Optimizing web business

Paras Chopra and Sparsh Gupta of fer a great lesson on how the internet can provide opportunities to build a profitable global business in next to no time. Chopra is just 23, Gupta is 25, and within two years of starting work on a project they call a 'website optimizer', they have several thousand customers, including Microsoft, Groupon, Rackspace, MakeMyTrip, FourSquare, and WWF.

And while Chopra and Gupta said the company was profitable, one person, who knows them well, described the company as "insanely profitable" .

They call their company Wingify. "Just thought it was a cool name and the URL was available," says Chopra. And their product, Visual Website Optimizer (VWO), helps marketers create different versions of their website in real time to figure out which one works best.

If your website has a coloured button that users need to click to download a product , you can check in real time which colour works best to persuade users to click on it. The technology randomly shows, say, green and red buttons, and then generates the data to tell you which one drew more clicks. It can test similarly for different layouts of a web page and tell you which one made viewers stay longer on it or pushed people to take some actions on the website like downloading objects. It can generate 'heat maps' of your web page that tell you how many people clicked on which parts of your page. That could help you determine where you should place your most important messages or links. Chopra thought of the idea to create an easy-to-use website optimizer when he found that a free version offered by Google was hard to use even for technical folks. "Google has not updated the product for the last five years. We found that people needed it, and saw an opportunity," he says. Chopra, who grew up in Delhi, developed a serious interest in programming and web applications when he was still studying . He joined a biotech course in Delhi College of Engineering (DCE) because he had some interest in computational biology (used in modeling gene networks), but web application was his real interest.

In 2007, when he was in his penultimate year at DCE, he developed an application that allowed multiple live web pages to be presented as a slide show. In his final year at college, he developed a music portal for independent rock bands. "It failed because nobody pays to listen to music," says Chopra, wryly.

Once out of college, he was keen to work on a project that would combine data mining , marketing and technology. The result was a testing and analytics product. "But I built in too many features and people did not know what to do with it," says Chopra. Which is when he felt that he might be better off focusing on just the testing part of the analytics product and improve on the Google offering.

By December 2009, he had a beta version of the product ready, which he distributed among bloggers. With feedback pouring in over the next six months, he improved on the product, and finally launched it commercially in May 2010.

Chopra meanwhile also got in touch with Gupta, who was senior to him in DCE and who had gone on to do a masters in science from Oxford University where his major was artificial intelligence. He initially worked part time for Wingify. But now, he works full-time . "I focus on the technology, and Paras focuses more on the business," Gupta says.

They have spent almost nothing on marketing . Chopra uses blogs and writes guest posts on popular websites about testing and website optimization to attract attention to their product. "The idea is also to build our image as thought leaders in the space," he says.

Globally, there are other such testing products, such as Optimizely and Adobe's Omniture. But Chopra and Gupta say those are priced substantially higher than their product. "That's one reason why our revenues are growing by 10-15 % per month," says Chopra.

Now they are looking at adding more features that big enterprises value, such as enabling real-time targeting of website visitors with promotions, based on their activities on the websites.
"But our USP will always be ease of use. With our product, companies would not have to involve their IT departments to test their websites," says Chopra.