Congratulations on the milestone, and thanks for sharing your story in the blog post. It's great to see a product's evolution over a decade.
I want to highlight that it's not as clear-cut as this: "If you are what Paul Graham calls as relentless resourceful, you will build a successful business."
I know there are people reading who consider themselves relentless and resourceful, yet are not successful after perhaps a decade or more of trying. The mental health impact of long-term failure can be crushing (I've been there).
They should understand that there is an element of luck involved, and if they didn't make it to $20MM straight from college, that doesn't mean they're worthless or can't make it anymore. The experiences of dead-ends and failures can be channeled into something that will set them apart, but it takes honesty. Luck is not a one-way thing: you need to be in a position to take advantage of the luck that comes your way, and mentally ready to jump on it.
Absolutely! The OP certainly deserves much due respect, especially for taking the time to share and document his business efforts.
However there are tons of people who likely "made the right moves" but were simply not as lucky or lacked resources to make success happen. If anything, this recent pandemic should shed light on how certain events are beyond any one individual's control.
You're not necessarily wrong, but you have to be careful with this kind of thinking as it can easily be interpreted as fatalism.
The reality is that yes, luck plays a role, but success isn't a coin-flip. It's more like poker, where luck dominates individual hands, but good decisions dominate the long-game.
I didn't mean it that way. Luck plays a huge role in success. But a back story will help explain why I said what I said.
Even in 2009, VWO wasn't my first attempt at a startup. Eve since I read Founders at Work in high school, I was inspired to do a startup of my own. So when I entered college in 2004, I immediately went about trying to do startups. Over the four years, I did 3 different startups (Kroomsa, MyJugaad.in, Precimark) and all of them failed. Then I launched Wingify (precursor to VWO) and that also didn't fly. Finally, my fifth attempt was VWO which led to this.
So, from my own experience, it seems luck is a function of how many shots you take and how much you learn from those failures.
I absolutely believe that the asymptotic result of being relentlessly resourceful is success (of some reasonable degree).
I want to highlight that it's not as clear-cut as this: "If you are what Paul Graham calls as relentless resourceful, you will build a successful business."
I know there are people reading who consider themselves relentless and resourceful, yet are not successful after perhaps a decade or more of trying. The mental health impact of long-term failure can be crushing (I've been there).
They should understand that there is an element of luck involved, and if they didn't make it to $20MM straight from college, that doesn't mean they're worthless or can't make it anymore. The experiences of dead-ends and failures can be channeled into something that will set them apart, but it takes honesty. Luck is not a one-way thing: you need to be in a position to take advantage of the luck that comes your way, and mentally ready to jump on it.