

Visual Website Optimizer featured in India's national newspaper - sushi
http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Default/Scripting/ArticleWin.asp?From=Archive&Source=Page&Skin=TOINEW&BaseHref=TOIKM/2011/05/06&ViewMode=GIF&PageLabel=17&EntityId=Ar01700&AppName=1

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uast23
This is a very recent development among media housed in India; they have
suddenly started realizing that people here are actually earning money by
doing a "valid" business on Internet. You can also find lot of bloggers being
covered by national newspapers very frequently. I say, this is a very good
move because more than anything else it will help in reducing the tabooness of
leaving a secure job for doing a startup.

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FraaJad
Congrats.

Times of India is world's largest circulating English newspaper [1], however
"The Hindu" carries the banner of "India's national newspaper".

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_circulation#World_new...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_circulation#World_newspapers_with_the_largest_circulation)

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paraschopra
Ah didn't know about it. That makes it even better! We got featured in world's
largest circulating English newspaper.

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ThomPete
Congrats.

I can't help to think that the discussion that was on here a while back have
something to do with it all.

HN have turned into quite an impressive ecosystem (even if my assumptions
about your success is wrong :) )

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paraschopra
Thanks! I can't thank HN community enough for the guidance and support. I
remember doing Ask HN about 1.5 years ago and got great feedback (especially
from patio11, webwright and others). Now even though we're still bootstrapped;
team has grown to 6 (earlier it was me alone). At the time of Ask HN there
were 0 users, now we have paying customers including Microsoft, Groupon,
Mitsubishi and other big brands. It's been an awesome ride! (Hint: May is also
1 year anniversary of our paid plans and we are planning something very
special)

The best thing about our business is that we earn in USD but the expenses here
(in India) are less by a factor or so. Hence even without raising VC funding
we can afford to hire top talent, let them tackle challenging problems
(servers doing 1.6 billion pageviews per month) and pay them really well (at
par with Google, Yahoo, etc). Can't wait to see what's in store ahead...

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Zakuzaa
Could you share what was the process like? TOI people contacted you or you
contacted them? phone interview? email? Really interested in knowing this.
Thanks.

[Edit] I myself was contacted by a national hindi newspaper, but it didn't
work out.

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paraschopra
Sure, a fellow entrepreneur (Pallav from FusionCharts -- awesome guy, has an
interview on Mixergy) connected me to the journalist who had covered them. The
journalist called and we then exchanged lot of mails and phone calls. Then he
went radio silent and now out of nowhere, we got a story!

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Zakuzaa
Great. Thanks :)

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karterk
Congrats! Curious - what is your technology stack?

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paraschopra
LAMP stack with nginx as load balancer and Varnish as cache layer. Redis as
queue. And, of course, how can I forget most helpful memcache

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paraschopra
And, oh btw our test designer and actual A/B test execution relies a lot on
jQuery and JavaScript.

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karterk
Thanks, 1 billion+ impressions are impressive. Would love to hear more about
some of the technical challenges you face. Perhaps a blog post sometime on
that? :)

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paraschopra
Yeah, I think a blog post would be interesting. We scaled from having 1 server
to now application spread across 19 servers (most are Apache 2G RAM; 2 varnish
caches 4G each; 1 load balancer 4G. We are going to add one more load balancer
soon.)

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maheshs
Congrats paras, you are a big inspiration for every startup especially in
India.

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dangerdiabolick
I second that :)

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brown9-2
Is Google Website Optimizer really 5 years old?

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paraschopra
Yep, it was launched in 2006. Here is the launch announcement:
[http://techcrunch.com/2006/10/18/google-launches-website-
opt...](http://techcrunch.com/2006/10/18/google-launches-website-optimizer/)

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_ankit_
Congrats! Way to go! You guys have a product with great potential.

I can say that seeing your current implementation.

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savrajsingh
great job paras!

