{"id":52092,"date":"2020-06-08T21:05:21","date_gmt":"2020-06-08T15:35:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vwo.com\/blog\/?p=52092"},"modified":"2025-04-28T12:10:06","modified_gmt":"2025-04-28T06:40:06","slug":"vwo-evolution-10-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vwo.com\/blog\/vwo-evolution-10-years\/","title":{"rendered":"How VWO has evolved over the years"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

We celebrated our 10th birthday last week. In 2010, we launched VWO as the world’s first A\/B testing tool<\/a> with the now industry-standard Visual Editor<\/a> for making website variations. Back then, it was called Visual Website Optimizer because, well, it provided a visual way of optimizing website (conversion rate)<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’m Paras Chopra, the founder & the chairman of VWO. For our 10th anniversary (on 27th May 2020), I and my co-founder (& the CEO) Sparsh Gupta looked back at our decade long journey together to see how far we’ve come. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Download Free: A\/B Testing Guide<\/span><\/a><\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

What came out of that reminiscence is the story of how VWO looked like back then and how it evolved over time.<\/p>\n\n\n

How VWO started (2009)<\/h2>\n\n\n

The reason Wingify<\/a> is the official name of our company (and not VWO) is because the first version of the product was actually called Wingify. It was the year 2009 and I was fresh out of college. Having attempted several startups during my undergraduate days and seeing all of them flop, I had come to realize the value of marketing and started learning about it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, the more I read about marketing, the more I fell in love with it. After a while, it dawned on me that perhaps my next startup should be about marketing. And that is how Wingify was born.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here’s a screenshot of how the very first product (called Wingify) looked like:<\/p>\n\n\n

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\"screenshot
Wingify was the precursor to VW<\/em>O<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

I distinctly remember launching it on Hacker News<\/a> from where we got initial 15-20 users. The feedback I got from those users was overwhelmingly clear: I was trying to do too many things in one product and it was damn confusing. So, acting on this feedback, I decided to focus on one feature of the product (A\/B testing) and do it really well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I chose to focus on A\/B testing because:<\/p>\n\n\n\n