

Startup: an emotional roller coaster ride - sparshgupta
http://paraschopra.com/blog/personal/startup-an-emotional-roller-coaster-ride.htm

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bromley
Do you find that the larger companies that typically want webex demos also
want SLAs or a custom contract of some sort?

My company is launching a commercial API soon, and one of the potentially
high-paying customers has mentioned wanting to meet to discuss contracts. I
was thinking more along the lines of standard terms and conditions and a big
"click here to sign up" button, and am not sure we want to consider SLAs or
custom agreements. So I'm curious as to whether you're finding that the larger
companies often expect them, or whether a great service and standard T&C are
enough.

BTW I think I might be able to improve your conversion rate :) The "Terms"
links from your sign-up pages go straight to a 404.

~~~
paraschopra
(Ouch! Thanks for the heads up. We recently did an A/B test on signup page --
looks like one of the links got mixed up. Fixed it now. Though did not notice
any drop in conversions, probably people don't read or care about terms. Sad,
especially because our terms are quite simple).

Regarding your other point, yes, some companies have elaborate custom
contracts involving different teams: lawyers, procurement and what not. One of
the prospective customers sent us 100 page document on Vendor Assessment with
stuff like this - 'Do you keep your laptops in an open car?' and 'Do you
install anti-virus software and keep it updated'. I was quite surprised but
they said it was their "standard" procedure.

Though, we do not offer SLAs and I don't think companies are adamant about it
if you convince them that historically your uptime has been in 99.9% range.

~~~
bromley
Thank you Paras :)

Focusing on historical uptime sounds like a good plan to me, and it's pleasing
to hear that the companies don't tend insist on an SLA if you can demonstrate
that.

Custom contracts are frightening. On the plus side they give you a good reason
to charge more. But on the minus side they give the other company a good
reason to take you to court if something goes wrong and you're unable to
deliver as expected.

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prateekdayal
Its interesting to know that you have to do a webex demo for your products. I
assumed that for Saas, demos are a thing of the past. Other people have
experienced the same too?

~~~
paraschopra
Yes, big companies usually need webex demo. I'd be curious to know if other
people experience the same (or VWO is an exception).

~~~
mahmud
Yes, webex is par for the course, but it helps you negotiate better $. Charge
a "pain premium".

~~~
paraschopra
Excellent point. However, we have transparent per-visitor pricing (also
displayed on website) so it is impossible to negotiate better $ since it is
linked to traffic customer wants to test.

~~~
mmelin
Perhaps you could modify your offering to be either "Self-serve" with
transparent pricing but no demos or "Hands on" with Webex demo, dedicated
support etc. In my experience customers that insist on Webex demos make up for
the pain in price insensitivity once convinced, but you need to be able to
exploit that somehow.

~~~
patio11
One interesting thing about this customer type: they will pay you just to
promise to do things that you were going to do anyway. (Like, say, respond to
all inquiries within 24 hours.) They will also pay you to promise not to do
things you have no intention of doing. (Like, say, closing in the next twelve
months.)

You can _charge through the nose_ for things like that. (A week of my time
costs $X. Two consecutive weeks costs a little less than $2X. A week of my
time now and a week of guaranteed availability in Q4 costs about $8X, because
if you need that particular combo you can find $6X in your sofa.)

~~~
paraschopra
Patrick, I think I need to learn about this from you. Right now: all I say is
that tell me your traffic requirement and we will give a quote. No strings
attached!

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epynonymous
excellent product, and excellent story! from the video introduction, the user
interface seems to be a little antiquated, what are you using for the right
click menu? it reminds me of solaris CDE menus :)

how did you guys get started? the idea is really novel.

~~~
paraschopra
I started programming a platform which had everything from segmentation to
analytics to targeting and test. Here's that platform:
<http://www.wingify.com/labs.php>

I did a Show HN, had beta users and got feedback (notably including patio11)
that I need to focus on one aspect and make it as easy as possible. So, I
focussed on A/B testing (because existing popular Google's tool was not easy
to use for non technical folks) and coded Visual Website Optimizer.

~~~
patio11
Amazing that that was only a year and three months ago. It feels like forever.
(Oh yeah, that was midway through the final deathmarch at work. That's why.)

I just found my emails about Wingify/VWO to Paras and a friend of mine.
Notably, I told Paras to raise the price (the proposed prices topped at the
lowest price now) and told my SEO buddy that VWO was going to make millions.

~~~
paraschopra
Yep, I remember that you once mentioned that you would have loved to code VWO
yourself and then make millions out of it. You can't imagine how powerful and
motivating that was (and still is) to me.

Also, Patrick, notably you dedicated a full post on your blog on VWO
[http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/12/09/bringing-ab-testing-
to-t...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2009/12/09/bringing-ab-testing-to-the-
fortune-5-million/) and it brought bootload of beta testers. That was AMAZING!
I iterated through every piece of feedback and refined it.

It's hard to imagine VWO existing in form it exists today had you not helped
initially. Thanks for all of this! I owe you a lot :)

~~~
robeastham
A personal recommendation from Patrick or someone else as high profile here on
HN must be like gold dust in the early stages. It's just the sort of
recommendation and publicity that I'd love to get for my new startup when I
launch the private beta soon.

I've been playing about with a competitors A/B testing free trial but their
site seems to be having problems today as I can't access my experiments. May
be related to Google app engine I think. Anyway they don't provide heat maps
like VWO and some other stuff and so VWO will definitely be next on my list to
test drive. Thanks for the insight into the day in the life of a startup too.

~~~
patio11
As much as I treasure the image of sprinkling off magic startup pixie dust
with every twitch of my shimmering wings, the hard-nosed metrics junkie in me
notes that you can expect only a few hundred clickthroughs from the most
popular links on my blog ever. Paras got a few more signups than that would
suggest slightly because I banged down doors to give away VWO accounts to SEOs
I knew but mostly because VWO is VWO's pixie dust: the product's quality and
take on the space is disruptively better than what Google managed with
infinite money.

