Where I Started: Dennis van der Heijden

Where I Started is a new monthly mini-series by Experiment Nation and Ontrack Digital that explores how Experimenters got into the field.

Podcast Version

Transcript

Andra Baragan 0:25
Welcome to where I Started the interview mini series in which we get behind the scenes and find out how some of today’s experimenters got into CRO. This should be a fun little project that we started with Experiment Nation to give you a bit of a get away from all those test results. But also it can be a source of inspiration for those of you that want to get started in CRO and don’t really know which path to take. Let’s see today’s guest Hello and welcome. Can you please start us off by telling us your name your job and which company you work for?

Dennis van der Heijden 0:57
Hey, my name is Dennis van der Heijden. I’m CEO and founder of Convert. My job is I’m the founder and CEO of Convert and at the moment I focus mostly on connecting with customers and building a team that’s remote and runs about managers around the whole world. On LinkedIn.

You’ll see the chief happiness officer because I’m mostly focused on keeping my team happy and focusing on making sure that the clients and agencies are happy. I do focus on zero a lot but for the product part. So we’re trying to look what to people need and what we can build for them to remove some obstacles in their daily work and come up with techniques to make that all easier and automate things. When do you currently live? I live in Spain.

Andra Baragan 1:59
For how long have you been working in experimentation?

Dennis van der Heijden 2:02
I’ve been working in experimentation, I think since 2008. Yeah, that was the year of the global crisis. And that’s where it all started for me.

Andra Baragan 2:14
What is the career path that led you to experimentation?

Dennis van der Heijden 2:18
In 2008 When the crisis was hitting us, I just moved to Mexico with my, I think one and a half year old at the time. And I was running a couple of lead generation sites. And I had a freelancer called Claudio which is now a co-founder of Convert. And we were selling leads to come software companies. And with a global crisis, we had of course a problem that lots of our leads were not converting. And we have almost half the traffic that we used to have. And the only thing I could think of is it’s double the conversion rate. So that’s where we get started. We build a WordPress plugin to based on predefined rules that I wrote. Use the keywords of search engines like Google as well as the search engines of our WordPress sites, and modify each page depending on the history, the current search that somebody had. And we did increase conversion rates and we did double and I was able to spend a good first year in Mexico thanks to that project and later on, I realized that was called conversion optimization. Specifically the personalization part. And that converted eventually into a company called Reedge and then later on that was rebranded to Convert.con

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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