
Optimizely Raises $58M - dsiroker
https://blog.optimizely.com/2015/10/13/optimizely-series-c-funding/
======
RussianCow
Genuine question: How do companies with such vague and unimformative home
pages become so widely-used? I'm sure their platform is great, but I couldn't
tell from their home page what they do, and wasn't interested enough to keep
reading. And Optimizely isn't the only culprit by any measure. Is it just word
of mouth? Or are most people somehow more likely to use a product with a vague
and buzzword-laden description over something more succinct and to the point?

~~~
abalone
Enterprise software, which more or less Optimizely is[1], is a very different
sales model from your typical consumer or small company oriented technology
business. It's much more focused on getting people on the phone or in front of
salespeople. So, in some sense you _want_ to have just enough information to
get people on the phone.

[1] Super over-simplified rule of thumb: If you see "Solutions" in their nav
menu, it's enterprise software.

~~~
shostack
Unfortunately this is right.

As the target audience for Optimizely and an ex-customer, I have to say it
annoys me to no end that they are so light on details. My time is limited and
I don't want to have a conversation with a rep until I can see more of what it
offers. Pretty much every analytics platform out there falls into this trap.

Half the time the sales reps can't even answer my questions so I have to waste
even more time with a sales engineer on a followup call to just see basic
things like pictures of the interface.

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georgemonck
" _Every morning, we all wake up to a world that isn’t optimized. Reading the
news, commuting to work, ordering coffee, planning a vacation; far too few of
these experiences were optimized using data. As a result, our lives are filled
with experiences that are never as good as they could be._ "

Oh the horror! Just the other day I was getting a cappuccino from my local
cafe, and as the barista expertly poured out a perfect latte-art fern, I
thought to myself, "man, if only this process could be optimized using data,
like they do at Starbucks." Then I sat at my computer and read some
idiosyncratic posts from my favorite blogger. After enjoying a few posts I
said to myself, "man, if only he could optimize his blog posts for maximum
clicks like Buzzfeed does. Why doesn't he use data to make his experience
better?"

</sarcasm>

I do generally dislike cheap negativity when responding to startup news. But
this first paragraph was really tone-deaf and deserving of ridicule. Let me
try to balance my criticism with some constructive advice for rewriting this
press release.

Drop the first four sentences. Start off with, "When Pete Koomen and I founded
Optimizely five years ago, very few companies had even heard of A/B Testing,
and optimization software was about the last thing anyone considered putting
in their technology stack." Then give an example. "When we first helped XYZ
Sporting Goods optimize their site, we knew we were on to something. Not only
did we help them write more compelling copy and better imagery that bettered
their sales, we also created a much better experience for their customers. No
longer would visitors click away because they could not understand what the
site did, or what their message actually was. A/B Testing and data based
optimization allowed us to match the website to the people who were actually
visiting their site. Fast forward to 2015 and much has changed...."

Not every company is going to change the world. But you can still write a
compelling, feel-good narrative without making me want to throw a shoe at the
screen.

~~~
leftnode
I'm not sure why you're being down-voted but this was completely spot on.

~~~
pka
Agreed, upvoted.

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Rambition
Huge fan and proponent of Optimizely and the platform they offer, we made them
an integral part of our agency for our performance based CRO clients as a tool
we could bring to the table to help execute our ideas for the past 3 years.

That is, until they changed their model and began to push agencies off the
platform by insisting that the client and not the agency must have the account
relationship with Optimizely, and the agency can then "work" on the account
but no longer under one account spread across multiple clients.

I have no objections to pricing changes and strategy pivots, more power to
them and I understand to develop more and more features, pricing must be
raised to match usage. We would happily pay more per month, however we don't
see the business sense in handing over our client relationships directly to
Optimizely so that our clients could then choose to drop us as an agency at
anytime, but keep the Optimizely account.

An account that would be full of our work product, testing ideas and custom
code developed to implement tests that a client could now easily take to
another agency and continue benefiting from the work.

(Yes, we have contracts with our clients, but we are not naive enough to think
that clients won't look for a way to do away with our fees if they can take
our services and work product with them.)

Our ability to utilize the tools provided by Optimizely and build winning
tests has helped us grow our business, but this change in agency support has
caused us to need to look for alternate solutions.

It would be great if some of this latest raise could be used to re-invest in
agencies again, providing a client manager style interface where multiple
accounts/sub-accounts can reside under one login. Even if each client needs to
have a different pricing structure based on their usage patterns, can't share
visits across clients, but could be arranged and managed by the agency as one
point of contact and billing.

I'd love to kick back up our usage of the platform, as the new features I see
them rolling out are enticing and I am sure this raise will only accelerate
that, but we can't commit to a vendor that seems to actively enable and almost
encourage our clients to circumvent our own service model.

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PhilWright
You just know that when the pricing page says "Call us" that they are going to
try and rip you off. This is a classis sales technique for expensive products,
they ascertain how much you can probably afford and then that becomes the
price. Very off putting.

~~~
trjordan
Optimizely ain't cheap, dude, and scaling doesn't work the way you want it to
at a lot of volumes.

I worked at a company where we paid $400 / month for Optimizely, based on
having ~20k uniques. That seemed fair. If you take that up by 100x, $40k /
month might not sound fair. You can cut the pricing at that point and say it's
$10k / month, but there's a world of difference between a B2B site and an
ecommerce site. The usage patterns are different, so the value received and
load put on Optimizely are different. It bears different pricing.

Beyond that, sales reps aren't all bad. If you're going to lay out $200k for a
product like this for a year, you probably don't want something that you just
email out a bunch of logins and say "hey team, try it out, let me know what
you think." Talking to a human being can help an exec figure out the way their
organization can use it the best and help them get that implemented. Yeah,
they're biased, but people who deal with sales reps know how to mitigate that
bias, and a good rep can be the difference between a successful implementation
and a failed one.

~~~
shostack
I am an ex customer of theirs in one of the highest tiers. Their sales reps
were better than most, but in general I'd agree with parent poster.

I'm the target of a lot of analytics and ad tech/network sales people and at
this point in my career I loathe talking to them. Many try to blow smoke up my
ass, try to mask deficiencies about their product instead of just being honest
about shortcomings and trying to explain why the value is still worth it, and
the list goes on.

Hell, I've had some ad tech sales people flat out lie to me and then had their
executive boss get mad at me when I called them on it because I was lied to.
They tried to say the sales guy made a mistake and couldn't offer what they
had offered. Oops!

As soon as someone comes up with a way to cut out sales people from enterprise
sales I will shower them with money.

~~~
trjordan
Right, I totally agree. Putting "Director" in my LinkedIn title made my
corporate voicemail useless.

I think you've got the right of it though: "As soon as someone comes up with a
way to cut out sales people from enterprise sales." We haven't figured it out
yet, so we all get to deal with bad behavior and absurdly annoying
appointment-setting tactics.

~~~
shostack
Pro tip: have a phone not connected to any directory and give instructions to
not connect anyone to your line if they call the receptionist. If someone
needs to call me, I'll have given them my number myself. Anyone else just
wants to sell me.

Now I just get a cluttered inbox, not voicemail as well.

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hayksaakian
Can anyone here honestly claim the optimizely is better than visual website
optimizer? I've used both extensively and I constantly run into problems where
I'm required to do things a certain way with optimizely where I can just do it
like I want with vwo.

Genuine question. I'll give them a 2nd chance if someone can convince me.

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turing_bot_3c
... wow, we live _SO_ in the advertisement bubble! And the first few sentences
are just absolutely ridicolous.

~~~
shostack
And what are you basing this incredibly broad and unsupported statement on
exactly? Optimizely is providing the companies that use it with value that
exceeds the cost or they wouldn't continue using it.

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bojackeden
I think Optimzely's drag and drop software is great but I think Qubit (which
is in occupying a similar space) has a data analytics platform that far out
weighs Optimizely. If anyone is interested in the actual data aspect of
personalization then Qubit's discover software is incredible.

~~~
dangrossman
Disclaimer: Eden is a sales rep ("client services") at Qubit.

