Optimizely began as an internal bookmarklet used to deliver consulting contracts
Pete Koomen · Startup Advice: AI GTM, Pivoting & How To Hire · Y Combinator · Oct 21, 2025 · at 29:38
Optimizely co-founder Pete Koomen explains how they tackled complex technical scope by building an internal tool first.
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“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 least six months, I think, to build. But the way that we cut the problem down into something smaller was we built the first version for ourselves. So my co-founder Dan and I started with the simplest thing, which was a little, it was a bookmarklet, actually, that would pop open a little text field on any website That either he or I could use to just write JavaScript manually that would get run on the website. And that was just enough for us to go in and get some consulting contracts to build A-B tests for other companies.”
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