From bedroom to boardroom: How SaaS startup Wingify bootstrapped its way to success

Paras Chopra (left) and Sparsh Gupta, co-founders, Wingify. (Tarun Kumar Sahu/Mint)
Paras Chopra (left) and Sparsh Gupta, co-founders, Wingify. (Tarun Kumar Sahu/Mint)

Summary

  • From humble beginnings, to serving over 5,000 global enterprises, to a deal to be acquired by Everstone. All in 15 years. In a landscape obsessed with big funding rounds, Wingify founders Paras Chopra and Sparsh Gupta have proved that you don’t need to depend on external funding to become a success.

Bengaluru: Avinash Raghava’s phone began buzzing incessantly late on 23 January as message after message poured in. Curious, Raghava, the man behind SaaSBoomi, a community of SaaS (software as a service) founders, picked it up to see what the commotion was all about.

It turned out that private equity firm Everstone Capital had announced it was buying an 80% stake in Wingify, a bootstrapped SaaS startup founded by Paras Chopra and Sparsh Gupta. And SaaSBoomi’s more than 6,000 SaaS founders were agog at the development.

“Sparsh and I are a part of 17 mutual WhatsApp groups and when the news of the stake sale was announced, an atmosphere of congratulatory cheer broke out among SaaS entrepreneurs across India," said Raghava.

While details of the consideration are not public, the deal valued Wingify at approximately $200 million. It marked the culmination of a short but remarkable journey by the Delhi-headquartered company, which had been set up in 2009. In just over a decade and a half, Wingify has established a global presence, serving over 5,000 enterprises, including many in the US, Canada and Europe.

The startup’s revenue surged 30.8% in 2023-24 to 288.61 crore from 220.6 crore in the previous year. This was accompanied by a 30% year-over-year increase in profits, according to its consolidated financial statement, filed with the Registrar of Companies.

Wingify had achieved all of this on its own steam. And that drew the attention of Everstone, which viewed its global market potential, strong profitability and robust technology platform as key differentiators.

“Software startups in India have traditionally been a VC (venture capital) play," Sandeep Singh, managing director of Everstone, told Mint. “We were quick to move with Wingify because it ticked all the boxes that we were looking for."

In particular, Wingify’s focus on product excellence and profitability, rather than growth at all costs, caught Everstone’s eye. Icing the cake, the SaaS company was bootstrapped, profitable and had a strong technological foundation in the marketing tech space, which the PE firm has been eyeing for a while. In July 2023, for instance, Everstone had made a significant investment in MediaMint, another bootstrapped marketing firm with a global market. The Wingify deal was part of that larger plan.

The valuation of $200 million translates to a remarkable 4x return on investment for Wingify, which had an annual recurring revenue (ARR) of $50 million when it was acquired.

But focusing solely on ARR might not quite capture the whole picture in terms of the returns Wingify has generated. “Their capital returns are off the charts," said Nitin Bhatia, managing director of DC Advisory, a corporate finance advisory firm that helped broker the deal. “Only 2 lakh had originally gone into the company. After that, everything has been from accruals from the business. The company had more than $60 million in just cash sitting in the books at the time of exit," Bhatia said.

In a landscape obsessed with rapid growth and big funding rounds, Wingify has proved that you don’t need to depend on external funding to become a success.

Chasing a dream

Wingify co-founder Chopra, a self-confessed “Silicon Valley dreamer", had always harboured entrepreneurial ambitions. Inspired by stories of tech giants like Google and Yahoo, Chopra says he yearned to build something impactful—a business that did not require a huge factory but could be created on the canvas of a laptop screen.

Paras Chopra, founder and chairman, Wingify.
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Paras Chopra, founder and chairman, Wingify.

After graduating from Delhi College of Engineering in 2008, Chopra, who worked as a research engineer with a company based in the national capital, often spent his evenings on personal projects. He recounted his early attempts at building software, which failed because he couldn’t attract users. One of those projects would, however, bear fruit later—it was the first code that he wrote for a visual optimization tool.

“I fell in love with marketing," Chopra said. This was at a time when analytics as a field was gaining traction globally, with Google acquiring analytics software Urchin in 2005. “Google had a website optimization tool that was a bit too technical. It required marketers to code," said Chopra. A website optimization tool helps marketers and website owners analyze a website’s performance and user experience.

Recognizing the complexity of existing solutions and the bottleneck they created for marketers, Chopra saw an opportunity. He created a visual tool that could help marketers run their own tests quickly and easily—the tool reduced the turnaround time from a week to under an hour.

This insight, born from a deep understanding of the market’s pain points, became the foundation of Visual Website Optimizer (VWO), Wingify’s flagship product.

Sparsh Gupta, Chopra’s college friend and now Wingify’s CEO, joined the venture in its early stages. Gupta, a University of Oxford computer science graduate, was working at a London software firm to repay his student loans. Despite the distance, the duo synchronized their schedules to dedicate after-work hours to developing Wingify. By January 2011, Gupta had returned to Delhi to work on Wingify full-time.

Sparsh Gupta, co-founder and CEO, Wingify.
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Sparsh Gupta, co-founder and CEO, Wingify.

Gupta recalls the early days as being a mix of excitement and challenges, noting: “People thought I had been fired to leave my job in London."

The young founders worked out of their bedrooms and then a small office. Hiring was difficult as they were not doing “mainstream stuff," requiring them to convince not just candidates but also the candidates’ parents in some cases. Their first hire was a support engineer, a testament to their customer-centric philosophy.

The challenges were never about profitability, said Gupta. In the first month of commencing paid services, the company made about $4,000 and achieved $1 million in revenue within 18 months.

In the absence of a mentor, a venture capitalist or even a playbook, Gupta says their decisions were driven by customer feedback and data. “There were instances where we spent hours on calls with customers. Sometimes during those calls, I’d mute myself, build a feature that the customer requested in 30 minutes, and inform them before finishing the conversation," Gupta recalled.

Ankit Jain, who heads product and engineering, joined them in 2011. Jain recalls the time spent in their first office in Rohini, a neighbourhood in northwest Delhi. “It was a small office and we just used to sit across the desk and develop a lot of new features, answer customer queries, do sales, marketing… Anything and everything that was required to make the company a success was done by everyone," said Jain.

Sometimes during calls, I’d mute myself, build a feature that the customer requested in 30 minutes. — Sparsh Gupta

A/B testing, a method to compare different versions of content to determine which one performs best on a website, was a relatively new concept at the time, and Chopra attributes a significant part of Wingify’s initial growth to writing and publishing content around the concept. “One of the beautiful things about the product was that you got hard data on what worked and what didn’t work for your website," said Chopra.

He adds customers were encouraged to post their success stories with the tool, which were published as case studies, turning the customers into advocates and contributing to the overall literature around A/B testing.

Product to platform play

Pallav Nadhani, who bootstrapped and sold his startup FusionCharts to US-based software firm Idera in 2020, says that while it can be a longer journey, bootstrapping allows for greater control and flexibility. “Building a profitable company without external funding gives you incredible control and flexibility," said Nadhani. “You’re not chasing an investor’s timeline-led growth and you can focus on building a sustainable business."

Referring to the Wingify acquisition, Nadhani said, “It’s a great story of perseverance. They built a fantastic product, which competed successfully against global giants like Optimizely, even with Google offering free tools. That’s a testament to their resilience." He believes the Wingify deal will inspire other Indian entrepreneurs to explore the bootstrapped path.

But Wingify’s success story is not just about organic growth. It’s as much about strategic decisions and a unique approach to the SaaS market. And innovations inspired by frugality, which drove the company’s product-led growth.

Besides VWO Testing, the company built a set of connected tools to help businesses improve their online presence. Some of Wingify’s other offerings include a VWO personalization tool that lets businesses create custom website experiences for each visitor, changing things like product suggestions and messages based on what each person does on the site. This helps keep people interested and encourages them to buy.

Wingify also launched VWO Insights, a tool that goes deeper than merely providing numbers and demographics of visitors. It shows how people use a site, where they click and how they move their mouse. This helps businesses understand why people get stuck or frustrated, so they can fix those problems and make their site better.

“We stand out today because we are one of those platforms that provide more than one capability within a single product," said Jain. Over the years, Wingify led product innovation through many firsts, including heatmaps, visual testing tools, a content distribution network (CDN), and a Bayesian statistics engine.

“Wingify is one of the most beautiful stories of category creation," said SaaSBoomi’s Raghava. “They scouted for funding at one point and I am glad they didn’t raise funds because they built the second-biggest bootstrapped company in the SaaS space after Zoho."

Shot in the arm

Software as a service is a business model where customers rent software hosted on the cloud and pay monthly or annually for the service. It is a segment that gained momentum in India around 2010. While global companies such as Salesforce were already popular, Indian startups, including Zoho and Freshworks, came up with a unique proposition: build in India and sell in the US market.

Venture capitalists, wary of pumping money into e-commerce after many failures, started noticing the SaaS landscape after Freshworks’ success. Compared to consumer apps, companies in the segment mostly sold directly to businesses, had relatively lower operational costs, and a faster path to profitability. Many made a beeline for India’s booming SaaS market, which peaked in 2021, attracting $4.8 billion in venture capital.

However, while the last decade has seen many successes, there have also been many failures. Some SaaS companies, including Tiger Global-backed Toplyne and Matrix Partners-backed Protonn, struggled to find the right product-market fit. Global competition and a general downturn in the market also affected such startups in India.

Amid this backdrop, the Everstone deal has come as a shot in the arm for the ecosystem. “Everstone happened to be a partner who believed in our growth—it’s not about growth at all costs," said Chopra, alluding to the founders’ philosophy.

It’s a philosophy that has clicked, going by the company’s client retention rate. “This company has always maintained a very healthy margin, something that distinguishes it from most of its peers, simply because it has found a way to have a much lower cost structure while maintaining 90% plus business globally," said DC Advisory’s Bhatia. “There are very few players globally who have been able to demonstrate this sort of a leap forward."

The next phase

In 2018, Chopra transitioned from CEO to chairman, pursuing his other passions, including AI research and development, through the Turing Dream community, an AI research community. As the company matured and achieved significant scale, he began thinking about his long-term involvement and sought to monetize his ownership.

Chopra had tremendous passion for zero to one, the initial phase of building something from scratch, and not as much in the long-term scaling phase.

“Paras wanted to monetize some of it and began exploring options for an exit," said Gupta, ultimately leading to a majority stake purchase by Everstone. Gupta, who continues to be the CEO and in-charge of day-to-day operations, is excited to explore the partnership under new mentors from Everstone.

“Sparsh is more than happy to sort of take the company from 10 to 100, which is the journey Wingify finds itself on now," said Everstone’s Singh.

The company’s growth had largely been driven by India, with a limited on-ground sales presence in key markets such as the US and Europe. Everstone, with its experience in building global sales teams, sees significant potential to expand Wingify’s reach. “We have experience in building global sales teams. It’s an area where we feel reasonably confident we can add value," said Singh.

Bhatia, too, noted that Everstone has been successful in building teams locally. “They understand that playbook well," he said, adding that the PE firm has a clear sense of where to steer Wingify over the next three to four years from a product strategy standpoint.

Aside from expanding the team in the US, Singh said Everstone’s plans for Wingify’s growth include developing new AI-powered products focused on behavioral insights and personalization, and exploring potential acquisitions to further strengthen its market position.

Gearing up for this new chapter, Gupta said Wingify’s next target will be to cross the $100 million revenue milestone in a couple of years.

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