Dan Siroker, founder and CEO of Optimizely, discusses the company's early growth and customer adoption during the 2012 US presidential election.
Opinion
Siroker calls Adobe's marketing cloud a poorly integrated 'Franken-suite'
“Adobe you know, has a product that, you know, has been evolved through acquisitions, which turns what they're offering into what our customers tend to describe as a Franken-sweet. It's a bunch of products that don't really integrate well with one another.”
What-if
Siroker: Optimizely would have benefited early on from vertical focus
“If I had to give myself advice to a past version of myself, I think a lot about that, and I think about optimization. I think that it would have actually served us better to be more narrowly focused on a set of customers and deeply empathize with their biggest…”
Insight
Siroker: Job candidates heavily focused on titles are a massive red flag
“We try to seek missionaries, not mercenaries. So people who are really focused on title as part of that process, ah, to me is a red flag. It means that they're about trying to make their LinkedIn profile look good, not how to make our customers wildly successf…”
Insight
Secure six paying reference customers before scaling a second product's go-to-market
“Looking back, what I would, wish I had done differently is, is have a small team of folks working on getting six reference customers who are using the product, paying for the product, and are willing to be public spokespeople for the product as a way, ah, to r…”
Assertion Supported
Siroker: Optimizely operated without multivariate testing for a year and a half
“We didn't have features that people assumed were, ah, must haves, things like multivariate testing. We didn't have that for a year and a half.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Siroker: IBM has hundreds of non-developers running daily tests on Optimizely
“They've seen 70% of the decision gets made before sales person is involved. So they use Optimizely. They've got a team of hundreds of people doing A-B testing, optimization every single day that don't require developers to be involved in the process.”