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 with 1M/1M as well. I don’t think we would have existed without the amount of content we have produced.

Paras Chopra: It has to be good content. A lot of people think that churning out garbage content is the same thing. You obviously know it has to be quality content.

Sramana: What was your revenue at the end of March 2013?

Paras Chopra: We did around $3.5 million.

Sramana: How much did you increase the team from 2011 to 2013?

Paras Chopra: We more than doubled the size from 7 employees to 17. We added most of our positions in engineering, although we did bring on a sales guy, a marketing guy, and two support guys.

Sramana: What has been significant for Wingify this past year?

Paras Chopra: Our focus has changed. I have matured as a businessperson, and I have insight into what works and what does not work. The company has always been reactive. We have now determined that we can be proactive. One of my key realizations this year is that if India can make a cost play on IT services, there is no reason that it cannot make a similar play on product as well. My goal is to make Wingify the most respected software company to come out of India. Our forecast for this year is somewhere between $6 and $7 million.

Sramana: Have you given some thought as to what your product roadmap will be?

Paras Chopra: There is a lot we can do. The product is evolving beyond A/B testing and moving towards the original vision of Winfigy where it is a layer that sits on top of a website to provide intelligence. I would like to see Wingify sitting on top of every website where we can do testing, targeting, and whatever AI roles they would like performed on their website.

Apart from that, there are other areas where the market is expanding. There are apps that need testing and optimization. There remains a need to test and optimize the entire customer service experience. That includes taking data from different channels and integrating those data to find optimization for it. There are a lot of things we can test and optimize today.

Sramana: The advantage of India is that you can do things at a reasonable cost structure. You have a good culture built in the company, and you can bootstrap these products that will ultimately be adjacent to your customer base.

Paras Chopra: I don’t think a lot of people realize the advantages we have here in India. It may take Silicon Valley $100,000 to recruit a salesperson. We can recruit five equally bright salespeople for the same money here.

Sramana: I have been talking about affordable SaaS since I did the Zoho story. They have built a lot of software products.

Paras Chopra: That is an inspiration to what we believe we can achieve. One of the reasons I convinced myself not to raise venture capital is because I don’t know how long it will take to travel this road. We have received many offers, but we have turned them all down to date. I think Wingify is going to have a long journey.

Sramana: Thank you for sharing a very inspiring story. It has been a real pleasure talking with you. Good luck as you go forward!

[This interview is featured in my Entrepreneur Journeys book, Seed India – How To Navigate The Seed Capital Gap in India]

To learn more about solo entrepreneurship, please study our course on Udemy: How To Succeed As A Solo Entrepreneur with Sramana Mitra.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Solo Founder, Bootstrapping to $7 Million in India: Wingify CEO Paras Chopra
1 2 3 4 5 6 7