"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.
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?
If you're on their homepage, it's probably because you were referred there by someone or something that already told you about them. The homepage has just what a referral needs: a one-field signup form, some other brands using them so you trust the referral gave you good advice, and enough branding to show you you're in the right place.
If you're coming from anywhere else, like an ad, it's going to be linked to a landing page tailored to that source. For example, if you search "A/B testing" on Google, you'll find an ad that links here, not to their homepage: https://www.optimizely.com/ab-testing
It certainly isn't because you were on their blog and removed "blog." as https://optimizely.com doesn't load. (HTTP only, which does a redirect to https://www.)
Consider that you may not be their target customer, so it might seem vague to you -- but to people in their target customer market, it may be perfect. To me, they clearly communicate their value prop, which is, to help me "Deliver the best experiences for every customer across desktop, mobile web, and mobile apps."
The main reason is: this is their homepage after they just released a MASSIVE new product and raised a pile of money. The majority of relevant traffic to their homepage either knows who optimizely is or is already a customer.
Their original product was pretty straightforward: easy-to-use A/B testing. Put in your site, drag and drop some stuff, click go, and it'll tell you if one version performed better. Their old home page reflected this, and mostly tried to get you to take it for a test drive (you could enter any URL and play around with it).
The new product is MUCH more upmarket. They're looking for companies that have enough traffic that you can cut your visitors 5 different ways and still have a meaningful segment to market to. Between this and the fact that it's new news, the homepage is deliberately information-light. They know you know them, and they want to get on the phone.
My prediction is they drop back to something a bit more interactive / descriptive once the buzz from their raise and launch dies down.
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.
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.
Great question. I spent a lot of my time at Optimizely running a/b tests on the homepage. The short answer is: you're seeing what performed best on the primary success metric: new leads. For enterprise B2B sales, new leads are the lifeblood of the sales team. Although things can always be improved, I would argue that the homepage provides just the right amount of information to spark your curiosity enough for you to hand your email address over to the sales team.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is a great strategy for the seller. A no-name company calls and they get a quote for $10k. IBM call with exactly the same requirements and they get quoted $15k. Just because the salesperson thinks that IBM can afford more.
I do not doubt this is typical for enterprise sales but as a customer it is very frustrating and leaves you with a constant feeling that you are probably being done-over. Not to mention that because every sale is a high-touch process starting with sales it means that a significant portion of the cost is the employment of all these non-scalable sales people.
I hate the 'call us' pricing model. But I don't deny it probably works well for them.
Except it's a core concept of economics and is done everyday for basically everything that can be purchased.
In your head you have a maximum you will pay for some good or service based on the marginal value it would give you compared to the marginal cost. The goal for a seller is to find this number for each customer and sell to them at that price. In such a case, both parties are better off in total even though there may be a very wide delta between COGS and income.
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.
Cupcakely also "just got bukkaked with fat term sheets." Oh, wait, that was the fake company in that TV show. But good luck searching for it, because non-fake companies apparently jumped all over the temporary search engine juice.
Then again, I like cupcakes, and I like being optimal, so what the heck?
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.
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.
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.
31 comments
[ 6.1 ms ] story [ 81.4 ms ] threadOh 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.
If you're coming from anywhere else, like an ad, it's going to be linked to a landing page tailored to that source. For example, if you search "A/B testing" on Google, you'll find an ad that links here, not to their homepage: https://www.optimizely.com/ab-testing
Their original product was pretty straightforward: easy-to-use A/B testing. Put in your site, drag and drop some stuff, click go, and it'll tell you if one version performed better. Their old home page reflected this, and mostly tried to get you to take it for a test drive (you could enter any URL and play around with it).
The new product is MUCH more upmarket. They're looking for companies that have enough traffic that you can cut your visitors 5 different ways and still have a meaningful segment to market to. Between this and the fact that it's new news, the homepage is deliberately information-light. They know you know them, and they want to get on the phone.
My prediction is they drop back to something a bit more interactive / descriptive once the buzz from their raise and launch dies down.
[1] Super over-simplified rule of thumb: If you see "Solutions" in their nav menu, it's enterprise software.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Now I just get a cluttered inbox, not voicemail as well.
How else would you do pricing? That's how its done.
I do not doubt this is typical for enterprise sales but as a customer it is very frustrating and leaves you with a constant feeling that you are probably being done-over. Not to mention that because every sale is a high-touch process starting with sales it means that a significant portion of the cost is the employment of all these non-scalable sales people.
I hate the 'call us' pricing model. But I don't deny it probably works well for them.
In your head you have a maximum you will pay for some good or service based on the marginal value it would give you compared to the marginal cost. The goal for a seller is to find this number for each customer and sell to them at that price. In such a case, both parties are better off in total even though there may be a very wide delta between COGS and income.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_utility
Then again, I like cupcakes, and I like being optimal, so what the heck?
Genuine question. I'll give them a 2nd chance if someone can convince me.
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.