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Optimizely to be acquired by Episerver
- driverdan 6y agoSounds like they're having financial trouble and needed to sell. I'm hearing this will likely result in nothing for employees.
- driverdan 6y agoIf you're going to downvote please explain. Replies after mine with inside information agreed with me.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- xnx 6y agoI would not want to be Optimizely and have to compete against a strong free offering like Google Optimize.
- BrianOnHN 6y agoI 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.
- ssharp 6y agoOptimize 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.
- Reema_ 6y agoWith us you can get all optimisation tools unlimited. https://www.webtrends-optimize.com/ https://www.webtrends-optimize.com/
- whoisjuan 6y agoThis 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 tasks they enable. I doubt that Optimizely's feature flag offering is superior to something more specialized like LaunchDarkly. Also there are a couple of strong incumbents' solutions like Google Optimize and Adobe Target and it's always hard to go against incumbents specially when the incumbents are coming after you and not the other way around. One clear problem for Optimizely in this space is that experience optimization became a function of marketing departments through out the years but for a while they were positioning themselves as a developer tool. This go-to-market strategy opened a lot of opportunities for other players who saw a bigger market when selling the same type of solution to Marketing Departments. Maybe I'm wrong but it seems that they just stopped growing and have been experiencing a lot of customer churn since this is likely an expensive product with a hard to calculate ROI. They're probably still selling a lot but nowhere near to the original investor expectations / close to becoming profitable.
- TheBill 6y agoGoogle 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.
- ssharp 6y agoOptimizely'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.)
- jakemcgraw 6y agoJust 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.
- roasm 6y agoThey 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.
- joecasson 6y agoI worked there for 5 years. This is the correct take.
- cosmie 6y agoOptimizely used to, but their sales strategy changed to deliberately reposition themselves in the market. They've priced out self-service and smaller users, and repositioned their sales model for larger companies with immature internal capabilities. They lock you in with that annual pricing, and include enough margin to throw a massive amount of support resources at you to ensure you get everything fully off the ground and deeply embedded into your internal workflows. As an early self-service user, it was really irritating when I tried to bring them into a new company I started at and realized they made that change. But after working for a major marketing agency for a while, I've realized that it makes sense for them (even if it sucks for my purposes). In the world of large scale brand marketing companies (such as CPG companies), even a rudimentary informational/branding/brochure-ware website tends to be a $500k+ abomination, involving a super complex IAT[1] consisting of 3-6 external agencies and internal teams. In that world, the single greatest cost for anything is the man-hours required for account management, since even the tiniest of thing involves so much coordination (both logistically and politically). Optimizely's absurd looking price bakes in the cost of providing that level of account management support as well as initial implementation/usage technical support. Without those, it's entirely likely that the brand could purchase Optimizely and it'll sit unused because the agency scopes don't account for it and no one is willing to eat the unscoped hours required to implement/support/use it. [1] https://isl.co/2018/10/agile-iat-four-principles-for-better-interagency-collaboration/ https://isl.co/2018/10/agile-iat-four-principles-for-better-...
- chundicus 6y agoAs 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?
- whoisjuan 6y agoNot a rule of thumb but undisclosed acquisition prices are many times an indication of a poor exit.
- billyhoffman 6y agoIt can depend. Valuation is based on SaaS business metrics like Cost to Acquire Customer, Average Contract Size, Average Lifetime, and Margin. Reducing headcount or doing a hiring freeze is a way to improve your metrics ahead before you go shopping yourself for an acquisition.
- andrewingram 6y agoI 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.
- chundicus 6y agoSorry for my daftness, but what is the incentive behind intentionally losing a bunch of staff before 'exiting'? Just to reduce your cash burn?
- namenotrequired 6y agoMostly to get better profitability numbers to show to potential acquirers
- andrewingram 6y ago
- setgree 6y agoI 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?
- pmiller2 6y agoI'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.
- brentsabully 6y agoThat 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.
- roasm 6y agoA few years ago, we were a monthly customer of Optimizely for a few hundred dollars a month. Reasonable for a startup. Then they went to the annual cost of $30K+ upfront and ended all monthly options. They had to move to high cost, high touch to compete with the free/cheap offerings to stay in business. This acquisition suggests that didn't work. We ended up building randomization, remote config, and logging ourselves, and did the analysis with our existing stuff.
- designium 6y agoI hope the founder exited well. I remember working with him at Google when he was the PM for Google Optimizer. Nice guy.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- BurntBunting 6y agoI don't. The founders pushed people who trusted them to work hard and value the company over their own needs. While the founders and their friends were able to pull out equity, every one else was told that they had to wait their turn, which never came. If Dan and Pete were nice guys, they would have take care of the employees that built their company. The employees wouldn't have been millionaires, but they might be able to scrape together a down payment for a house. And not like the mansion that Dan has, just something that would move them out of the fear of rents increasing and losing their jobs. They used to be nice guys. I don't wish ill towards them, but they do not deserve a good exit with this.
- hitekker 6y agoWasn't Dan or Pete forced to step down on account of gross incompetence? I recall there being some internal drama about their departure.
- dsiroker 6y agoHaha, certainly no drama and no one forced us or even asked us to step down. I wrote a blog post about it: https://link.medium.com/mHgtiQ3bu9 https://link.medium.com/mHgtiQ3bu9
- askafriend 6y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24368516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24368516 If you don't mind answering, what's the strategy behind a hiring tactic like the one in the link above? It seems cartoonish and not grounded in reality....
- richardfeynman 6y agoI 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.
- roasm 6y agoIf you can share, what was the dishonesty you're writing about? I can't tell if you're saying it was fraudulent dishonesty or self-delusion (where you think you're in a better position than you really are). And do you know if the self-sever market was drying up for Optimizely in 2015? I assume they wouldn't abandon it if it was growing at a decent rate.
- jameslk 6y agoI wonder how Google Optimize factors into this. Provided its a free service, it seems like Optimizely may have had trouble offering something unique to the self-serve market over something that is completely free. Similar to how it seems Dropbox has less to differentiate itself from Google Drive and other similar services these days.
- dataminded 6y agoI used their paid product once and failed to buy it two times after that. They tried to move up-market and did it in an unreasonably difficult way in my opinion. It was easier to do business with ORACLE and then Google. The sales folks didn't listen, their proposals ignored our requirements, it was a mess. I hope the staff got something.
- martingoodson 6y agoIn 2014 I wrote an article on why Optimizely's approach to AB testing was statistically flawed [1]. I was working at a competitor so I needed to be a bit circumspect. It was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7287665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7287665 I always wondered how they got away with it for so long. [1] http://www.datascienceassn.org/sites/default/files/Most%20Winning%20A-B%20Test%20Results%20are%20Illusory.pdf http://www.datascienceassn.org/sites/default/files/Most%20Wi...
- dr_dshiv 6y agoHave you ever given thought to generalizability in A/B tests? I'm surprised there isn't more of a developing science of constructs that generally work...
- richardFINEman 6y agoOptimizely switched to a Frequentist statistics model in 2015, which changed how pretty much all testing companies do stats. Your article was valid, for a full year.
- glangdale 6y agoIt's a bit breathtaking how basic the statistics knowledge is to make this critique (not complaining about the critique, mind you). I'm startled that this was coming as news to anyone.
- dsiroker 6y ago(co-founder of Optimizely here) HUGE thank you to YC and the entire HN community for all their support over the years. It was almost ten years ago that we launched here on HN. [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1788634 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1788634
- mh- 6y agothanks for an amazing culture and experience at Optimizely, Dan.
- joecasson 6y agoDitto!
- petermelias 6y agoStill remember first time used original Optimizely product for my own startup. Was amazing
- the_washout 6y agoIt was great working with you, Dan.
- rickyyean 6y agothanks for letting me shadow the sales team. learned a lot from watching your guys at work!
- alooPotato 6y agono, thank you Dan! You've helped us and countless other startups find their way. Distinctly remember coming to your office and doing a 2 hour product feedback session on Streak. Super generous!
- neonate 6y agohttps://archive.is/Sz20v https://archive.is/Sz20v
- Sandeep89 6y agoThere's never been a better time to look at Webtrends Optimize. In the industry for 20+ years, now independently owned. Strongest free tier on the market, best services team, best rated satisfaction. Prices haven't changed in 10 years, with cheaper offerings opening up. Agencies have been hopping over to us for the last 12 months - everything I've read below rings true with what I'm hearing elsewhere.
- bmmayer1 6y agoI 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 "good" exit, it's a great accomplishment for Dan and the team and can't wait to see what they do next!
- dr_dshiv 6y agoDidn'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.
- hitekker 6y agoCompletely 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".
- Reema_ 6y agohttps://www.webtrends-optimize.com/ https://www.webtrends-optimize.com/
- socialleaf 6y agoAgree. 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.
- andrewingram 6y agoThe 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.
- Reema_ 6y agoPlease try us https://www.webtrends-optimize.com/ https://www.webtrends-optimize.com/ We are known for our customer services.
- RRL 6y agoBack in 2015 I was pitching Optimizely internally. We already had an in house barebones A/B testing tool. Once I got over that hurdle our CTO let fly how his only experience using Optimizely had been a time when Optimizely went down and took his site down with it. Optimizely eventually brought out their head of product, and an army of senior engineers to convince him things were good now. We signed an annual contract, but Optimizely was never added to any page that was revenue critical/dependent on speed. Optimizely got their huge contract, and in the end marketing and design got their lightweight A/B testing tool, but we never realized the white paper level metrics jumps because it was never used on any page that would actually have material impact.
- dr_dshiv 6y agoUpGrade [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/ https://upgrade-platform.org/
- mrnobody_67 6y agoAnother proof point that once the founder-CEO is replaced by a professional CEO, it's game over more often than not. This happened in 2017 at Optimizely.
- the_washout 6y agoYuuuuuuuuup.
- brentsabully 6y agoHappening right now at UserTesting. As the CMO would say: "yay!"
- suhail 6y agoCongrats, Dan! :)
- kumarski 6y agoMaybe I haven't worked in tech long enough, but am I the only one who has never heard of Episerver?
- cwdegidio 6y agoI only know of them because they acquired Ektron CMS. Which to this day is the worst CMS I have ever had the displeasure of working with.
- tpmx 6y agoIt's one of the crappier CMS startups from the early 90s that somehow survived. Mostly known in Scandinavia. I/we competed against these guys 21-23 years ago. We had real tech, they had brilliant powerpoint engineers. I have no idea why they're buying Optimizely.
- tootie 6y agoIt's an old-school enterprise CMS. And a crummy one. It's done a pretty remarkable job of staying relevant all things considered. The current market leader in this space is Adobe who own AEM and bought Omniture years ago so they can offer analytics and A/B testing in one bill of sale. Episerver must be working to position themselves the same way. Lot of big enterprises buy these kind of systems and pay through the nose for them.
- dwd 6y agoEpiserver for a while was one of the main competitors of Sitecore in the IIS/.Net Enterprise CMS space. Both were European (Swedish and Danish respectively) I built sites with both back in the late '00 and while Sitecore was marginally better I don't miss working with either. Adobe also bought Magento, while not as bad as Omniture, has it's own levels of hell.
- adeveloper870 6y agoWorked at a company that considered Optimizely for one of their possible A/B solutions. We went with another vendor, but I then ended up writing an in-house solution that took about a month [w/o analytics]. It is very easy to implement this in-house so long as you own the systems and don't outsource [too much].
- worldsoup 6y agoI interviewed for a marketing role at Optimizely back in 2013...I passed all the interviews with the team and then had a final, short interview with the CEO. He asked me a few basic questions and then asked 'if you only had 3 years to live, would you work at Optimizely?'. I responded honestly and said no. Said that I'd love to work here to help and grow the business, learn, and further my own career but if I had only had 3 years to live I'd spend my time differently. The hiring manager called the next day and said I would not receive an offer and when I asked him if it was because the answer to that question he said yes. That made it obvious they had a strange and not particularly healthy culture...lucky for me as I ended up at a much more successful early stage startup where I accomplished what I wanted to accomplish.
- alexhutcheson 6y agoAre there any good open source alternatives to Optimizely that can be self hosted? I'm aware of Wasabi[1], but I believe it's abandonware at this point. [1] https://github.com/intuit/wasabi https://github.com/intuit/wasabi
- rogerdickey 6y agoI remember meeting Dan, the founding CEO of Optimizely, at winter 2010 YC demo day. I had just grabbed my name tag and was walking toward the building when he stopped me outside to give me the pitch. He immediately struck me as a smart, capable guy, but as a former software engineer I couldn't understand why companies wouldn't just build A/B testing themselves. What did Optimizely add? How was it defensible? Dan didn't answer the questions to my satisfaction so I thanked him and moved on. As the years went by and I saw them raise round after round, get great press, put up billboards, and build out a beautiful office that I walked by at least once a week, I felt terrible for missing out on the angel investment. I was a rookie investor (I think that was my first YC) and chalked it up to my inexperience. I even tried to extract "lessons learned" and apply them to similar investment opportunities. It feels bittersweet to see things end this way, with probably no return for the common and a haircut for investors. I had built them up and expected them to succeed but I guess it's good to know I was right. Lessons: It ain't over 'til it's over and vanity traction like press & billboards mean nothing. Don't build a big company on a bad idea, it's a waste of time and money for everyone, especially the founders & employees.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- rvivek 6y agoBTW, I'm not sure if you would have expected them to get to $100m in ARR either when you passed on them because you were skeptical of the market. There's a lot between $1m to $100m ARR that can go wrong. In this case, I don't think it was the market opportunity.
- rogerdickey 6y agoDid they reach $100m ARR? If so that's impressive, a lot more than I would have guessed.
- dennisvdheijden 6y agoCongrats Optimizely from you friends at Convert.com (A/B testing tool that keeps the prices online)
- dblooman 6y agoAny alternatives to Optimizely?
- dennisvdheijden 6y agoConvert.com
- Reema_ 6y agoPlease try https://www.webtrends-optimize.com/ https://www.webtrends-optimize.com/
- pkaura 6y agohttps://vwo.com/ https://vwo.com/ is closest and better in a lot of aspects, check more here : https://vwo.com/compare/optimizely/ https://vwo.com/compare/optimizely/. Full disclosure - I work for VWO
- bobsimble 6y agoDynamic Yield
- racer_x 6y agoAdobe Target
- jnrivasseau 6y agoKameleoon (disclosure: I am the CTO & founder). Close to Optimizely in the sense that it has enterprise level features. Our main focus at Kameleoon is performance / speed, at every level (loading of the JS engine, DOM manipulation, tracking, server side testing and/or feature flagging). But there are lots of other alternatives as well. As always, it depends on what exactly you need :-)
- scottmcleod 6y agoShot themself in the foot. RIP.
- paraschopra 6y agoDan, Paras from VWO here. Congratulations for the acquisition. We've enjoyed competing with Optimizely over last the last 10 years, and certainly learned a lot in the process. Hopefully, that will continue even after the acquisition. The way we look at things, experimentation as a market is certainly in an early phase. The more complex the world becomes, the more necessary experimentation becomes to understand what customers really want. As an aside, it is true though that for experimentation to work, a company needs to be ready for it. Their culture needs to support being proven wrong and having patience to build momentum of wins over the long term. Any org with a short term horizon will likely see experimentation as a cost without corresponding returns. But companies that really see long term - think Amazon - ground themselves in experimentation. Of course, not every company can be Amazon but our belief is that more companies will start realizing that there's no alternative to developing a culture of experimentation. This is why we're excited about the market. For us, at VWO, it still seems day 1 :)
- jimbojones79 6y agoI 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 executive he/she is wrong and their idea sucks. No one wants to do the work of building a culture. It is akin to selling religion. I'll be most proud of the companies I sold to that then started doing internal webinars on how to do hypothesis-driven product development and really engaging in bottoms-up approach to experimentation. Those deals took 12-36 months to close, but you felt like you were changing how they ran their business. I see a lot of folks throwing shade on Optimizely here. I think that is ridiculous. Not many companies can grow to 300 employees and over $75 million in annual revenues. Even fewer companies get to IPO. Everyone's thoughts about how Optimizely used to be worth more are BS. Valuations are perceptions of product/market strength rather than the reality. We shouldn't be looking at this as a failure. Rather we should look at this as a natural course of a business finding its product/market fit. Form a market perspective, Optimizely was hemmed in by big players like Adobe and Oracle who bought competitors to round out their marketing suites. Adobe and Oracle do not care about their experimentation products and will give it away for pennies, so it isn't like they are driving innovation. On the low-end, Optimizely created a bunch of fast followers. VWO, ABTasty and Kameleoon, just to name a few copied not only the Optimizely tech but also their marketing in some cases and then just sold for cheaper. Ultimately, the market decided that Experimentation technology just wasn't super valuable (you still need to generate the test idea yourself). The technology could be copied easily and many people didn't care enough about it to change their cultures. Outside of the market forces, Optimizely definitely made some mistakes. You could make the argument that pricing and product development had issues in the past few years. I think those were not the core issues. I think the basic mistakes they made were in execution. It is less sexy to talk about but ultimately if you have a great product and a need in the market, you still can't win if you don't execute properly. Marketing execution was poor, Sales enablement was haphazard, Partnerships with other tech firms or agencies changed almost daily, and culturally, the organisation struggled to maintain the original culture it had around transparency. It failed to realise that competitors had caught up to a bunch of core functionality it thought was unique. It failed to market the new features that were differentiable. It is easy to blame pricing or moving into "enterprise" as the issue because that is what people see on the outside. I think that is unfair. Many companies have done the same thing and it worked. It is all down to execution. Ultimately, I think Optimizely built a real market and culture in the tech world that experimentation matters and data matters. The fact that you have a ton of copycat companies prove that others see it as valuable as well (I wonder how they'll fair in the future). Regardless of where it goes as part of Episerver, it will have brought loads of people into the world of experimentation, and I think that is a good thing for the world.
- jnrivasseau 6y agoHello, Jean-Noel here, from Kameleoon (also a competitor to Optimizely, but mostly serving European markets so far). First off, congrats to Optimizely / Dan and co for the acquisition. For us Optimizely has always been a role model, especially from the technical side of things (I'm the founder of Kameleoon, but currently serving as CTO, so obviously I have a tech background). Optimizely was (and still is, in many ways) a great platform. And it did create (or at least, heavily helped develop) a whole market. However I agree with Feynman's comment, the main problem with this company (and even looking from aside, it was quite obvious for us) was that they raised way too much money and made promises to their investors that were completely impossible to fulfill. Basically, it looked like they wanted to be compared to AirBNB, but their potential was honestly never the same, and this was quite clear from someone with a little insight into the business. Because of that, they started making mistakes after mistakes, burned way too much money and it all went downhill. They're not the only ones with that problem - almost all competitors / actors in the field raised too much for the side of the market, from my opinion. Dynamic Yield is probably the one that did the best at that game, with a great exit when the hype was at its peak. But all the other ones are clearly in trouble (even Optimizely exit, I am sure, is clearly not a success for their investors, etc). The only actor that has a reasonable overall strategy is VWO (somebody asked if they're were profitable - of course they are, since they did not receive any funding, they have to. While Optimizely clearly never was), because it stayed lean and avoided the pitfalls of over investments (going to all continents on the planet, having 20 offices all over the world, etc). Hats off to Paras for that. We try to stick to the same strategy at Kameleoon, even if we had to raise a bit of capital. But you don't need to raise $200 millions to have a great CRO platform - we proved this for a fact. About the switch to Enterprise - anyone in this industry will tell you it was absolutely necessary. Impossible to sell experimentation to SMB and expect to be profitable, you need larger customers. Because contrarily to Mailchimp for instance, a SMB customer paying $50 (or even $500) per month for a CRO platform won't be able to operate it on its own and will churn. The problem with Optimizely pivot to Enterprise is not the pivot in itself, it's how they did it (I heard some horrors stories from people inside Optimizely, not sure if they are true, but one thing is clear - it did not go well). Anyway, it's still an exciting field, from the technical side of things, there are still many innovations to be done and we hope to spearhead that at Kameleoon :-)
- Dom31 6y agoTest