11 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 31.7 ms ] thread
Congrats Dan & team - that is awesome news!

Looks like your bump happened in May 2012 and drove that 2x growth in adoption.

Probably not coincidentally connected to your funding round that same month - what's the story of the growth?

Thanks!

If you look back you can see we've been growing at a pretty steady clip every since we launched: http://trends.builtwith.com/analytics/Optimizely

However you are right that there does seem to be an inflection point in May 2012. I can only speculate why this happened. Here are a few possible reasons:

1. We got really lucky with a bunch of great press at the end of April including a phenomenal piece in Wired: http://www.wired.com/business/2012/04/ff_abtesting/ and a piece on CNN: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEpsfQHNUxU

2. We announced our funding: http://blog.optimizely.com/2012/05/30/optimizely-surpasses-g...

3. Probably in some part because of #1 we started ranking very high for organic search terms. For example we are now the first ranked result for "website a/b testing" on Google.

Hope that answers your question!

Congrats! That looks like quite an accomplishment.

Edit- On a side note, I'm actually friends with one of the founders of Omniture. He's also an investor in my startup. I'll have to find an easy way to break the news to him. :p

Josh?
John. As far as I know Josh isn't investing directly in things these days. He did invest in a Utah-based incubator called BoomStartup which we were a part off though. I think Josh is pretty busy with his new company called Domo these days.
What happen ed in march to cause that wicked inflection point?
See my comment earlier. A couple of reasons including press, announcing our funding, and better SEO.
That's pretty exciting. I've been using the service for a few new projects and I'm pretty happy with it. Congrats guys!
Congrats Dan! You totally deserve the success of building a great platform. However, I'd like to put a different perspective here just for clarity's sake:

The data source you quote (BuiltWith) clearly mentions that Visual Website Optimizer http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/ is installed on 6300 websites v/s Optimizely's 5144 websites. (Ominture Test and Target is installed on 10,000+ websites). So '#1 testing platform' is clearly how you chose to interpret. In terms of total number of websites that use a platform, Omniture still is #1

For a fair comparison, here are our stats:

- 1850+ customers (our lowest public plan is $49 v/s yours $19)

- 14 employees

- Profitable and bootstrapped

I hope the A/B testing market and products mature thanks to healthy competition. Good luck!