Throughout the month of August, the Rude Baguette will be running a series of interviews with some of France’s top and rising entrepreneurs, where they’ll share their reflections on their year thus far, their plans through the end of the year and how they manage their businesses through the August down period. In this installment, we talk with AB Tasty founders Alix de Sagazan and Rémi Aubert.
Seeking to dramatically simplify the A/B testing process for e-marketers, AB Tasty which grew out of Liwio and was founded by Alix de Sagazan and Rémi Aubert , has grown into a leader in this space, with numerous top retailers as clients. Although the bulk of their sales are in France, they have big aspirations and are now turning their eyes towards Europe and, likely, beyond. I recently asked de Sagazan and Aubert to share their thoughts on their big growth year, expansion plans and their tips for founder success:
What have been the big accomplishments for AB Tasty since the beginning of the year?
The beginning of this year was a very exciting time for us with a growing interest in A/B testing solutions. On-site optimization and testing are now common practices for all major e-commerce websites and we are also seeing some media players embracing this practice.
In terms of achievements, we’ve increased our turnover by 300% from January to June and hired 6 people to develop our sales and technical teams over this period. We are planning to hire 6 more by the end of the year as new contracts are signed. By the way, new major customers such as Galeries Lafayette, Bouygues Telecom, France Télévision, Promod, PSA Peugeot or Groupon have trusted our solution since the beginning of the year.
From a product perspective, we are still working to improve the features as well as the user experience. We’ve just launched a new version of our website, re-designed the WYSIWYG editor for creating tests and have a new report interface under construction as we speak.
We are now launching new offerings based on a Pay As You Go pricing model, an innovation in the market since all AB testing players are working on a contract model. This allows small players to try our solution and get used to A/B testing. Bigger players will still benefit from our traditional full features, without limit, offers.
What are your goals for the end of the year?
Our first goal for the end of the year is to expand to more European countries. Right now, only 10% of our clients are based outside of France. Opening an office in a big European market, as the UK, would be a great achievement and we are working on it.
Our sales pipeline is quite full with huge sales objectives until the end of the year. Regarding the technical roadmap, while it is confidential, we can say that going Mobile is on our top priority list.
What have you learned this year that you think every entrepreneur should know?
Success is mainly based on the expertise of our employees. The real value of a company is the proficiency of the people who are working for it. It’s very hard to find the right person, for the right job at the right time. This is a key success factor and it contributes to creating a great working atmosphere in the office, which is also very important.
The second key success factor is the ability to take risks. Without taking some risk, you don’t succeed. Every time we took a risk, we learned, progressed and moved forward.
Finally, the third one is our capacity of innovation. We’re trying to be as close as possible to our clients, getting their feedback in order to understand their expectations and being more innovative in order to anticipate their needs.
How does your company handle vacation & the August down period?
We benefit from less day-to-day business issues to take care of and can focus instead on structuring and growth-generating projects. Actually, we’ve never worked so hard than in August. For the past 30 days I’ve been working every day, including the weekends. It’s wonderful to be able to work quietly and not being disturbed every 5 minutes. Moreover, Paris is a wonderful city during summer, with no traffic jams…