top | item 2557058

Optimizely (YC W10) brings data-driven Web design to the masses

46 points| waderoush | 15 years ago |xconomy.com | reply

9 comments

order
[+] drndown2007|15 years ago|reply
Nothing against Optimizely (I'll go see what it is after I post), but man I'm getting tired of the cutsey -ly names. This is one fad I wish would fade away.
[+] Zakuzaa|15 years ago|reply
What's wrong with -ly names?
[+] jbenz|15 years ago|reply
We got a call from http://hiconversion.co/ recently. They wanted to sell us on their conversion optimizer software. Their site talks a lot about "Real Time ROI" and "IT-Free Use", but no where on the site do they actually describe what they do. I emailed the rep this question and he basically wouldn't tell us. He would only say "I can explain it with a demo." We were curious to see how it worked, so we said yes. Then we had to schedule a time, call up GoToMeeting, enter the passcode, and listen to a 30 minute presentation.

He was a nice enough guy, but my god, all HiConversion had to do was exactly what Optimizely did: put a 4 minute video on their homepage (which I am seeing for the first time today).

The WYSIWYG editing in both systems is pretty similar. The main difference is that I got a quick and easy understanding after four minutes on Optimizely's site.

P.S. The price is significantly better at Optimizely. 30 Day Free Trial and $400/month vs $3,000/month. We'll check out that free trial version at least.

[+] dsiroker|15 years ago|reply
Thanks, glad you like the demo video!

The inspiration for Optimizely came out of similar frustrations when I was the Director of Analytics during the Obama campaign. We went through a long drawn-out sales process with Omniture Test & Target when all we really wanted was a short demo of the product. Hopefully we've done a good job of building a product that is easy to use and understand so we can avoid doing a 30 minute presentation to explain how it works. We're building the product I WISH we had back during the campaign.

We're actually thinking of putting together a series of short videos showcasing different features of the product similar to how Splunk does this: http://www.splunk.com/videos

Is this something you'd be interested in?

[+] nhangen|15 years ago|reply
I'm a happy paying user. Really dig the site. A few ideas for UI enhancements, but I think this is a great and easy way to quickly test site changes without having to dig into the code or Google Analytics, which makes the process incredibly difficult.
[+] dsiroker|15 years ago|reply
Hi Nathan, glad you dig our site! We're honored to have you as a paying customer. If you have any UI suggestions for the product we'd be glad to hear them. You can email us directly at [email protected]