First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win

http://blog.optimizely.com/2012/10/12/first-they-ignore-you-then-they-laugh-at-you-then-they-fight-you-then-you-win/

by dsiroker • 14 years ago

156 44 14 years ago

blog.optimizely.com

sounds• 14 years ago

At first I was skeptical whether the article would correctly quote Ghandi (yes, disputed) [1]. I was pleasantly surprised at how optimizely is responding to Adobe. I think I'll go try it out.

[1] http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mohandas_Karamchand_Gandhi#Disp...

nikunjk• 14 years ago

I love even now so many people misspell Gandhi. Not a hater, but I want to know if this is the spelling that they teach in particular countries.

001sky3• 14 years ago

Considering the spelling (apparent) in his footnoted reference, one surmises it is a (meaningless) typo.

juddlyon• 14 years ago

Give them hell for all of us who've been subsidizing their bloatware all these years! Love it.

I wish some well-financed Mac devs would build a Photoshop/Fireworks killer....

lanstein• 14 years ago

Well, only for the last couple years, really - they got acquired fairly recently.

evan_• 14 years ago

Correlation does not imply causation- Many, many causes have gone through the first three steps but not the final step.

rorrr• 14 years ago

If you look at the home pages for both products, it's absolutely clear which one uses their own "medicine".

http://optimizely.com

https://www.omniture.com/en/products/conversion/test-and-tar...

tisme• 14 years ago

They're both valid approaches. The one is classic sales copy, the other is the new hip web x.0 look.

It's worth nothing that omniture pulls in a very very large amount of money, so they must be doing something right.

ssharp• 14 years ago

Enterprise software sales techniques are often mocked but they're clearly producing results. If you're an enterprise buyer, you don't care about a hip look and getting through the sales process as fast as possible, like many small customers do.

I think comparing Adobe's page to Optimizely and declaring who is eating their own dog food does not offer any insight. In enterprise sales, there are so many other steps in sales the funnel to worry about than the web page. You need to optimize in places that have the highest returns. At most, I'd guess that Adobe is testing things on that page to capture leads that are probably not even apparent.

6ren• 14 years ago

If it was "absolutely clear", there'd be no need to test.

tsotha• 14 years ago

Ugh. I'm so sick of this quote it's guaranteed to get you ignored permanently.

wtracy• 14 years ago

The quote is still meaningful in the context of social movements, but I agree that using it in the context of market competition is pretty tacky.

asdfs• 14 years ago

Even in the context of social movements it's rather meaningless when used as a form of argument for something.

prostoalex• 14 years ago

Yep, statistically speaking "First they ignore you, then you die" is the correct version and describes App Store outside of top 50 apps.

rexreed• 14 years ago

Spot on. Probably the most accurate version would be:

"First, your competitors / enemies / adversaries ignore you. If everyone else also ignores you, then you die. If others pay attention to you, then your adversaries laugh at you. If your followers still take you seriously, then you keep living. That makes your adversaries mad, so they fight you. If you can withstand the legal and physical challenges of being fought by someone with deeper pockets or more weapons, then you keep living. If you still have the resources and support to continue, then you win. A sure victory with the peril of a thousand deaths."

larrys• 14 years ago

"Why are they so afraid to mention this “one startup”?"

They don't want to legitimize you or give you any publicity. That's obvious and a good business strategy on their part. After all what do they have to gain by doing so?

chj• 14 years ago

Exactly. I am surprised that the author even asked.

snprbob86• 14 years ago

Seemed rhetorical to me...

throwaway10124• 14 years ago

I am a regular contributor on HN but I work in this industry and so i am using a throwaway account.

Dan, 1.3 billion 'visitors' is a really vague representation. Is it user sessions or page views or number of unique visitors measured in one of the experiment/control groups?

Test & Target mbox hell as mentioned in the post is very very true. Learning to use it within one hour is a joke. The technology they use is really stale and hasn't changed a lot in the recent years. Many of the players who started after 2008/09 have far superior implementations, thanks to lot of advancements in browser technologies which T&T failed to capitalize.

I am very happy for Optimizely's success and these two posts will bring them a good amount of well deserved PR. Test & target and in fact a good number of other providers are way ahead of Optimizely in this game. The number of sessions/experiments is one good metric but it is definitely not the best one to measure the leader in the race.

* What is optimziely's ARR?

At 2800 customers paying $250/month [1], it should be around $8.5M. Lets be generous and make it $10M. A handful of T&T's high profile clients will be paying Adobe that amount.

* How many IR100, IR500 [2], top 100 travel, publishing, finance sites are in Optimizely's client list?

Builtwith's data is not very accurate. We have worked with the guy from builtwith to compute some lists and their methodologies are not very great. They just look for signals in the script tags and it throws lot of false positives. Out of my own interest, i have spent hours writing parsers and scripts to compile the list and Optimizely is not really in that picture.

You can have thousands of clients paying you hundreds of dollars or have a few hundred clients paying 5/6 figure amounts. Optimizely has been after the former while the other players including T&T have been targeting the latter. I guess Optimizely is now trying to expand their enterprise client list since that is where the big money is but it takes a lot more to compete in that arena with long sales cycles and vast requirements.

* How many user sessions are being served?

Requests is probably the worst measure. T&T mentioned it because they can show their artificially inflated metric which is a result of their terrible implementation. IMO, user sessions is a better measure. 1.3 billion user sessions (in 2 years)[3] is still no where close to what the other providers serve. Number of tests currently running is also a good measure.

Optimizely is a great product and they have made it super easy to run A/B tests but false proclamation claiming you are number one when you are not even close is not very nice.

[1] Optimizely probably has a good number of clients in that 2800+ who pay $10k-20K a month. The highest openly priced plan is $360. I guess it wouldn't be wrong to assume that 50% of the customers will be in one of the two lower plans ($17 or $71). Optimizely's current ARR would be somewhere between $5M to $10M (My guess!)

[2] http://www.internetretailer.com/top500/list/

[3] There was no mention of the timeline. So i assume it is from when they started in 2010.

ashray3• 14 years ago

I find it interesting that you used a throwaway even though you didn't mention anything that could be construed as offensive.

I guess you're a direct competitor to optimizely and I know of only one other direct competitor lurking these forums so hey :)

litek• 14 years ago

You only know of? I don't have any skin in the game, but there are plenty of competitors in this space. Reducing a criticism to the one HN frequenter you're aware of seems, well premature and unfounded.

throwaway10124• 14 years ago

I guess you are thinking Visual Web Optimizer. No, I am not a part of VWO and also not an employee of a company that is a direct competitor to Optimizely. Adding to what user 'litek' mentioned, there are at least a dozen well known competitors in the A/B, MVT space.

dsiroker2• 14 years ago

Thanks for the long and thoughtful comment. I'll try to answer all of your questions point by point.

Regarding the 1.3 billion visitors: we define this as the sum of all the unique visitors to each experiment that have been run through Optimizely. We purposely avoided calling them 1.3 billion "unique" visitors because some people will be bucketed into multiple experiments and across multiple customers. We purposely do NOT include people who were not bucketed as part of the experiment/control groups. If we did, this number would likely be much higher since many of our customers use our traffic allocation feature that let's them only sample a small fraction of their traffic to include in the experiment: http://support.optimizely.com/customer/portal/articles/58196...

I wholeheartedly agree with your point that many of the players who started after 2008 have far superior implementations due to the advancements in browser technologies which T&T failed to capitalize. We certainly stand on the shoulders of giants. We would not exist as a company without jQuery, Akamai, Google App Engine, and Amazon Web Services. Not to mention the fact that browsers are much faster and can execute JavaScript in real-time to manipulate the DOM before the page is rendered in the browser and shown to the user.

As for revenue numbers: one of the advantages we have as a startup is that we are not required to publicly tell the world how big we are. If Omniture knew how big we were they might actually allocate resources to try to improve their products.

You are right that many of our 2,800+ customers pay us far more than our highest listed price of $399.

As for top customers in the categories you mentioned we are thrilled to have Disney, Starbucks, Salesforce, Crate&Barrel, GoDaddy, Footlocker, Electronic Arts, CareerBuilder, and more. It's refreshing to see companies that are traditionally "sold to" using a enterprise sales approach who are eager to embrace the shift to more nimble products that "just work." Old school sales tactics are falling on deaf ears as companies shift toward purchasing more like consumers. The vast majority of our customers come to us through word-of-mouth. We are riding the wave of the consumerization of enterprise.

radicalbyte• 14 years ago

> As for revenue numbers: one of the advantages we > have as a startup is that we are not required to > publicly tell the world how big we are. If Omniture > knew how big we were they might actually allocate > resources to try to improve their products.

I'd hazard a guess that their implementation is optimized for revenue, meaning that any changes for the better are going to decrease their revenue. That will stop them making the changes they need to be able to compete with you.

garazy• 14 years ago

Please send me an email with regards to the issues with the builtwith data, I'd be happy to identify the false positives to ensure they are not in your reports. Thanks!

throwaway10124• 14 years ago

Looking at just the script tag (eg: mbox.js/cdn.optimizely) and taking it as signal doesn't provide accurate results especially in case of providers who provide the option of self-hosting.

I will send you an email shortly with the methods that i used and let me know what you think.

noelwelsh• 14 years ago

Really interesting comment. In what way, other than revenue/sales, would you say Optimizely is behind Omniture Test and Target? Does T&T really offer any features over Optimizely?

throwaway10124• 14 years ago

Having a robust A/B, MVT testing infrastructure that lets you test on page components is the most important thing but it is only a small part of the equation. I don't have a comparison chart of Optimizely vs T&T features but there are some common feature sets and every provider lacks one or the other. Having used Optimizely, i would say Optimizely has about 30-40% of features that other enterprise level products have (personal guess not based on metrics/facts!). Some areas where the smaller products lack features are

- Personalization, segmentation and targeting (I am not talking about basic geo-targeting, repeat users, technographics etc). The features in this category can go way deep.

- Industry specific features (Having a one product fits all approach will be hard to sell in many industries. Eg: There is a huge difference in how retail and publishing uses a testing product)

- Reports and analytics (every product provides charts and graphs but this is one area where you can keep building and you will still be lacking some thing or the other)

- Upsell features (recommendation engines, mobile, social)

Many of these additional features are hard/time consuming to build and will not make sense for a good percentage of users but having those will help the product to score in the enterprise land. After a certain point when you have all the basic features, identifying what to build is probably one of the hardest tasks.

dsiroker2• 14 years ago

Obviously features are important but it turns out that most businesses simply want an easy to use platform that "just works." Most of the customers who switch from T&T to Optimizely start off by trying both concurrently and evaluating whether Optimizely has what it takes to supplant T&T. When their T&T contract comes up for renewal, they shift their entire budget to Optimizely.

giis• 14 years ago

About the quote: I first came across this quote in my college library,in some linux book.Though I didn't know who wrote this quote at that time,I really liked it and wrote it down on my college books.I was the only guy who was sticking with linux ,where as all my friends advised me to switch to j2ee/.net platform because thats where jobs are available for it but not linux.

When I told,I'm going to do something project with linux,the reply will be "Linux is OS,what could you possible do with it?".I still remember,the day-before When a company came for campus recruitment,I was doing some linux related on my new desktop.Then one friend commented 'he doesn't need to be prepare for interview,he will get a job with linux :P'.

Next day,I was lucky to meet a linux-enthusiast in my interview panel and 9 students got a job out of 180 students.My name topped that list !:)

Few days later,the same guy who commented a day-before the interview,saw this quote on my book asked 'did you wrote this quote?'.I said,"read it some book". again he insisted 'don't lie,looks like you wrote this'.I replied 'no i didn't'

In my final-year college project,I mentioned thanks for my parents and my guide and 'unknown' person who wrote this quote.

After few years,one of my oss project received foss india awards (www.giis.co.in/LFY.png).I came to know to this quote was actually written by Gandhi.

As for as I'm concern this quote has 3 questions :

What will you do when others ignore you? [are you going to give up?] What will you do when others laugh at you? [are you going to get discouraged ?] What will you do when others fight with you? [are you going to quarrel with them? or shut-up & continue your work]

nrao123• 14 years ago

This is an excellent case study unfolding in real time in the A/B Testing software industry on how large incumbent products (Adobe's Omniture - Test & Target) get killed by startups (Optimizely) .

The core of the issue seems to be something called MBox (http://www.managingecommerce.com/glossary/i-n/mbox) which is a mechanism for setting up a test e.g. Does A page perform better than B page - which is the essence of A/B testing. Of course, some genius strategist comes up with "our value is driven of by the number of tests/experiments that people run so lets set our pricing strategy of that" and then over time you slowly "capture more value than you create".

And then comes a startup which calls BS on that practice because most tests don't end up anywhere & they design a really radically simpler software that is not constrained by "per test" & other artificial constraints! They win by creating more value than they capture. More background on that topic here: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/09/does-open-conflict-with-maki...

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win

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