Paras Chopra: Making Websites Fly

Paras Chopra | 26
Founder, Wingify
CATEGORY: TECHNOLOGY

Paras Chopra is one of those wizkids who have always excelled in academics. He opted for a biotech degree, won a gold medal and then, unexpectedly, quit his first job to start a company that builds software for optimisation of websites. “My parents always knew that their son is a bit weird, so they weren’t shocked when I told them what I wanted to do,” says Chopra.

While studying for his biotech degree, Chopra got hooked on to data analytics and the inferences one could draw from varied sets of data. During his first job at a company called Aspiring Minds, he was a part of the R&D team that designed employability tests and analysed the results to judge key skills, talent and potential in people. Computer adaptive tests use analytics to understand the target population, pick up patterns and make judgements call. “We do the same with Wingify’s software—analyse signals and behaviour of the traffic you get on the site and suggest better alternatives to achieve set goals,” says Chopra.

The core feature of his software (Visual Website Optimizer) is the A/B testing tool that allows live testing of a website with different variables. In other words, you can create different versions of a site and check which one performs better. This helps isolate variables to best judge the effectiveness of a website. For example, where to place a picture or a ‘submit’ button on an ecommerce site; when and where to place social media tools; knowing which headlines work better for a news site; understanding the browsing habits of users to optimise the site’s design, and so on.

The product has hit the right note, bagging clients such as Microsoft, Advanced Micro Devices, General Electric, Groupon, Airbnb, The Walt Disney Company and Hotels.com. Chopra launched the software in 2010, and the company clocked $3.5 million in revenues last year. He is confident that revenues will nearly double this year.

Chopra’s friend and now Wingify CTO, Sparsh Gupta, who holds a masters degree from Oxford and has worked in London, handles the tech developments in the firm, while Chopra focuses on growth, sales and marketing, and future development. They have a team of 40.

Chopra didn’t have it all easy; he’s had his fair share of failures in college where he witnessed many start-up projects never taking off—like a music website that wanted to promote Indian independent rock bands. Chopra says, “I was approaching them with a ty-pical engineering mindset. They never succeeded and gave me enough insights on why marketing is important.”

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