along with Sparsh Gupta, bootstrapped Wingify into a profitable and global SaaS company.
All of us — let’s say most of us — have fallen in love at some or the other point in our lives. Paras Chopra too was not an exception. He, though, happens to be an odd one out in one aspect. As a fourteen year old, he didn’t experience any crush. Chopra bypassed this emotional stage and found the love for life during his school days. “I started coding when I was 14,” says the founder of Wingify who used to spend countless hours in coding. “I loved it,” he says. Chopra enjoyed every single minute of coding and much like a teen lover, he would crave to meet his love every hour, every day. In fact, the young boy soon slipped into deep love and started NaramCheez, a free desktop and web-based software, in 2000. He also occasionally dabbled into custom software design and development, particularly in AI.
Months passed by, the love blossomed, and the young boy joined Delhi College of Engineering in 2004. Chopra, still stoked up on his passion, would try to do something new during every summer break. The techie ended up founding three startups during his four years of college stint: Precimark, MyJugaad.in and Kroomsa. All three failed. “They did not work out but I just kept doing them,” he says. Failures, though, couldn’t douse his blazing fire of passion. Reason was simple. It was the love of what he was doing rather than love of the outcome which kept Chopra motivated.
Though his love kept him relentless, it also added one more dimension to Chopra’s personality: brutal honesty. Almost two years after starting Precimark, a startup that mined social networks for talent, business intelligence and marketing purposes, Chopra penned a candid note explaining ‘what, why and how’ of Precimark’s debacle. “Our present approach is flawed, everyone is taking this as a part-time job…Startups do not work this way,” he confessed in June 2007. “Startup is not a summer project…either give your 100% or just don’t do it,” was the first big learning for the rookie founder who, much like a seasoned surgeon, was doing a post-mortem and figuring out what went wrong.
The second big lesson lied in team selection. “Choose your team with extreme care. They should be as passionate about the idea as you are,” Chopra underlined in his note. There were three more interesting takeaways. First was about emotional detachment. “Do not be too emotionally attached to your startup and ideologies,” he suggested, adding that one can be passionate and objective at the same time. The second outcome stemmed from the first lesson. “Do not be afraid of folding up,” he boldly outlined. When the idea or execution happens to be fundamentally flawed and things have gone wrong beyond correction, it’s best to shut down. And finally, the young founder discovered something that can either make or break a startup. “The key to success is execution,” he wrote. “Everybody has ideas and they are dime a dozen,” he added.
Three back-to-back setbacks in three consecutive years would have dented the spirits of any young founder. Chopra, though, was wired differently. He still loved coding, entrepreneurship and most importantly chasing his love. In 2008, he finished his engineering, in October he joined Aspiring Minds as a R&D engineer, and almost during the same time, he started working on building the first version of Wingify.
GRIND? I DON’T MIND!
Striking a balance between job and continuing with his passion to start something again was tough, though. But again, Chopra was not hooked to an easy way of life. “For about 10 months, I had locked myself in a room,” he says, alluding to his harsh working schedule. Every day, he would travel two hours from Delhi to reach his office early in the morning, would come back by 6 in the evening, and after an hour would cut himself off for over half a dozen hours and code till 2 at night. The grueling timetable was followed religiously for around 10 months, and finally the 22 year old rolled out the first version of Wingify on Hacker News in 2009.
The excitement of the young man was palpable. Chopra has loaded the platform with a lot of features ranging from testing, analytics and personalization. Sadly, there was a gross mismatch between expectation and reality. “All I got was a handful of users and a few comments,” he says. It was heartbreaking for the man who had already tasted setbacks during his college days. He lists out some of the intangible hard work which went behind the making of the first version: sleep deprivation, zero friend circle and countless hours of laser-sharp concentration. “Imagine, you do so much and then you hear comments like ‘what the hell have you made, and ‘I don’t understand,” he says.
Let’s fast forward eight years and jump to March 2017.
This time the founding team of Wingify — Sparsh Gupta started contributing to Wingify in 2010, and officially joined full time in early 2011 — couldn’t understand what was going on. The entrepreneurs were into their eighth year of bootstrapped journey, and suddenly a dark billowing cloud threatened to eclipse the profitable march of the friends who had laboriously built a global SaaS company out of India.
Google sounded the war bugle on March 30, 2017. “This is not a test: Google Optimize now free — for everyone…”read the news which was boldly flashed across the country. “As of today, Optimize is available in over 180 countries. And we’re not done yet…Keep an eye out for more improvements and announcements in the future,” screamed the message flashed by Google on its blog. “What are you waiting for? Try it right now. Happy Optimizing,” is how the note ended.
Clearly, it was not happy news to wake up with. Gupta still vividly remembers the day. The news spread like wildfire. Google launched Optimize, and it does exactly what Wingify did: A/B testing! There was, though, a big difference. Wingify had been selling the product, and Google made it free! “If Google enters your space, you just don’t know how to react,” recalls Gupta, who didn’t anticipate the belligerent move by the much bigger rival.
GOOGLE & SERACH FOR AN ANSWER
All kinds of random thoughts started bugging Gupta. “What if my users shift to Google? What if we start losing business and employees…Gupta’s mind started to play games and tease the entrepreneur who quit a cushy job in London and joined Chopra in 2010. Over the next eight years, by 2017, the friends hustled a lot to bring Wingify to a decent scale without taking in any venture capital. A trial by fire, especially at this junction of their life, was the last thing the duo expected. Google had posed a searing question.
Chopra, meanwhile, quickly figured out a fitting response. The answer was in going back to the roots: Wingify’s obsessive love with the product and the consumers. The partners decided to double down on customer service, became hyper receptive and sensitive to consumer feedback, and decided to learn and unlearn on a war footing.
Another plus for Chopra was the track record of Wingify. The bootstrapped startup had been in the game, and among the top scorers, for eight long years. In March 2017, the future lied in drawing inspiration from the past. “If it was obvious what’s going to work, big companies would have cracked it,” says Chopra. And the big advantages that the Goliaths have are obvious. Chopra lists out the weapons in their armoury: loads of money, army of smart people, easy access to resources and a big brand name.
Chopra, though, quickly points out the biggest chink in the armour of the much-bigger rivals. They lack startup DNA. The only reason why startups are able to make a dent, he explains, is because they figure out something that nobody else has really realized. “They iterate really fast,” he says. “Speed of learning from customers is the biggest priority that an entrepreneur needs to focus on,” he says. The failures during his college days, he stresses, happened largely due to a glaring absence of feedback. “Talking to customers before coding would have helped saved months of hard work,” he says. “Talk to customers before you write any piece of code,” he dishes out an advice to all budding founders. And to engineer-founders, he adds one more layer. “I know it (user feedback) doesn’t come naturally to them. But that’s precisely what needs to happen,” he says.
Meanwhile, Gupta went back to his team and reminded them of Wingify’s another DNA. “We must focus on what we could do rather than worry about what could happen,” he underlined. He, in fact, pointed out the silver lining. “If Google is getting into the industry, then it means that the industry is quite big,” he said. The challenge came with a massive opportunity. Google’s entry, he underlined, will end up expanding the market. Thousands of businesses, which were not convinced about the power of A/B testing will now try it for free. “And once they do it, they would upgrade to a much better experience with us,” he added. Lastly, a realisation that Wingify has survived enough scares in its journey gave enough confidence.
LOVE, RESPECT & BROMANCE
Chopra, for his part, tells us his biggest weapon and strength: a deep love for what he has been doing and a warm camaraderie with Gupta. “He runs the day-to-day show now,” he says, pointing out how Gupta is helming the operations at Wingify as the CEO. Though Chopra still madly loves his first baby — Wingify — he now has a second baby in the form of Nintee, a startup focused on reducing suffering in the world by helping more people become healthy for life. Though Chopra has gone solo with Nintee, Gupta happens to be an advisor. With friends acting as sounding board for each other, Chopra and Gupta have built and carved out a unique model of entrepreneurship based on grit and respect.
Love still forms the cornerstone of Wingify. Chopra explains. Though it’s not an easy journey even for a VC-backed venture, the hustle gets magnified for the bootstrapped counterparts. The ones with venture capital have support from VCs, have funds to aggressively expand and have a great cushion to take a lot more risks. But when you don’t have all of that, how do you explain the long and arduous bootstrapped journey? “The only possible explanation is you do it because you love doing it,” says Chopra, adding that doing things for the pure love of doing them needs loads of passion and obsession.
Commenting on a bootstrapped way of life, Chopra wants to convey a critical message. “VC way of business is not the only way of doing business,” he says, adding that bootstrapped ventures are not an exception, as perceived by media and outsiders. “I think 99% of businesses in the world have not raised funding,” he says. “The VC business, therefore, is an exception,” he adds.
