A Seattle-area startup that builds tools to help product teams experiment with new features is doing some experimenting in San Francisco — with an aggressive new advertising campaign aimed at making itself known in Silicon Valley.
Bellevue, Wash.-based Statsig launched the campaign across San Francisco on Monday, with a variety of messages on more than 200 roadside billboards and posters at transit shelters and stations.
The goal is to show that Seattle startups have reach beyond the Pacific Northwest. It’s a unique approach for a company coming from a region that more often takes a back seat to the Bay Area in terms of tech chest thumping.
“Our research shows that while our customers are highly engaged in the technical world, they also take time offline, and that is where we plan to meet them,” Statsig founder and CEO Vijaye Raji said.
Raji, who spent almost 10 years at Microsoft, did his own part in infusing San Francisco’s tech culture on Seattle when he was the head of Facebook’s large engineering center in the city for more than five years. He left as a vice president and head of entertainment at the company to start Statsig in April 2021.
Statsig helps product teams test and evaluate new features, using live data from real customers, prior to launching them widely. It views its approach as a major improvement over traditional A/B testing, giving product teams fine-tuned controls and the ability to conduct hundreds of experiments in parallel, with detailed analysis of outcomes based on the metrics of their choice.
One billboard message plays off that A/B testing mentality:
“A/B Testing saves V/C Money,” reads the message above Statsig’s name and logo.
Other messages include:
- Build. Measure. Learn. Repeat.
- Ship good features cut bad spend.
- Launch Smartly Not Darkly.
- Features Fail, Experiments Don’t.
- Don’t have great ideas. Prove them.
Statsig’s billboards and posters will compete in a crowded market of tech-related advertising in and around San Francisco. The San Francisco Standard reported in September on the abundance of tech billboards around the city and some of the obscure messaging promoting niche companies and concepts.
This video offered an enlightening view of what some people on the street thought of some of the signs:
Statsig has grown to a workforce of 70. The startup raised $43 million in 2022 from Silicon Valley’s Sequoia Capital, with participation from Seattle’s Madrona Venture Group. Statsig raised a $10.4 million Series A round in 2021. Total funding is $53 million.
The startup said it has “hundreds of paying customers,” as well as “thousands of active users” enrolled in its free tier. Notable clients include Microsoft, Notion, Brex, Vanta, Flipkart, Cruise, Univision, Bolt, Headspace, and others.
The advertising campaign, which will run for about a month, was created by San Francisco agency Division of Labor, and is specific to the city, with billboards in the area around Paradise Valley and Redwood City.
