Optimizely

“This company optimizely went through YC on winter 10, and they put this prototype literally in a couple of days, and the reason why is that they had applied with YC with a very different idea. They started with a Twitter referral widget, and that idea didn't w…”

“We actually had this example at Optimizely where we were building software to help companies run A-B tests. But at the earliest stages, we got companies to pay us just to go in and manually build A-B tests. For them. Right. And so we're making money. The first…”

“The single biggest mistake that founders make is thinking that implementation is the customer's job.”

“In fact, we closed six-figure deals with customers that were excited about our product, and then we discovered a year later when it was time for them to renew that they hadn't run a single A-B test with Optimizely.”

“When Dan and I started building, we booked demos with all of our competitors, and every single one of them used a dummy website to show what it was like to use their products to run A-B tests. And we thought this was really lame. So we spent weeks building a f…”

“For example, at Optimizely, we used a tool called Built With to figure out whether prospects were using analytics tools and JavaScript frameworks. Because those were signals that a company was relatively sophisticated and cared about their website.”

“At Optimizely, the hardest part of building our first product was building this website editor. That would work with any other website and would allow a non-technical person to go in and build an A-B test without writing code. And that ended up taking us at le…”