Twilio's rank is really low for a company with that much name recognition/revenue/employees/valuation etc and is actually great evidence that Alexa is a terrible indicator of B2B success. And Zendesk's number is skewed because they use their domain to setup customer service portals for their users. 99% of that traffic is going there to submit a ticket to some other company and could care less about Zendesk or their product offerings.
Maybe those are watching the browsing behavior of experts in a field. Maybe it's watching for twitter references. Maybe it's sitting outside a company's office watching foot traffic. Maybe it's looking for who sponsors conferences. I don't really care what the indicators are; what I care about is that someone cares about finding them, and is diligent and intelligent enough to find them.
It matters when it's used to handwave dismiss a valid argument and followed by "so don’t even try that line on me".
Example:
Website A: CRM software for real estate agents that charges $2,000 per month. Alexa rank 120,000.
Website B: in the same business but gives their software away free, lets users host blogs on their site and advertises with popups served from the domain (a huge Alexa boost to lots of porn sites, ad networks and others) and as a result has an Alexa rank of 9,000.
If you were to do a post on the real estate CRM industry you'd probably dump on company A and praise company B - even though we know essentially nothing about either business. Website A could be doing millions per month in revenue and have 50+ employees and B could be one guy working nights and weekends and making $2,000 per month.
tl;dr apples-to-apples comparisons between B2B companies based on homepage traffic stats = fail.
http://www.csc.com/ Alexa 30,000 - Market Cap $7.1 Billion
https://www.saic.com/ Alexa 43,000 - Market Cap $5 Billion
And just a random one I've used that I knew would have a high Alexa given how their service works:
http://unbounce.com/ Alexa 6,000 - Total employees 20, total funding $850k (per crunchbase)
If you were to rank these three companies, unbounce would be on top and you'd be telling the CEO's of two companies worth a combined $12 Billion+ to stop whining and be more like unbounce.
Web traffic is one of several signals used to produce the ranking.
"Think your B2B startup shouldn’t be expected to ever have meaningful web traffic? Twilio is #13,158 in global web traffic and Zendesk is #650, so don’t even try that line on me."
P.S. I remain a big fan of what you're doing here - was just trying to help.
Looking forward to the next post.