Launch HN: Mutiny (YC S18) – Website Personalization for B2B Companies
We're Jaleh & Nikhil, the founders of Mutiny (https://www.mutinyhq.com/). We help companies personalize their website for each visitor to close more sales.
We are built for B2B companies that are actively growing their website traffic. For the majority of these companies, 97-99% of their visitors don’t convert to a trial or sales conversation. Typically the reason is that when potential customers come to their site they don’t understand why the product is great for them. This happens because customers from different industries and company sizes are looking for different things when they land on a website and are motivated by different social proof.
Mutiny enables B2B companies to dynamically customize the website’s message, images, and call-to-action to match the visitor. For example, one of our customers Amplitude, a product analytics company, changes its website’s customer logos on their pricing page and signup form to match the visitor’s industry. This specific personalization generates 54% more leads. Another customer Carta, an equity management product, changes their homepage headline and messaging to highlight product features that matter most based on the visitor’s company size. They have seen 80% more leads in their smaller customer segments as a result.
Mutiny was inspired by our own experience. Nikhil and I were early Gusto employees and helped grow the company from 500 to 50,000 customers such as startups, restaurants and accounting firms. I led marketing and quickly learned that the same message did not work for all the businesses we served, resulting in low conversion rates. This problem got worse as we started to spend more on advertising/content and attracting customers who had never heard of us before. Personalizing the buyer experience helped increase conversion rates, but doing it well required a lot of expertise and engineering work. And after speaking with other marketers and growth teams we realized that virtually every B2B company serves multiple audiences with different needs, but doesn't have sufficient engineering support to personalize their experience.
Here’s how it works:
Set up: User adds the Mutiny javascript to their website and defines their website conversion events in the Mutiny UI.
1. Understand visitors: We have pre-built data integrations (e.g. Clearbit, Segment, Salesforce, UTM) to identify visitors by their industry, company size, funnel stage, advertising campaign, free user v/s paid user and more. We also display how many visitors fall into each segment and what their conversion is.
2. Prioritize the highest impact segments: Mutiny analyzes visitor traffic, conversion & CRM data to recommend the best audience segments for personalization. It then suggests personalization playbooks that fit with the recommended segment & walks the user through best practices for personalizing each segment’s experience.
3. Personalize any website element: Users can load any page on their website inside Mutiny’s visual editor, and change any html element such as text, image or call-to-action for that segment.
4. Measure results: Every Mutiny experience has an automatic control group that never sees personalization, allowing users to measure the impact of personalized experiences compared to non-personalized.
Mutiny is being used by Brex, Segment, Elastic, Amplitude, Carta & others who are seeing 40-200% more leads with Mutiny. Our detailed case studies including screenshots of personalized web pages are available here: https://www.mutinyhq.com/cases/
We have released 30+ personalization playbooks that we have seen work well across b2b companies here: https://www.mutinyhq.com/playbooks. If you are a smaller startup with little web...
48 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] threadMany B2B companies drive the majority of their growth from other sales channels beyond the marketing website. And traffic can sometimes be low on the marketing site, especially through any multi-click funnel, that running effective tests can take a long time. Has Mutiny seen these cases (marketing site not having enough traffic) and thoughts on this challenge?
I'm just waiting for somebody to start a Cardiff Electric, or MacMillan Utility...
How many visitors do you have?
It appears you're already on the hitlists of ad-blockers. So is Segment: They seem to be surviving just fine, regardless.
A few questions (honestly, you don't have to answer them all, esp publicly, if you don't feel like it):
1. Wouldn't a deployment of this on the first-party severs be more effective since it'd bypass the content blockers (server-side sdk)? Is it in the works?
2. What else are the existing customers / prospective customers asking for in terms of features?
3. What's the key functionality you ought to build next?
4. What was the most surprising thing abt how customers used your product?
5. Does it play nicely with other frameworks like Optimizely, Fastly, React, and so on... out of the box? Is the mutiny js-sdk a simple drop and forget? What's the catch?
6. Why the emphasis on B2B? I can't imagine why it wouldn't work for B2C (low-income vs high-income societies, artics vs tropics, europeans vs africans and so on)?
I really like the logo, the colours, and the super neat landing page.
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A few suggestions from the comfort of the armchair I'm sitting on at the altar of unsolicited feedback from a non-expert:
1. Are you using mutinyhq on mutinyhq.com? If not, you could do so, and link a demo that shows mutinyhq as it would appear to a SaaS employee to someone from the finance industry to someone from Vietnam? Like how you do currently for Brex, Segment, Amplitude, and Carta: I must point out that it take too many clicks to browse what those really powerful examples. I wonder if viewing those could be a tad more friction free like how Facebook lets you view your profile from different PoVs.
2. Above the fold one liner, Turn your website into your #1 growth channel doesn't convey enough: I wouldn't click on (CTA) request invite, tbh. I'd expect to learn more / see faq / view demo (a screencast / video, may be)?
3. Personally, to me, the section with "works with any tech stack", "B2B playbooks to up your game", "More leads, fewer dependencies", "Reclaim your website" is too handwavy without conveying much (except for, works with any tech stack). I think, you'd be better off highlighting the 30 playbooks instead. I went through the three playbooks linked from the front-page and they did far more than anything to convince me to sign-up.
4. I feel, because the final section ends with ...let our team walk you through tactics to increase your inbound leads by up to 50%, the CTA could be Schedule a meeting (with href-mailto / calendly link) and/or Talk to us now (directing to a whatsapp chat or some such for visitors from mobile web).
5. "User adds the Mutiny javascript to their website and defines their website conversion events in the Mutiny UI." This isn't anywhere on the landing page. I wish it was. Stripe.com is a good example which conveys how easy it is to accept payments. The same goes for the editor you've built. I'd, personally, be blown away if I could see a screencast of it in-use, than read a blob of text abt it.
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What a great product! All the best.
When things calm down from the launch, we should speak further. We built / released our own Company and IP APIs since Clearbit was obscenely expensive at scale. Our data quality / match rates are now comparable - https://bigpicture.io/docs/enrichment/company/
We're looking for a couple strategic partners. You can reach me at michael [at] bigpicture.io
Within the Mutiny product, you can use our website editor to select and update any element of your page without requiring any code changes. The changes you make are compiled into a unique JavaScript file that is distributed globally through our CDN, this ensures Mutiny loads from the location closest to the visitor, making it performant and reliable. Once the incoming visitor loads the website in the browser, the Mutiny JavaScript classifies them based on their information and updates the relevant HTML elements to reflect the personalization (for example, you may change your hero CTA to "Get a Demo" for enterprise companies).
We have worked with customers running client-side, single page applications (using React, Vue.js, Angular, and more) from day 1 and have built our software to handle these environments. We hook into the browser's paint lifecycle using APIs like `requestAnimationFrame` (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/window/requ...) to avoid seeing a flash of the original content when personalization is rendered. We subscribe to DOM manipulations using `MutationObserver`s (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MutationObs...), allowing us to render correctly in a dynamic JavaScript environment.
I took a look at your website and tried it out in our editor - all the personalized changes render well!
Pricing depends on your visitor volume. How many monthly visitors do you have? We also have a startup package if you have <20k monthly visitors and <$5M in funding and founded in or after 2015.
What can you do to identify what kind of industry a user is from when they visit via a Google Search? Or a direct link? Do you always require something like a UTM parameter?
What’s your view on the ethics of doing this for users who haven’t signed up or otherwise provided any info, and thus think they’re anonymous?
Do you think most otherwise-anonymous Web visitors know or understand that IP->individual/business lookups are possible (for IPs which don’t have reverse DNS or SWIP entries)? It seems like basically no Web visitors know about IP data appending.
If or when this does become mainstream knowledge, how do you think the general public will react?
The purpose of using this data for personalization is to help the incoming visitor find what they are looking for and understand more specifically why a product would be right for them. Our system is built such that when a user visits a Mutiny enabled website, their information is never shared nor sold. Only the company whose website the user has chosen to engage with has access to this data, similar to how company's use analytics platforms today.
We do not use 3rd party cookies, so user data is always protected across companies and domains. If users prefer to forgo personalization we respect these privacy settings and allow users to opt-out.
Could you point out where this is in your privacy policy? My admittedly-basic reading seems to show the opposite. https://www.mutinyhq.com/privacy says this:
"“Do Not Track”. Do Not Track (“DNT”) is a privacy preference that users can set in certain web browsers. Please note that we do respond to or honor DNT signals or similar mechanisms transmitted by web browsers."
If, as you note, you respect users' privacy settings, why don't you honor Do Not Track? Forgoing personalization is the whole reason that DNT exists.
If this was an oversight, how about updating your service's behavior and the privacy policy?
We do indeed honor Do Not Track in our service. Additionally, users can opt-out by emailing privacy@mutinyhq.com as detailed in the privacy policy.
But how is it better than just asking for the profile type and personalizing on self-declared choice ?
For example, for the Carta website we could just ask the visitor if she is seed stage, growth stage or investor and adapt the website to the user's answer.
It's one step that can be stored in a cookie and we are certain that the user hasn't been bucketed into the wrong profile.