Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver
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Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver
1–10 of 203 posts
Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver
#2Sounds like they're having financial trouble and needed to sell. I'm hearing this will likely result in nothing for employees.
Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver
#3[deleted]
Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver
#4I would not want to be Optimizely and have to compete against a strong free offering like Google Optimize.
Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver
#5This sounds like a bad exit. From what I can tell the original Optimizely space has been slowly becoming a more discrete area of progressive delivery, rather than an industry on its own.
Many players have jumped into this space with their own A/B testing and Feature Flags solutions as part of their total offering, many of those offerings being free, open source or cheaper. Also potentially better in the concrete tasks they enable. I doubt that Optimizely's feature flag offering is superior to something more specialized like LaunchDarkly.
Also there are a couple of strong incumbents' solutions like Google Optimize and Adobe Target and it's always hard to go against incumbents specially when the incumbents are coming after you and not the other way around.
One clear problem for Optimizely in this space is that experience optimization became a function of marketing departments through out the years but for a while they were positioning themselves as a developer tool. This go-to-market strategy opened a lot of opportunities for other players who saw a bigger market when selling the same type of solution to Marketing Departments.
Maybe I'm wrong but it seems that they just stopped growing and have been experiencing a lot of customer churn since this is likely an expensive product with a hard to calculate ROI. They're probably still selling a lot but nowhere near to the original investor expectations / close to becoming profitable.
Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver
#6Just kicked the tires on Optimizely for a site with less than a million MAU. They wanted $50K upfront for one year. No monthly or quarterly billing available. Went with Google Optimize instead, works fine for free. In the face of that, very surprised Optimizely doesn't do month to month to get folks started.
Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver
#7As someone not too familiar with the ins and outs of acquisitions or IPOs... is it unusual to get acquired after laying off a big chunk of your staff? Is that an indicator that they probably accepted a lower valuation than they would have before that layoff?
Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver
#8I count 18 sentences of fluff/framing before they say who is acquiring them. Talk about burying the lede!
18 seems like an outlier, but for press releases I’ve read in the “we’ve been acquired” category, I’d guess that the median is > 10. Does anyone have first-hand knowledge about why these statements are released in this teasing way?
Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver
#9This sounds like a bad exit. From what I can tell the original Optimizely space has been slowly becoming a more discrete area of progressive delivery, rather than an industry on its own. Many players have jumped into this space with their own A/B testing and Feature Flags solutions as part of their total offering, many of those offerings being free, open source or cheaper. Also potentially better in the concrete task…
Google Optimize & VWO hurt them. Free, or low price, low friction won at scale with smaller teams running 1-2 experiments or low level personalization.
Everyone I know who's going to high volume testing is either on a hosted CMS that has this baked into their offering or JAMStack.
No one I know has deployed Optimizely since 15/16.
Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver
#10A few years ago, we were a monthly customer of Optimizely for a few hundred dollars a month. Reasonable for a startup.
Then they went to the annual cost of $30K+ upfront and ended all monthly options. They had to move to high cost, high touch to compete with the free/cheap offerings to stay in business. This acquisition suggests that didn't work.
We ended up building randomization, remote config, and logging ourselves, and did the analysis with our existing stuff.