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Founder's Notes

The Anti-Bloat Philosophy: Why 'Simple' Wins More Tests

March 12, 2025
8 min read

The A/B testing industry has a bloat problem. Tools that started simple became enterprise suites. Features multiplied. Prices exploded. And somewhere along the way, the actual testing got harder.

The Bloat Problem

VWO has 50+ features. Optimizely has 100+. Most users use 5. The rest is complexity that slows you down, confuses your team, and costs you money.

What Bloat Looks Like

Feature Creep

Heatmaps, session recordings, surveys, personalization, feature flags, analytics... all bundled together.

Complex UI

Dashboards with 20 tabs. Settings buried 5 clicks deep. Training required just to get started.

Heavy Scripts

100KB+ of JavaScript loading on every page, slowing down your site.

Enterprise Pricing

$10K-$100K/year for features you'll never use.

Why Simple Wins

Lower Barrier to Testing

Complex tools require training, documentation, and dedicated teams. Simple tools let anyone run a test in minutes. More people testing = more experiments = more wins.

Faster Iteration

When creating an experiment takes 5 minutes instead of 50, you run more experiments. Velocity matters more than any single feature.

Clearer Insights

Simple tools show you what matters: did the variant win or lose? Complex dashboards bury the answer in noise.

The ExperimentHQ Philosophy

We removed 90% of features nobody uses. What's left is what matters:

Create experiments in minutes
Visual editor that just works
Real-time results
Clear statistical significance
Sub-5KB script
Pricing you can understand

What We Intentionally Don't Do

These are features we could add but choose not to:

Heatmaps — Use Hotjar or Clarity
Session recordings — Use FullStory or LogRocket
Surveys — Use Typeform or Hotjar
Full analytics suite — Use GA4 or Mixpanel

Best-in-class tools beat all-in-one suites. We'd rather do A/B testing exceptionally well than do everything mediocrely.

Simplicity Is a Feature

The best tools are the ones you actually use. Complexity is the enemy of adoption. Every feature we add makes the product harder to use — so we add features reluctantly, and only when they serve the core mission.

ExperimentHQ is what Google Optimize should have evolved into. Simple, fast, and focused on what matters: helping you run experiments and make better decisions.

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