Sorry to hear that! Our goal is to make Optimizely so easy to use it just works. Clearly we've failed in this case. I'd love your feedback on what we could have done better to improve your experience.
You are generally right. The vast majority of our customers don't need help and hence our homepage is basically just a text box to enter a URL and get started.
That said, there are other folks who do need a little extra help so we built them an academy.
On the contrary, it might just mean that their product is expanding beyond its original tech-centric customer base and is now reaching a much larger but less tech-savvy demographic as well.
That's a very naive view of the role of an academy. Most of the best ones go far beyond product training and into best practices and skill development.
It's not the role of HootSuite's product to teach you the theory & best practice of being a great social media manager. It's not the role of HubSpot's product to teach you how to be a great marketer. But that's precisely what HootSuite and HubSpot's academies do, and why those certifications actually mean something.
Finally even on the product side, that doesn't make sense one you get to high value products. On one end of the spectrum are consumer apps – and I agree with you there. E.g. If you needed an academy to learn how to use the Twitter iphone app, something is seriously wrong. On the other end of the spectrum are products bought by businesses for $100k+. These products generate a ton of value, when implemented properly, and touch many processes – they are complex and they need to be. As an executive, if I'm buying software for $250K you will be absolutely sure I'm paying $5K for all my admins to get certified on the product ASAP. You can't wait 6 months for them to learn it when there's thousands of dollars of value on the line every day tied to their efficiency. B2B products lie at different points along this spectrum and academies generate great ROI at almost every level when done properly.
This isn't GM saying "we have an academy so you can learn to drive a GM" - this is GM saying "we offer driving lessons". Not everybody is born knowing how to drive like a boss.
I hear sentiments like this a lot, but I don't agree. Many companies have training on how to use Google Calendar/Drive properly. That doesn't mean these products are too complicated.
>Many companies have training on how to use Google Calendar/Drive properly
Is this really a thing? I would be embarrassed if I couldn't figure out a site as simple as Google Calendar/Drive. How should I take advantage of this?
I find at times like this, it's good to offer an alternative perspective as well, as public criticism of a product can be easy to take personally.
For what it's worth, I found the product incredibly intuitive and very easy to setup. (This was 2 years ago, and the product was young, so I don't know what new features, read complexity, have been introduced to the product.)
Yeah, I've had no trouble dipping my toes in, trying things out, and then expanding beyond the simpler stuff to more advanced things. In a couple months my company has achieved some awesome results already, and we've been able to put together little fun promos like an Easter Egg Hunt that would have been much more complicated to do without (outsourced) back end support if we didn't have a tool like Optimizely to let us play around with our website.
FWIW, two weeks ago we launched our Optimizely Academy to help folks like you go from zero to hero: https://learn.optimizely.com/hc/en-us