After a month, we pivoted to create products we wished we had, leading to the development of Optimizely, which simplifies A/B testing for users without technical resources.

During the campaign, I learned the importance of A/B testing and how to use data to make better decisions.

Optimizely helps companies run A/B tests to determine which design changes lead to better customer conversion rates.

After seeing Barack Obama speak at Google, I was inspired to volunteer for his campaign, which led me to run several successful A/B tests.

The first year of Optimizely saw us grow to a team of four and achieve an annual run rate of $1.1 million, focusing on continual product improvement.

I decided to pursue my startup idea because it kept gaining momentum, despite the challenges I faced. I set up my startup as a four-week test to validate my idea without high expectations.

During a call with a former colleague, I pitched Optimizely, and he immediately saw its value, suggesting a price of $1,000 a month, which was significantly more than we made with our previous ventures.

We built a tool to streamline the process of iterating on our prompting layer, allowing us to run experiments and assess the impact of even trivial changes on performance and user engagement.

We had our first paying customer for Optimizely before writing any code, demonstrating the demand for our product.