Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by KingOfCoders 2121 days ago
My impression is Optimizely never crossed the chasm. Huge following with VC funded startups and early stage startups but never crossed into "Google Analytics" territory where every company with a website was using it.

Slowing down users meant higher prices to sustain VC promised growth. Higher prices meant enterprise sales. And it went down from there.

2 comments

I'd say in the early days they were on the way to getting that mindshare. I had SME clients using them, where VWO was cheaper but they didn't like using VWO.

When Optimizely hiked their prices and lost the smallest plan, all these clients went elsewhere. I'm sure their contribution was noise to Optimizely's turnover, but the awareness of what was possible with A/B testing and the way they'd tell their friends about Optimizely and what they'd just done on their website - you couldn't buy that exposure.

Yeah, I agree. I think the use cases weren't substantial enough so people just didn't use it enough to justify subscriptions in most cases. This means high customer churn, especially if they were selling to customers based on strength of their name (which I think they were, to digital marketers who conned themselves into believe it was a product they needed). They received funding from a PE firm (Insight Partners) who were probably eager to get a return.