In 2006, Yahoo! was ahead of Google in traffic but was slowly losing talent war. Yahoo! was run by Hollywood executive Terry Semel. It chased the ad deals. Google onboarded engineers. Yahoo! rejected engineers who had no computer science background. One such reject was Sparsh Gupta, a mechanical engineer from Delhi College of Engineering. The same Gupta set up a startup — Wingify , a visual website optimizer. His DCE batchmate Paras Chopra was a partner. Their startup was leading A/B testing platform serving Microsoft, Disney World, World Economic Forum, UNICEF, Vodafone Group, HBO and eBay.
The startup earlier launched one product which flopped. It was posted on Hacker. There was on brutal comment — ‘Don’t replicate what Google does for free. Find what Google is bad at. Become the best at that.’
Googles website optimiser required coding knowledge. Marketers hated writing the code. So Wingify built a visual version. Drag and drop. No developers were needed. They christened it Visual Website Optimizer. They gathered clients and kept growing steadily. They earned profits between Rs. 40- Rs.60 crore.
They are new competing with Optimizely and Adobe. In January 2025, Wingify stake of $ 200 million was acquired by Everstone. Chopra left to explore other avenues. Gupta has stayed back as cofounder. He retains most of equity.
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