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Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

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Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#191

Post by nicktoknowyou »

triceratops wrote: post #122
richardfeynman wrote: post #19

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 Drop…

Wow. I interviewed there in 2015 and got turned down. Wasn't a great interview experience either. Bullet dodged, I supposed.

Me too - super arrogant. While I clearly wasn't what they were looking for, I had a lousy taste in my mouth after that experience. I still remember an awkward moment when I answered a question and the interviewer circled back to remind me I hadn't fully answered his question (he was right, but it just felt unnecessarily didactic).

Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#192

Post by cutenewt »

mrnobody_67 wrote: post #153
richardFINEman wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at Optimizely for 4 years and can tell you that pivoting to Enterprise has been one of the best company decisions. One of the important distinctions between Optimizely and most developer-first platforms is that experimentation is a hard practice to pick up. Most companies have difficulties getting their programs off the ground and keeping them funded, let alone grow or scale them. Small digital businesses st…

The big missed opportunity was to build a bounty-based marketplace to serve the SMBs... charge for results vs. the product.

Would the bounties be large enough to cover the work involved? I'm doubtful.

Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#193

Post by richardfeynman »

richardFINEman wrote: post #189
richardfeynman wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First off, love the username :-). You argue that pivoting from self-serve to enterprise was one of the company's best decisions. If that were true, Optimizely would be considerably more valuable now than it was four years ago, which is manifestly not the case. Moreover, if the self serve model was indeed fatally flawed, then it would not be possible for anyone to build a profitable business serving this segment. Howe…

Richard, I appreciate your theoretical arguments. Consider me the applied physicist who has actually seen the data. :) On the valuation. Optimizely's pre-exit valuation rose in every VC round since changing the focus of the business from SMB (Series B) to Mid-Market (Series C) to Enterprise (Series D). The valuation of the exit took a hit for reasons that were not the enterprise focus. I could say more here, but cons…

Thanks for making these points. They seem less hyperbolic and more grounded than your earlier claim ("it was one of optimizely's best decisions") and I appreciate that change in tone.

You characterize my arguments as theoretical, but they are empirical. Optimizely's valuation didn't increase after the decision to kill self serve was made, and VWO was able to build a successful business without killing self serve.

Also, as you now agree, optimizely would have had a better source of enterprise deals with self serve intact. That's important.

Stepping back, every SaaS business has issues converting self serve users to enterprise. Fixing those issues takes hard work, which optimizely was not willing to do. Similarly, every business has higher churn in monthly self serve plans than annual enterprise plans. Fixing this takes hard work too. Things were not unsolvable, optimizely simply had no appetite for solving them.

To address your other points: 1. I donbt that labor costs would have made a difference, but say they would have. Was anything stopping optimizely from reducing costs to have overseas development in india? 3. Your comments about the various foci at different rounds of funding is irrelevant. I'm not arguing that building an enterprise business is bad, I'm arguing that killing self serve was bad.

Ultimately, as Dan predicted in 2013, Optimizely died of indigestion rather than starvation; the market was always there, and still is.

Hope this helps clarify my position, even if we still disagree. If you send me an email, I'd be happy to help squash your skepticism about the $100k too.

PS. I don't think that killing self serve was the only thing that led to optimizely's demise, but I do think it was a factor.

Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#194

Post by paraschopra »

jimbojones79 wrote: post #172

I worked at Optimizely for 2.5 years and left as recently as February. I'll be grateful for the experience of selling experimentation into the European market, even if Optimizely was on a flat trajectory. It is one of the most difficult things to sell. The problem with experimentation is you are selling hard work. Everyone says they want to be data-driven, but no one wants to do hard work. No one wants to tell an exe…

Just to be clear, VWO wasn't and isn't a follower.

We started in late 2009, exactly the same time when Optimizely started and we had visual editor on day 1 and have many firsts in the market to our credit (integrating heatmaps into A/B tests, asynchronous code, Bayesian statistics and so on).

It's a perception among VC/SF crowd that Optimizely was the only innovator in the A/B testing market but that's not the truth if you actually put effort into researching. Many players, including VWO and of course Optimizely too, pushed the market in terms of innovation.

-Paras (founder of VWO)

Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#195

Post by jnrivasseau »

jimbojones79 wrote: post #172

I worked at Optimizely for 2.5 years and left as recently as February. I'll be grateful for the experience of selling experimentation into the European market, even if Optimizely was on a flat trajectory. It is one of the most difficult things to sell. The problem with experimentation is you are selling hard work. Everyone says they want to be data-driven, but no one wants to do hard work. No one wants to tell an exe…

Agree with Paras there, VWO was not a follower, they started at the same time. These things are actually funny - I even started Kameleoon before Optimizely (early 2008), but we developed our visual editor first and did not apply it to AB testing at the beginning. We made a (successful) pivot at the end of 2011 and have been focusing on CRO since, becoming competitors to Optimizely & others.

Calling Optimizely's competitors simple followers is clearly an over-simplification and a bias from the VC/SF crow indeed. As Paras pointed out, every actor in the field had their firsts in the market (some of Kameleoon's examples: our anti-flickering technology, our aggregation features in our reports / data engine, our automatic cross-device history reconciliation or our full ITP support). In many ways, Optimizely tech is now trailing behind today.

However it's true that Optimizely (and to a lesser measure, VWO) did a lot from the marketing side to develop the market, and we benefited quite a bit from that. We're definitely grateful to them :)

Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#196

Post by socialleaf »

hitekker wrote: post #41

Completely unsurprised. Experimentation-done-right is too expensive and too ambiguous to sell as a product. Every product experiment requires a complex set up, a lengthy running period across a huge base of users, and then heavy analysis in order to achieve statistical confidence over a specific feature's impact on a business metric. That "confidence" is often represented by a subpercentage point that may or may not…

Agree. Plus I'd also like to highlight how experimentation platforms/tools are sold as 'conversion uplifter'. All orgs are looking for solutions to take their conversion graphs up and to the right. And they are ready to pay hefty sums for any tool that speaks to this motivation.

But then they are asked to wait! Wait for the concept to mature within the org. Time being of critical importance most orgs end up getting frustrated as what they initially started with doesn't hold true now. And when you already have lots of money, it's easy to switch.

Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#197

Post by ajit_singh »

richardfeynman wrote: post #193
richardFINEman wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Richard, I appreciate your theoretical arguments. Consider me the applied physicist who has actually seen the data. :) On the valuation. Optimizely's pre-exit valuation rose in every VC round since changing the focus of the business from SMB (Series B) to Mid-Market (Series C) to Enterprise (Series D). The valuation of the exit took a hit for reasons that were not the enterprise focus. I could say more here, but cons…

Thanks for making these points. They seem less hyperbolic and more grounded than your earlier claim ("it was one of optimizely's best decisions") and I appreciate that change in tone. You characterize my arguments as theoretical, but they are empirical. Optimizely's valuation didn't increase after the decision to kill self serve was made, and VWO was able to build a successful business without killing self serve. Als…

"Optimizely died of indigestion rather than starvation" while it might be true, not sure if Dan ever admitted anything close to that in public.

Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#198

Post by brentsabully »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #165
richardfeynman wrote: post #19

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 Drop…

My impression is Optimizely never crossed the chasm. Huge following with VC funded startups and early stage startups but never crossed into "Google Analytics" territory where every company with a website was using it. Slowing down users meant higher prices to sustain VC promised growth. Higher prices meant enterprise sales. And it went down from there.

Yeah, I agree. I think the use cases weren't substantial enough so people just didn't use it enough to justify subscriptions in most cases. This means high customer churn, especially if they were selling to customers based on strength of their name (which I think they were, to digital marketers who conned themselves into believe it was a product they needed). They received funding from a PE firm (Insight Partners) who were probably eager to get a return.

Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#199

Post by [deleted] »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #147
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.

Interestingly, many other companies are starting to take this path, and I think it sucks. Not that they're focusing on enterprise customers, but that they're essentially pulling a bait-and-switch: get traction and word-of-mouth with smaller self-service customers, and then once they get enough street cred, go tell those smaller customers who were crucial to their early success to fuck themselves. Full Story has gone…

[deleted]

Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#200

Post by brentsabully »

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?

That is not a successful acquisition. It's definitely a means of burying the lede. If anything, it's to draw attention to the PE firm.
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