Thanks for the long and thoughtful comment. I'll try to answer all of your questions point by point.

Regarding the 1.3 billion visitors: we define this as the sum of all the unique visitors to each experiment that have been run through Optimizely. We purposely avoided calling them 1.3 billion "unique" visitors because some people will be bucketed into multiple experiments and across multiple customers. We purposely do NOT include people who were not bucketed as part of the experiment/control groups. If we did, this number would likely be much higher since many of our customers use our traffic allocation feature that let's them only sample a small fraction of their traffic to include in the experiment: http://support.optimizely.com/customer/portal/articles/58196...

I wholeheartedly agree with your point that many of the players who started after 2008 have far superior implementations due to the advancements in browser technologies which T&T failed to capitalize. We certainly stand on the shoulders of giants. We would not exist as a company without jQuery, Akamai, Google App Engine, and Amazon Web Services. Not to mention the fact that browsers are much faster and can execute JavaScript in real-time to manipulate the DOM before the page is rendered in the browser and shown to the user.

As for revenue numbers: one of the advantages we have as a startup is that we are not required to publicly tell the world how big we are. If Omniture knew how big we were they might actually allocate resources to try to improve their products.

You are right that many of our 2,800+ customers pay us far more than our highest listed price of $399.

As for top customers in the categories you mentioned we are thrilled to have Disney, Starbucks, Salesforce, Crate&Barrel, GoDaddy, Footlocker, Electronic Arts, CareerBuilder, and more. It's refreshing to see companies that are traditionally "sold to" using a enterprise sales approach who are eager to embrace the shift to more nimble products that "just work." Old school sales tactics are falling on deaf ears as companies shift toward purchasing more like consumers. The vast majority of our customers come to us through word-of-mouth. We are riding the wave of the consumerization of enterprise.

> As for revenue numbers: one of the advantages we > have as a startup is that we are not required to > publicly tell the world how big we are. If Omniture > knew how big we were they might actually allocate > resources to try to improve their products.

I'd hazard a guess that their implementation is optimized for revenue, meaning that any changes for the better are going to decrease their revenue. That will stop them making the changes they need to be able to compete with you.

I find it interesting that you used a throwaway even though you didn't mention anything that could be construed as offensive.

I guess you're a direct competitor to optimizely and I know of only one other direct competitor lurking these forums so hey :)

I guess you are thinking Visual Web Optimizer. No, I am not a part of VWO and also not an employee of a company that is a direct competitor to Optimizely. Adding to what user 'litek' mentioned, there are at least a dozen well known competitors in the A/B, MVT space.

You only know of? I don't have any skin in the game, but there are plenty of competitors in this space. Reducing a criticism to the one HN frequenter you're aware of seems, well premature and unfounded.

I didn't really publicly 'reduce' anyone to anything. Kinda like what you did here. But hey okay then.

For the record, I addressed a throwaway account and didn't name any names.

Really interesting comment. In what way, other than revenue/sales, would you say Optimizely is behind Omniture Test and Target? Does T&T really offer any features over Optimizely?

Having a robust A/B, MVT testing infrastructure that lets you test on page components is the most important thing but it is only a small part of the equation. I don't have a comparison chart of Optimizely vs T&T features but there are some common feature sets and every provider lacks one or the other. Having used Optimizely, i would say Optimizely has about 30-40% of features that other enterprise level products have (personal guess not based on metrics/facts!). Some areas where the smaller products lack features are

- Personalization, segmentation and targeting (I am not talking about basic geo-targeting, repeat users, technographics etc). The features in this category can go way deep.

- Industry specific features (Having a one product fits all approach will be hard to sell in many industries. Eg: There is a huge difference in how retail and publishing uses a testing product)

- Reports and analytics (every product provides charts and graphs but this is one area where you can keep building and you will still be lacking some thing or the other)

- Upsell features (recommendation engines, mobile, social)

Many of these additional features are hard/time consuming to build and will not make sense for a good percentage of users but having those will help the product to score in the enterprise land. After a certain point when you have all the basic features, identifying what to build is probably one of the hardest tasks.

Obviously features are important but it turns out that most businesses simply want an easy to use platform that "just works." Most of the customers who switch from T&T to Optimizely start off by trying both concurrently and evaluating whether Optimizely has what it takes to supplant T&T. When their T&T contract comes up for renewal, they shift their entire budget to Optimizely.

Please send me an email with regards to the issues with the builtwith data, I'd be happy to identify the false positives to ensure they are not in your reports. Thanks!

Looking at just the script tag (eg: mbox.js/cdn.optimizely) and taking it as signal doesn't provide accurate results especially in case of providers who provide the option of self-hosting.

I will send you an email shortly with the methods that i used and let me know what you think.