why aren't all 7 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public
record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable
ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't;
assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card:
▮▮▮▮▮ certainty ·
▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Insight
Koeman: Founders' Biggest Sales Mistake Is Assuming Customers Own Implementation
“The single biggest mistake that founders make is thinking that implementation is the customer's job.”
Disclosure
Optimizely began as an internal bookmarklet used to deliver consulting contracts
“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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Koeman: Optimizely Closed Six-Figure Deals Where Customers Never Ran Tests
“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.”
Disclosure
Optimizely built live-website demoing after seeing all competitors use dummy sites
“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…”
Assertion Contradicted
Koomen: Optimizely started as manual A/B testing consulting before building software
“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…”
Assertion Supported
Optimizely pivoted in YC W10 after a failed Twitter referral widget
“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…”
Disclosure
Koomen: Optimizely Used BuiltWith to Prospect Tech-Savvy Companies
“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.”