Overstat: The easiest way to test your website?

Testing, testing, testing — it’s one of the mantras among startups, but it can be tough to find the resources to make that happen when you’re a startup with relatively little capital and a tiny tech team. So a new company called Overstat is hoping to win itself a customer base by simplifying the testing process.

Overstat demonstrated its product on-stage this morning at the Launch conference in San Francisco. Optimizely has made headway in this market already, but Overstat offers an interface that looks impressively easy to use. During the demo, founder Matthew Cordasco brought up a heat map of the Mint.com welcome page.

“A moment ago we knew that 200,000 people had come to this web page, but we didn’t know [what] they were clicking on,” Cordasco said. “Now we’re beginning to get a clear picture of what they’re interested in.”

In about two minutes Overstat’s team saw that the Mint registration button wasn’t getting many clicks, so it created an alternate version of the page with a different image, then launched a test to compare the number of clicks received by the two images.

Overstat said it goes beyond testing a single page, with the ability to track a sales or registration “funnel” across multiple pages.

The conference judges said there seemed to be a lot of potential in the company — although they also had some reservations. Cordasco suggested that Overstat could be used by large and small companies alike, but the judges said larger companies will have more sophisticated needs and will want to build their own tools. And even though websites only need to add a snippet of JavaScript to their pages to make Overstat work, some companies might have reservations about adding yet another feature to their site that they don’t control.