Optimizely Raises $58M

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?

&quot;<i>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.</i>&quot;<p>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, &quot;man, if only this process could be optimized using data, like they do at Starbucks.&quot; Then I sat at my computer and read some idiosyncratic posts from my favorite blogger. After enjoying a few posts I said to myself, &quot;man, if only he could optimize his blog posts for maximum clicks like Buzzfeed does. Why doesn&#x27;t he use data to make his experience better?&quot;<p>&lt;&#x2F;sarcasm&gt;<p>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.<p>Drop the first four sentences. Start off with, &quot;When Pete Koomen and I founded Optimizely five years ago, very few companies had even heard of A&#x2F;B Testing, and optimization software was about the last thing anyone considered putting in their technology stack.&quot; Then give an example. &quot;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&#x2F;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....&quot;<p>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.

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.<p>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 &quot;work&quot; on the account but no longer under one account spread across multiple clients.<p>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&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>(Yes, we have contracts with our clients, but we are not naive enough to think that clients won&#x27;t look for a way to do away with our fees if they can take our services and work product with them.)<p>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.<p>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&#x2F;sub-accounts can reside under one login. Even if each client needs to have a different pricing structure based on their usage patterns, can&#x27;t share visits across clients, but could be arranged and managed by the agency as one point of contact and billing.<p>I&#x27;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&#x27;t commit to a vendor that seems to actively enable and almost encourage our clients to circumvent our own service model.

You just know that when the pricing page says &quot;Call us&quot; 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.

Can anyone here honestly claim the optimizely is better than visual website optimizer? I&#x27;ve used both extensively and I constantly run into problems where I&#x27;m required to do things a certain way with optimizely where I can just do it like I want with vwo.<p>Genuine question. I&#x27;ll give them a 2nd chance if someone can convince me.

... wow, we live _SO_ in the advertisement bubble! And the first few sentences are just absolutely ridicolous.

I think Optimzely&#x27;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&#x27;s discover software is incredible.