跟史上增长最快的 SaaS 服务公司 Optimizely 学习创业经验
编者按：史上增长最快的 SaaS 服务公司 Optimizely有着十几亿的访问者，它现在是最先进的在线 A/B 测试平台，它的创业过程有什么经验值得创业者学习？Tomasz Tunguz近日总结了 Optimizely 发展的早期经验，希望可以给创业者提供参考借鉴。
Optimizely 的创始人 Dan Siroker 在奥巴马竞选总统期间帮助他创建筹款网站，这段期间他掌握了 A/B 测试技能。也恰恰是这段经历，让他萌生了创业的想法，最终他将 A/B 测试技术作为创业想法，建立了 Optimizely 公司。目前 Optimizely 已经成为最先进的在线 A/B 测试平台。
在旧金山的红点办公室举行的小型交流会上，Optimizely 的另一位创始人 Pete Koomen 分享了其创业初期的一些经验和见解。下面是我从他们分享中总结的几条可供创业者学习的经验。
1、聘请专业管理顾问
首先，聘请专业的管理顾问和你一起工作，共同为公司的发展努力。随着 Optimizely 的不断发展，对于 Dan 和 Pete 的各种领导需求也不断增加，但他们本身并没有太多的领导经验。作为一个领导者，他们改进的旅程是永无止境的。不过他们发现学习领导技能的最佳方式就是聘请专业的管理顾问，在与顾问的每月一次的谈话中，他们会提出当前 Optimizely 遇到的问题，向顾问寻求解决意见。此外，管理顾问还会对他俩进行 360 度全方位的评价，以帮助他们了解到自己对团队发展的影响。
2、懂得放权
其次，你必须要利用 “解雇” 自己的方式，懂得放权。如果你发现自己已经特别擅长某个领域里的工作，譬如销售、产品环节、市场营销，这个时候你就应该聘请足够多的人来取代你的工作。你是团队的领导者，并不是任务的执行者。这样的做法也是正确的，这其实是扩展业务的唯一途径。当你成为领导者的那天起，你必须要懂得放权，让新员工了解工作，慢慢适应公司的环境和工作节奏，让他们成为独挡一面的人才。不过在 Pete 他们看来，学习放权的过程非常困难。
3、招聘销售员，速度要快且要不拘一格
在创业初期，你也需要聘请销售人员，特别是在公司还没有定义销售流程和销售行为的时候，这些人他们可以给你提供不同的销售灵感，可以帮你完善这个过程。Optimizely 第一个成功的销售员之前在西雅图的家具回收单位工作，第二个成功的销售员是专业的芭蕾舞退役舞蹈者。虽然这两个人没有典型的销售背景，但他们热情如火，他们依旧可以为公司的发展提出自己的销售建议和合适的市场战略。
4、招聘是首要任务
最后，当你的创业公司发现了适应市场需求的产品之后，接下来招聘便会成公司的重中之重。Pete 认为如果你想要创建机器你必须得先有创建机器的人。在 2012年 初 Dan 和 Pete 就意识到他们这一年的首要任务就是要建立一只伟大的团队。Pete 要求团队里的每一个人跟大家分享自己的喜好，以及他们为什么喜欢 Optimizely 和不喜欢 Optimizely 的哪些地方。这样他们可以更好地改善公司的不足，建立更强大的发展团队。
Dan 和 Pete 是非常成功的领导，他们懂得鼓舞员工，而这些他们创业初期的这些经验也非常宝贵。对于一个初期创业的人来讲，这些经验都会非常有帮助。
来源：tomtunguz.com
翻译：36氪
4 Lessons For SaaS Startups From Optimizely's Early Days
Last night, SaaS Office Hours hosted Optimizely co-founder and CTO Pete Koomen. Pete was a Google Associate Product Manager for AdSense and launched Google App Engine. Then he joined his co-founder, Dan Siroker, also an APM at Google to found three companies, the last of which is Optimizely.
As Pete shared with us, the idea of Optimizely was borne from a need Dan saw when managing the teams to build Obama’s fundraising websites during his first campaign. Dan and his team wrote code to fine-tune sign-up flows, and the experiments meaningfully improved fundraising performance. During YCombinator, after Pete and Dan had been accepted with a different ecommerce idea, that the two founders jettisoned the first idea and instead pursued the website optimization concept. Famously, they tested the idea by calling two advertising agencies and asking them to pay $1000 a month for early access to a product that didn’t yet exist (but soon would). Now 400 people strong, Optimizely is the leader in A/B Testing.
The conversation at the Redpoint office in San Francisco last night focused on the insights Pete accumulated during the early days of the company. These were some of the things I learned from Pete.
First, hire a management coach to work with you as the company grows. As Optimizely evolved, the demands on Dan and Pete increased enormously. Pete told us that being a leader is a never-ending journey of improvement. The best ways he found to learn leadership skills was to hire a management coach to meet him once per month, to talk through the issues facing him at Optimizely. In addition, the management coach performed 360 degree reviews for Pete to help him understand how his team wanted him to evolve to maximize his impact on the company.
Second, you must fire yourself way before you think you do. As soon as you become good at a job - sales, product, marketing - you know enough to hire the person to replace you. And you should do it right then. It’s the only way to scale the business. When that person starts, you have to stand back and let the new employee learn the job, making the mistakes they need to make to become great at it. As a founder of a business, Pete told us, that’s an incredibly hard exercise in letting go.
Third, hire for hustle in sales, especially at the beginning of the company when the sales process and sales motions aren’t defined. Optimizely’s first successful salesperson had previously started a mattress-recycling company in Seattle. Optimizely’s second salesperson had retired from professional ballet-dancing. Though these two key contributors possessed atypical sales backgrounds, they shared a fire, a determination that fueled their success in discovering the right go-to-market strategy for the company.
Last, after your startup finds product market fit, hiring becomes the top priority of the business. Pete said - and I loved this expression - “You have to build the machine that will build the machine.” In early 2012, Dan and Pete gathered the company at the beginning of the year to say that 2012 would be the year of hiring and that everyone’s first priority is building a great team. Pete asked every employee to share their likes and dislikes of working at Optimizely and used that to enumerate the companies values, which became the rubric that measured candidates and determined which would become Optinauts - Optimizely employees.
Pete is an inspirational leader who is remarkably genuine about the successes and struggles of building a category defining company. Thank you, Pete, for sharing some of these insights and stories!
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