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Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

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Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#11

Post by BrianOnHN »

xnx wrote: post #4

I would not want to be Optimizely and have to compete against a strong free offering like Google Optimize.

I use Google Optimize. I wouldn't call the free offering "strong."

There is a limit of about six experiments at one time. Each experiment can have up to 8 variants. And if you want more, then be ready to shell out thousands per month (I forget the exact number, but that's the ballpark).

Overall, if I were to redo things, I'd probably be better off just using Google analytics events.

Edit: that said, I'd never use a piece of bloatware like Optimizely for just the split-testing feature. If your product would benefit from split testing, then include it as a feature. It's not a "hard" feature/problem to implement into just about any existing product that would benefit from it.

Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#12

Post by pmiller2 »

setgree wrote: post #8

I 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?

I'd say it's just a PR tactic to make such things seem like "big news," when, in fact, such acquisitions are a fairly normal thing in the tech world. It's hard to even buy that kind of publicity, so one has to take advantage of it when one can.

Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#13

Post by ssharp »

TheBill wrote: post #9
whoisjuan wrote: post #5

This 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.

Optimizely's pricing makes no sense for small teams but VWO and Optimize cannot compete on features that start to become very useful as your experimentation and personalization efforts increase.

Any roll-your-own experimentation platforms take considerable resources to make accessible to those in the organization interested in using it (product, marketing, etc.)

Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#14

Post by roasm »

jakemcgraw wrote: post #6

Just 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.

They used to, but they ended it a few years ago. They consciously moved higher market, higher touch, higher cost.

Ultimately, i believe they got squeezed between smaller companies using free or cheaper offerings and larger companies probably building it themselves.

Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#15

Post by whoisjuan »

chundicus wrote: post #7

As 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?

Not a rule of thumb but undisclosed acquisition prices are many times an indication of a poor exit.

Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#16

Post by ssharp »

BrianOnHN wrote: post #11
xnx wrote: post #4

I would not want to be Optimizely and have to compete against a strong free offering like Google Optimize.

I use Google Optimize. I wouldn't call the free offering "strong." There is a limit of about six experiments at one time. Each experiment can have up to 8 variants. And if you want more, then be ready to shell out thousands per month (I forget the exact number, but that's the ballpark). Overall, if I were to redo things, I'd probably be better off just using Google analytics events. Edit: that said, I'd never use a p…

Optimize can run five experiments at a time and it only lets you measure 3 metrics. Any other metrics need to be analyzed in GA and will almost certainly end up sampled and unreliable.

Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#17

Post by tmpz22 »

whoisjuan wrote: post #5

This 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…

I was always very impressed by their office on the end of New Montgomery Street in the heart of Downtown San Francisco. You could see some very swaggy kitchens and open office space through their floor to ceiling windows on the ground floor. I was jealous for some of the employees who worked there.

Maybe this is ad hominem, but it seems to me they must've raised a lot of money to prioritize that kind of setting, likely in the guise of recruiting. Crunchbase lists them as having raised $251.2M and their last round being debt financing.

If this is a down-round acquisition with most of the employees gaining very little I wonder if this is a lesson to founders to be more cost-effective and raise less money.

Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#19

Post by richardfeynman »

I worked at Optimizely from before its series A in 2012 until the end of 2016, so I have a unique perspective on this. For most of the time when I worked at Optimizely, the company was all the rage. It appeared at the top of most "hot startup" lists, the Glassdoor reviews were 5/5, revenue was skyrocketing, and for a period in 2014 it became the fourth most valuable YCombinator company (after Stripe, AirBnB, and Dropbox). Of course, Optimizely's success was't guaranteed. In 2015, the company abandoned the self-serve market that had driven its original momentum and pivoted instead to vague and indefinite enterprise offerings that were (and are) hidden behind schizophrenic marketing, an impossible sales process, terrible customer service and a general approach of trying to extract the maximum amount of money from clients rather than providing them with value. From 2015 on, everything (including the internal culture) became mumbo-jumbo, a cloud of dishonesty. I used to be able to explain what Optimizely did to my grandmother; now I don't even really understand it myself.

Th Episerver acquisition is indeed a bad exit, and I think I will lose >$100k in stock I exercised (which is OK, I'll be fine). But I hope all readers will take from this saga a lesson in humility and the pitfalls of intellectual dishonesty and hubris. Just because your startup is skyrocketing isn't enough. Success is not guaranteed. Your company's leadership needs to be honest with itself, which Optimizely's leadership was not. They need to be humble and work hard, which Optimizely did not do.

Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#20

Post by roasm »

ssharp wrote: post #13
TheBill wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Optimizely's pricing makes no sense for small teams but VWO and Optimize cannot compete on features that start to become very useful as your experimentation and personalization efforts increase. Any roll-your-own experimentation platforms take considerable resources to make accessible to those in the organization interested in using it (product, marketing, etc.)

In my experience, I agree the core functionality (variant management, remote config, etc.) is relatively small amount of effort compared to the interfaces to make it accessible to those non-technical orgs, like you mention.

However, we found that those interfaces only allow very limited, shallow tests and you very quickly outgrow them as an organization. In other words, once you reach diminishing returns on button color and header text optimizations, you start wanting to test deeper UI experiences and complicated user flows. At that point, you have to involve engineering anyway.

When an organization has engineers who are motivated by business metrics, they have no problem implementing shallow tests (like button colors) while working on tests of the deeper UI experiences as well. And at that point, the non-technical interfaces have little value.

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