Thanks for making these points. They seem less hyperbolic and more grounded than your earlier claim ("it was one of optimizely's best decisions") and I appreciate that change in tone.
You characterize my arguments as theoretical, but they are empirical. Optimizely's valuation didn't increase after the decision to kill self serve was made, and VWO was able to build a successful business without killing self serve.
Also, as you now agree, optimizely would have had a better source of enterprise deals with self serve intact. That's important.
Stepping back, every SaaS business has issues converting self serve users to enterprise. Fixing those issues takes hard work, which optimizely was not willing to do. Similarly, every business has higher churn in monthly self serve plans than annual enterprise plans. Fixing this takes hard work too. Things were not unsolvable, optimizely simply had no appetite for solving them.
To address your other points:
1. I donbt that labor costs would have made a difference, but say they would have. Was anything stopping optimizely from reducing costs to have overseas development in india?
3. Your comments about the various foci at different rounds of funding is irrelevant. I'm not arguing that building an enterprise business is bad, I'm arguing that killing self serve was bad.
Ultimately, as Dan predicted in 2013, Optimizely died of indigestion rather than starvation; the market was always there, and still is.
Hope this helps clarify my position, even if we still disagree. If you send me an email, I'd be happy to help squash your skepticism about the $100k too.
PS. I don't think that killing self serve was the only thing that led to optimizely's demise, but I do think it was a factor.
You characterize my arguments as theoretical, but they are empirical. Optimizely's valuation didn't increase after the decision to kill self serve was made, and VWO was able to build a successful business without killing self serve.
Also, as you now agree, optimizely would have had a better source of enterprise deals with self serve intact. That's important.
Stepping back, every SaaS business has issues converting self serve users to enterprise. Fixing those issues takes hard work, which optimizely was not willing to do. Similarly, every business has higher churn in monthly self serve plans than annual enterprise plans. Fixing this takes hard work too. Things were not unsolvable, optimizely simply had no appetite for solving them.
To address your other points: 1. I donbt that labor costs would have made a difference, but say they would have. Was anything stopping optimizely from reducing costs to have overseas development in india? 3. Your comments about the various foci at different rounds of funding is irrelevant. I'm not arguing that building an enterprise business is bad, I'm arguing that killing self serve was bad.
Ultimately, as Dan predicted in 2013, Optimizely died of indigestion rather than starvation; the market was always there, and still is.
Hope this helps clarify my position, even if we still disagree. If you send me an email, I'd be happy to help squash your skepticism about the $100k too.
PS. I don't think that killing self serve was the only thing that led to optimizely's demise, but I do think it was a factor.