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Comment by RussianCow | Hacker News Reader

Genuine question: How do companies with such vague and unimformative home pages become so widely-used? I'm sure their platform is great, but I couldn't tell from their home page what they do, and wasn't interested enough to keep reading. And Optimizely isn't the only culprit by any measure. Is it just word of mouth? Or are most people somehow more likely to use a product with a vague and buzzword-laden description over something more succinct and to the point?

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If you're on their homepage, it's probably because you were referred there by someone or something that already told you about them. The homepage has just what a referral needs: a one-field signup form, some other brands using them so you trust the referral gave you good advice, and enough branding to show you you're in the right place.

If you're coming from anywhere else, like an ad, it's going to be linked to a landing page tailored to that source. For example, if you search "A/B testing" on Google, you'll find an ad that links here, not to their homepage: https://www.optimizely.com/ab-testing

It certainly isn't because you were on their blog and removed "blog." as https://optimizely.com doesn't load. (HTTP only, which does a redirect to https://www.)

Great, now i've got optimizely ads following me everywhere on the internet ; ). Congrats on the raise.

Great question. I spent a lot of my time at Optimizely running a/b tests on the homepage. The short answer is: you're seeing what performed best on the primary success metric: new leads. For enterprise B2B sales, new leads are the lifeblood of the sales team. Although things can always be improved, I would argue that the homepage provides just the right amount of information to spark your curiosity enough for you to hand your email address over to the sales team.

Enterprise software, which more or less Optimizely is[1], is a very different sales model from your typical consumer or small company oriented technology business. It's much more focused on getting people on the phone or in front of salespeople. So, in some sense you want to have just enough information to get people on the phone.

[1] Super over-simplified rule of thumb: If you see "Solutions" in their nav menu, it's enterprise software.

If you see `compliance' anywhere that's an even stronger hint.

Unfortunately this is right.

As the target audience for Optimizely and an ex-customer, I have to say it annoys me to no end that they are so light on details. My time is limited and I don't want to have a conversation with a rep until I can see more of what it offers. Pretty much every analytics platform out there falls into this trap.

Half the time the sales reps can't even answer my questions so I have to waste even more time with a sales engineer on a followup call to just see basic things like pictures of the interface.

The main reason is: this is their homepage after they just released a MASSIVE new product and raised a pile of money. The majority of relevant traffic to their homepage either knows who optimizely is or is already a customer.

Their original product was pretty straightforward: easy-to-use A/B testing. Put in your site, drag and drop some stuff, click go, and it'll tell you if one version performed better. Their old home page reflected this, and mostly tried to get you to take it for a test drive (you could enter any URL and play around with it).

The new product is MUCH more upmarket. They're looking for companies that have enough traffic that you can cut your visitors 5 different ways and still have a meaningful segment to market to. Between this and the fact that it's new news, the homepage is deliberately information-light. They know you know them, and they want to get on the phone.

My prediction is they drop back to something a bit more interactive / descriptive once the buzz from their raise and launch dies down.

Consider that you may not be their target customer, so it might seem vague to you -- but to people in their target customer market, it may be perfect. To me, they clearly communicate their value prop, which is, to help me "Deliver the best experiences for every customer across desktop, mobile web, and mobile apps."

It's probably intentionally vague. They might have a heavy sales driven process which relies on inbound leads asking questions/inquiry.

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