This was my 5th startup. During my college days I kept launching startups (Kroomsa, Precimark, MyJugaad.in). Failure of all these made me introspect and I realized I was trapped into the engineer's fallacy: build things without knowing or caring about how to market them. This pushed me to learn marketing and I fell deeper into the rabbit hole.
So, my next attempt was build a marketing suite as I was learning a lot about what works and what doesn't. But even that turned out to be a dud as I put too many features into it. But I did launch it on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=876141 and got a few users.
Users found the UX too complicated and I got feedback to focus on 1 among the 10s of features I had added. See this comment by @patio11
>because you pack an AWFUL lot onto that first screen
So as my next iteration, I picked A/B testing and made a visual editor to make creation of A/B tests stupidly simple and that took off because it allowed marketers launch A/B tests without being reliant on developers.
This product, Visual Website Optimizer (VWO), took off!
Thanks for this. To get it straight, you decided to go for marketing niche has it was an industry that obsessed you.
From their, feedback allowed to focus on one thing and do it well. This makes sense as you probably stretched yourself too thin. But the thing I don't get is, what was the trigger/pivot that made you go for 'A/B/ testing and not another segment of marketing niche?
At that time, weren't there other players in A/B segment who were far more established? What competitive edge did you see that made you go all in in A/B and which eventually took off?
I picked A/B testing because I discovered the most used product (Google Website Optimizer, now defunkt) was pretty crappy.
As an engineer, I couldn't figure out how to use it and it was meant for marketers.
So I sensed an opportunity within the A/B testing niche. In fact, the name Visual Website Optimizer comes from the fact that it did with Google Website Optimizer did, but visually (in an editor, instead of HTML code).
Optimizely started at the same time as us. They went to YC and raised a bunch of money. We remained bootstrapped.
So, my next attempt was build a marketing suite as I was learning a lot about what works and what doesn't. But even that turned out to be a dud as I put too many features into it. But I did launch it on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=876141 and got a few users.
Users found the UX too complicated and I got feedback to focus on 1 among the 10s of features I had added. See this comment by @patio11
>because you pack an AWFUL lot onto that first screen
So as my next iteration, I picked A/B testing and made a visual editor to make creation of A/B tests stupidly simple and that took off because it allowed marketers launch A/B tests without being reliant on developers.
This product, Visual Website Optimizer (VWO), took off!