
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win - dsiroker
http://blog.optimizely.com/2012/10/12/first-they-ignore-you-then-they-laugh-at-you-then-they-fight-you-then-you-win/
======
tsotha
Ugh. I'm so sick of this quote it's guaranteed to get you ignored permanently.

~~~
prostoalex
Yep, statistically speaking "First they ignore you, then you die" is the
correct version and describes App Store outside of top 50 apps.

~~~
rexreed
Spot on. Probably the most accurate version would be:

"First, your competitors / enemies / adversaries ignore you. If everyone else
also ignores you, then you die. If others pay attention to you, then your
adversaries laugh at you. If your followers still take you seriously, then you
keep living. That makes your adversaries mad, so they fight you. If you can
withstand the legal and physical challenges of being fought by someone with
deeper pockets or more weapons, then you keep living. If you still have the
resources and support to continue, then you win. A sure victory with the peril
of a thousand deaths."

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larrys
"Why are they so afraid to mention this “one startup”?"

They don't want to legitimize you or give you any publicity. That's obvious
and a good business strategy on their part. After all what do they have to
gain by doing so?

~~~
chj
Exactly. I am surprised that the author even asked.

~~~
snprbob86
Seemed rhetorical to me...

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nrao123
This is an excellent case study unfolding in real time in the A/B Testing
software industry on how large incumbent products (Adobe's Omniture - Test &
Target) get killed by startups (Optimizely) .

The core of the issue seems to be something called MBox
(<http://www.managingecommerce.com/glossary/i-n/mbox>) which is a mechanism
for setting up a test e.g. Does A page perform better than B page - which is
the essence of A/B testing. Of course, some genius strategist comes up with
"our value is driven of by the number of tests/experiments that people run so
lets set our pricing strategy of that" and then over time you slowly "capture
more value than you create".

And then comes a startup which calls BS on that practice because most tests
don't end up anywhere & they design a really radically simpler software that
is not constrained by "per test" & other artificial constraints! They win by
creating more value than they capture. More background on that topic here:
[http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/09/does-open-conflict-with-
maki...](http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/09/does-open-conflict-with-making-
money.html)

------
sounds
At first I was skeptical whether the article would correctly quote Ghandi
(yes, disputed) [1]. I was pleasantly surprised at how optimizely is
responding to Adobe. I think I'll go try it out.

[1]
[http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mohandas_Karamchand_Gandhi#Disp...](http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mohandas_Karamchand_Gandhi#Disputed)

~~~
nikunjk
I love even now so many people misspell Gandhi. Not a hater, but I want to
know if this is the spelling that they teach in particular countries.

~~~
001sky
Considering the spelling (apparent) in his footnoted reference, one surmises
it is a (meaningless) typo.

~~~
Cushman
Maybe not meaningless; the common Westernized pronunciation does sound closer
to Ghandi than Gandhi.

~~~
001sky
English is the official language of India, no?

~~~
viraptor
It's common to write foreign names in a slightly modified way matching the
language used. This can be done to avoid uncommon character sets (you're going
to write Moscow, not Москва), or simply because it sounds better in the
sentence / people know how to read it (Warsaw, not Warszawa). Same happens
with names.

Your comment sounds like there's something strange about adapting the name to
the language currently used.

~~~
001sky
Agree, but there is nothing here about a "Foreign" _language_ , he was Indian
and thus there is (an) official spelling in English of his name.[1,2]

____________

[1] Birth/death records, etc.

[2] _During the British Raj, English was used for most official purposes both
at the federal level and in the various states.[7] The Indian constitution
adopted in 1950, envisaged the gradual phasing in of Hindi, to replace English
over a fifteen-year period, but gave Parliament the power to, by law, provide
for the continued use of English even thereafter.[8] But resistance to making
Hindi the sole official language has resulted in English being retained for
official uses. English continues to be used today, in combination with Hindi
(at the central level and in some states) and other languages (at the state
level)._

------
giis
About the quote: I first came across this quote in my college library,in some
linux book.Though I didn't know who wrote this quote at that time,I really
liked it and wrote it down on my college books.I was the only guy who was
sticking with linux ,where as all my friends advised me to switch to j2ee/.net
platform because thats where jobs are available for it but not linux.

When I told,I'm going to do something project with linux,the reply will be
"Linux is OS,what could you possible do with it?".I still remember,the day-
before When a company came for campus recruitment,I was doing some linux
related on my new desktop.Then one friend commented 'he doesn't need to be
prepare for interview,he will get a job with linux :P'.

Next day,I was lucky to meet a linux-enthusiast in my interview panel and 9
students got a job out of 180 students.My name topped that list !:)

Few days later,the same guy who commented a day-before the interview,saw this
quote on my book asked 'did you wrote this quote?'.I said,"read it some book".
again he insisted 'don't lie,looks like you wrote this'.I replied 'no i
didn't'

In my final-year college project,I mentioned thanks for my parents and my
guide and 'unknown' person who wrote this quote.

After few years,one of my oss project received foss india awards
(www.giis.co.in/LFY.png).I came to know to this quote was actually written by
Gandhi.

As for as I'm concern this quote has 3 questions :

What will _you_ do when others ignore you? [are you going to give up?] What
will _you_ do when others laugh at you? [are you going to get discouraged ?]
What will _you_ do when others fight with you? [are you going to quarrel with
them? or shut-up & continue your work]

------
throwaway1012
I am a regular contributor on HN but I work in this industry and so i am using
a throwaway account.

Dan, 1.3 billion 'visitors' is a really vague representation. Is it user
sessions or page views or number of unique visitors measured in one of the
experiment/control groups?

Test & Target mbox hell as mentioned in the post is very very true. Learning
to use it within one hour is a joke. The technology they use is really stale
and hasn't changed a lot in the recent years. Many of the players who started
after 2008/09 have far superior implementations, thanks to lot of advancements
in browser technologies which T&T failed to capitalize.

I am very happy for Optimizely's success and these two posts will bring them a
good amount of well deserved PR. Test & target and in fact a good number of
other providers are way ahead of Optimizely in this game. The number of
sessions/experiments is one good metric but it is definitely not the best one
to measure the leader in the race.

 __* What is optimziely's ARR?

At 2800 customers paying $250/month [1], it should be around $8.5M. Lets be
generous and make it $10M. A handful of T&T's high profile clients will be
paying Adobe that amount.

 __* How many IR100, IR500 [2], top 100 travel, publishing, finance sites are
in Optimizely's client list?

Builtwith's data is not very accurate. We have worked with the guy from
builtwith to compute some lists and their methodologies are not very great.
They just look for signals in the script tags and it throws lot of false
positives. Out of my own interest, i have spent hours writing parsers and
scripts to compile the list and Optimizely is not really in that picture.

You can have thousands of clients paying you hundreds of dollars or have a few
hundred clients paying 5/6 figure amounts. Optimizely has been after the
former while the other players including T&T have been targeting the latter. I
guess Optimizely is now trying to expand their enterprise client list since
that is where the big money is but it takes a lot more to compete in that
arena with long sales cycles and vast requirements.

 __* How many user sessions are being served?

Requests is probably the worst measure. T&T mentioned it because they can show
their artificially inflated metric which is a result of their terrible
implementation. IMO, user sessions is a better measure. 1.3 billion user
sessions (in 2 years)[3] is still no where close to what the other providers
serve. Number of tests currently running is also a good measure.

Optimizely is a great product and they have made it super easy to run A/B
tests but false proclamation claiming you are number one when you are not even
close is not very nice.

[1] Optimizely probably has a good number of clients in that 2800+ who pay
$10k-20K a month. The highest openly priced plan is $360. I guess it wouldn't
be wrong to assume that 50% of the customers will be in one of the two lower
plans ($17 or $71). Optimizely's current ARR would be somewhere between $5M to
$10M (My guess!)

[2] <http://www.internetretailer.com/top500/list/>

[3] There was no mention of the timeline. So i assume it is from when they
started in 2010.

~~~
ashray
I find it interesting that you used a throwaway even though you didn't mention
anything that could be construed as offensive.

I guess you're a direct competitor to optimizely and I know of only one other
direct competitor lurking these forums so hey :)

~~~
throwaway1012
I guess you are thinking Visual Web Optimizer. No, I am not a part of VWO and
also not an employee of a company that is a direct competitor to Optimizely.
Adding to what user 'litek' mentioned, there are at least a dozen well known
competitors in the A/B, MVT space.

~~~
ashray
I don't see any reason why you should guess that.

------
juddlyon
Give them hell for all of us who've been subsidizing their bloatware all these
years! Love it.

I wish some well-financed Mac devs would build a Photoshop/Fireworks
killer....

~~~
lanstein
Well, only for the last couple years, really - they got acquired fairly
recently.

------
evan_
Correlation does not imply causation- Many, many causes have gone through the
first three steps but not the final step.

------
rorrr
If you look at the home pages for both products, it's absolutely clear which
one uses their own "medicine".

<http://optimizely.com>

[https://www.omniture.com/en/products/conversion/test-and-
tar...](https://www.omniture.com/en/products/conversion/test-and-target)

~~~
ssharp
Enterprise software sales techniques are often mocked but they're clearly
producing results. If you're an enterprise buyer, you don't care about a hip
look and getting through the sales process as fast as possible, like many
small customers do.

I think comparing Adobe's page to Optimizely and declaring who is eating their
own dog food does not offer any insight. In enterprise sales, there are so
many other steps in sales the funnel to worry about than the web page. You
need to optimize in places that have the highest returns. At most, I'd guess
that Adobe is testing things on that page to capture leads that are probably
not even apparent.

