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Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

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Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#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 be statistically significant. Fun problem for the data scientist, plain hell for the PM.

In my company which uses experimentation for everything, each A/B test requires two weeks before the Product Manager can even see the results. Two weeks of waiting for a confusing, contradictory dashboard that can't be taken at face value, that needs careful, human analysis before it can be called a "win".

That slowness is fine for high-traffic, high-risk & high-value lines of business. But it's not fine when you're releasing feature that aren't just optimizations.

Competitors like LaunchDarkly and Split.io have recognized that critical difference, I think. They know that causality is expensive, and are particularly aware that the fine line between feature release and metrics impact is tied too heavily with a company's politics, i.e. it chafes against the intuition of executives.

Instead, they offer experimentation as an add-on to their developer tools. You can experiment if you need to, but it doesn't obligate you to do so.

That goal is much more realistic than the Optimizely's current goal: "helping our customers win in a digital-first world".

Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#42
post #40
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why Stripe will likely win: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24067211 Continuing self-service while expanding "up market" into the enterprise. If AWS can be self-service, pretty much any service can be.

This is different, both Stripe and AWS users are developers. I don't know how you can be so sure that Stripe will win, Adyen is already on the enterprise space, and they are a bigger company than Stripe. > Continuing self-service while expanding "up market" into the enterprise. Things are more complex than a sentence, the whole company needs to operate differently https://blog.luap.info/why-most-saas-companies-cant-b…

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Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#43

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…

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Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#44
post #40
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why Stripe will likely win: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24067211 Continuing self-service while expanding "up market" into the enterprise. If AWS can be self-service, pretty much any service can be.

This is different, both Stripe and AWS users are developers. I don't know how you can be so sure that Stripe will win, Adyen is already on the enterprise space, and they are a bigger company than Stripe. > Continuing self-service while expanding "up market" into the enterprise. Things are more complex than a sentence, the whole company needs to operate differently https://blog.luap.info/why-most-saas-companies-cant-b…

Stripe users are also anyone who wants to run a website on Wix or Squarespace or WordPress/WooCommerce and want to sell things. I have personally seen people that can’t spell “HTML” successfully set up basic eCommerce sites and make money off them. There is zero reason to pigeonhole Stripe as being for developers only any more than Square, etc.

Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#45

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…

Funny - I worked for two SaaS businesses that at one point used Optimizely and loved (and I mean LOVED) it. But I distinctly remember at the second job, that incredibly rough transition to that vague enterprise pricing structure along with the software getting clunkier and clunkier, which led us to abandon them and never look back. I think at one point they were trying to get us to go from paying $99 a month (!!!) to…

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Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#46
The problem I had with Optimizely when it was the go-to solution, was that it had a truly problematic impact on front-end performance due to the blocking way its script was loaded and page variants introduced. In some cases page loads were blocked by up around 5 seconds.

For obvious reasons it was tricky to run an A/B test just for testing the impact of Optimizely's script itself. But the key issue is that all the similar tools at the time (Optimizely not being the only culprit here) were determined to not required developer effort, which led to poor overall performance.

Then React et al came along and took ownership of the DOM, which meant adding tools which also manipulated the DOM became even more problematic.

Fortunately tools like Launch Darkly and Split solve this problem in a better way (high performance full-stack feature flags), even if it does mean developer effort to add tests. Optimizely did eventually launch their own version of this, but never really won back the developer mindshare.

Ultimately, it seems Optimizely enjoyed a few years of success, but a combination of developers getting more concerned with performance and the front-end world moving on to different architectures, seemed to lead to its decline.

Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#47
UpGrade [1] is an open-source A/B testing platform for education software. We want to make it easy for education software companies to pilot new materials and measure efficacy. We hope this can help optimize student outcomes and help advance the science of learning. Would love any feedback -- we just launched!

[1] https://upgrade-platform.org/

Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#48

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?

I worked for a startup that basically let 90% of its engineering team quit due to low morale over the course of a year without making any effort to (a) stop the exodus, or (b) replace them. When they exited about 6 months later, it became pretty clear that it was intentional.

Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#49

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…

Love these insights

Re: Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver

#50

I used to work two desks over from Dan at the Obama campaign in Chicago in 2007, when he was developing and testing an early proof of concept of what would become Optimizely. He was able to increase fundraising performance significantly by doing (what would now be considered simple) A/B tests. He's sharp and tenacious, identified a market ahead of its time and invented a new product category. Whether or not this is a…

Didn't they work on an educational game first? Or something about carrots and sticks? I liked their story when I read about them ages ago.
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