I 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.
Agree with Paras there, VWO was not a follower, they started at the same time. These things are actually funny - I even started Kameleoon before Optimizely (early 2008), but we developed our visual editor first and did not apply it to AB testing at the beginning. We made a (successful) pivot at the end of 2011 and have been focusing on CRO since, becoming competitors to Optimizely & others.
Calling Optimizely's competitors simple followers is clearly an over-simplification and a bias from the VC/SF crow indeed. As Paras pointed out, every actor in the field had their firsts in the market (some of Kameleoon's examples: our anti-flickering technology, our aggregation features in our reports / data engine, our automatic cross-device history reconciliation or our full ITP support). In many ways, Optimizely tech is now trailing behind today.
However it's true that Optimizely (and to a lesser measure, VWO) did a lot from the marketing side to develop the market, and we benefited quite a bit from that. We're definitely grateful to them :)
Just to be clear, VWO wasn't and isn't a follower.
We started in late 2009, exactly the same time when Optimizely started and we had visual editor on day 1 and have many firsts in the market to our credit (integrating heatmaps into A/B tests, asynchronous code, Bayesian statistics and so on).
It's a perception among VC/SF crowd that Optimizely was the only innovator in the A/B testing market but that's not the truth if you actually put effort into researching. Many players, including VWO and of course Optimizely too, pushed the market in terms of innovation.
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.