Why is Unbounce Called Unbounce?

Test, determine outcome, test against new idea, determine outcome, repeat.

Unlike the past, knowledge is now convenient, accessible and remarkably easy to collect and share. Every day we spend hours surfing the web watching compilation videos of cats, typing in an abundance of “how to” queries in Google, opening apps and browsing new blogs or websites to entertain our minds. But as we surf in a delusional state, what many are blind to are all the experiments we interact with. Brands of all sizes are constantly testing their own preferences and assumptions against how consumers actually behave on their websites. This type of experimentation is often referred to as A/B testing. According to Unbounce, “A/B testing is the act of running a simultaneous experiment between two or more pages to see which performs or converts the best. Despite the name, the experiment can be conducted with as many pages as desired.” You can test items like your websites copy or headline, call to action (CTA), photography, and video to name a few. Like any experiment, the collection and interpretation of data should help businesses make smarter decisions in the future.

Unbounce is a mobile responsive DIY landing page builder that makes it easier for marketers to perform tests. Did you notice the subtle A/B test in the Obama ads above? Which one are you more likely to click on? Sometimes even the most subtle text changes can yield shocking results. With Unbounce, you can quickly build, publish and A/B test landing pages without the typical web development bottlenecks. Testing lets you find out which messaging your customers relate to best – giving companies more insight and opportunity for revenue. The company was founded in August 2009 by six co-founders:  Oli Gardner, Rick Perreault, Jason Murphy, Carl Schmidt, Carter Gilchrist, and Justin Stacey. The company is currently headquartered in Vancouver, BC and is CEO’d by Rick Perreault.

Q&A With Co-Founder Oli Gardner:

Why is it called Unbounce?

Originally Rick Perreault purchased a domain name as a kind of a placeholder. It was called EZlanding.com which is pronounced “easy landing.” I’ll admit, It was terrible. I’m a branding geek, so there was no way I was going to settle on that name. I obsessed for days over finding a better name, starting with landing pages and marketing terms in general. Finally, I was out walking late one night on the Vancouver seawall and focused in on the fundamentals of a landing page. A dedicated, standalone landing page has only one thing to do, so you either convert or you bounce. Bouncing – and bounce rate in general – is a bad thing, so I flipped it on its head by un’ing it. Hence, Unbounce. I remember sprinting about a mile home to buy the domain name with that completely irrational fear that in those few moments someone else would buy it. Then I went out drinking with one of the other co-founders prefixing everything we could think of with “un” to see if it had legs and would stick. It did. My obsession with naming things has turned into a bit of a thing at Unbounce, and I’m typically the person who names most things we do.

How did you come up with the idea behind Unbounce?

The idea came from our CEO Rick Perreault. We’d all observed the pain marketers were feeling trying to get landing pages built and the headaches and bottlenecks created by I.T. Rick did some validation of the idea by taking out Facebook ads to see if others felt the pain, and it became obvious really quickly that it was a ubiquitous problem.  

What’s unique about your office space?

One of the coolest things in our office are the meeting room names. Every meeting room is named after something that doesn’t bounce. For example, piano, bowling ball, meteor and belly flop. The doors are all Unbounce blue and our creative team designed some awesome white transfers that show a visual of the name of the room.

If you weren’t at Unbounce, what would you be doing?

I’d be a photographer. I used to be pro before we started the company, but had to hang it up to be a broke startup founder. I finally picked it up again after 5 years last December when I did a pretty extreme solo trip spending 30 Days In The Desert. It was the trip of a lifetime and really brought back my passion for photography.

Often you hear, you need be 10X better than what exists in the market today. What’s your secret sauce?

We have an interesting challenge as a brand in that we’re marketing to marketers using marketing content about how marketers can do better marketing. As a software platform, if we can earn the respect of marketers through our content, they will by association be more likely to trust our product. For this reason we obsess over being the very best when it comes to the marketing we do because we want (and need) people to look up to us as the best of the best. We have a set of 6 core values at Unbounce, and then we have a 7th unofficial one that I call GAS. It stands for Giving A Shit. When you give a shit, great things happen. It’s a quality I value above all others and something that I would take over any skill or experience.

Mascots are big in the tech world. Have you ever thought of creating one?

We have but no real focus yet. It may happen.

Big or small, what tech brands do you admire?

Moz, HubSpot, buffer, zendesk, Shopify. The usual suspects.

What was the inspiration behind your logo?

It’s pretty simple really. The O sits in the middle of the word Unbounce, and one of the primary features of the software is A/B testing. The line through the illustrates the A/B split. We’ve recently removed it from the name and just have it as the round logo beside the name.

That’s a wrap. If you’d like to learn more about experimenting, optimizing and testing human interactions online, I highly recommend you watch how Kyle Rush performed over 668 million custom google analytics events to raise over $1 billion for President Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign. I was fortunate enough to watch this presentation live at MozCon 2013.

We hope you enjoyed yet another fascinating brand story. If you have any specific questions for Oli, you can find him on Twitter here. Thanks for reading “Why is Unbounce Called Unbounce?!”