How a Software Testing Problem Led Me to 26% Monthly Growth

Hello! What's your background, and what are you working on?

Hello indie hackers, my name is Asad Khan and I am co-founder of LambdaTest. Before starting LambdaTest, I also co-founded 360Logica Testing Services which was later acquired by Saksoft. Throughout my whole career, I have been involved in all aspects of software development. However, I have decades of experience in preparing solutions for end-to-end software testing.

Right now I am working on a new project, LambdaTest, with the aim of bringing the whole testing ecosystem to a cloud-based platform. To start off we have launched a cross-browser compatibility testing platform that you can leverage to run both live interactive manual testing and Selenium automation testing.

The platform is aimed at designers, developers, testers, product managers, and owners who are sticklers for perfection and understand the importance of seamless user experience. Our tool aims at making the lives of software testers and developers easy by giving them a platform where they can speed up their go-to-market launch. Using the platform, they can make their websites compatible with the latest and legacy operating systems and browsers.

To date, we have ticked two boxes on our roadmap, and going forward we hope to tick many more to deliver a complete testing ecosystem on the cloud so that a user does not have to hop between different platforms for various sorts of testing.

The LambdaTest platform has been live for more than a year now and we have over 45,000 active developers and testers from over 130 countries across the globe, all using the platform. We are seeing a steady growth of 20-30% month over month with a few ups and downs, but we have seen positive feedback for the product. :)

What motivated you to get started with LambdaTest?

It’s been fascinating to observe what Adobe has done for the designer community by bringing all its design tools under one umbrella. That concept got stuck in my mind and, being a tester, I was fixated on the thought of delivering something similar for my community of developers and testers. That’s when the idea of LambdaTest came to me first.

During my decade-long time at 360Logica, I worked with all types of testing teams across the globe and found that there was one problem that was inherent in all teams: there was no integrated platform to perform and manage all types of tests. Keeping this problem statement in mind, I put together a team and started working on the LambdaTest platform in early 2017 with the aim of creating a platform that helps users to perform both automated and manual cross-browser testing in the cloud.

Being a part of the community, I knew the scope of the product could be quite vast and that, if brought to life, it would definitely ease the tedious task of web testing. To validate the idea, I got out my Rolodex (yeah, I still have that thing) and started calling all the contacts I had made over the course of my career. The response was quite good and we got a lot of new ideas for how to make the platform more useful. It took roughly two to three months to finalize the first set of features to go live as an MVP.

What went into building the initial product?

One of the main focus points before starting the venture was to find the right people who would be equally interested and committed to the idea. It took roughly a couple of months to find the right team and then we were all set to go.

As you may have noticed here on Indie Hackers, most products start off as a part-time project or a weekend hobby. Coding for LambdaTest, on the other hand, started off as a full-time project. Even though I had this idea for a few years simmering in the background, coding didn’t start until the team was put together.

We saw a lot of ups and downs on the tech side as well. We once had to change the whole architecture of the product because we were not getting the performance that we expected, and we knew that we wouldn’t be able to compete if we couldn’t provide a performance that was better than the similar solutions present today. It was one of the major roadblocks at that time, and a few of us were afraid that it would sink the whole project. But we managed to prevail. In November 2017, after almost four to five months of working around the clock, we were able to launch the first release of the product.

The whole platform is based on multi-service architecture, making it easier for us to switch or upgrade modules. The frontend is built using AngularJS but we are exploring switching to ReactJS as well. Because of the multi-service architecture, we are using a multitude of languages and frameworks for the backend, including ELK stack, Kafka, Kubernetes, VMWare, SaltStack, Selenium, etc.

We started off with a VNC-based streaming solution. However, for two-way streaming it was not performing as well as we wanted, so we switched to a WebRTC-based solution. We collected all the latest and legacy operating systems, as well as all new and old browsers and browser versions. We created combinations of browser versions, put together machines using these combinations, and created an intelligent platform that automatically scales these machines up and down based on user demand. We were able to bring together a combination of over 2,000 browsers and operating systems on the cloud platform to perform the testing.

When creating a product like this you have to make some tough calls, like which features should be included in the initial rollout and which should be put on hold for future iterations. Some features that made it into our first version were:

• Integrations with project management tools — We provided easy integration with most of the popular issue-tracker and project-management platforms like JIRA, Asana, Trello, PaymoApp, GitHub, etc. Users can leverage these integrations to push issues found during testing on the LambdaTest platform directly to their choice of project management platform. It is one of the most important features of our dream of creating an integrated testing platform.
• Screenshot Testing — With this feature, you can take up to 25 screenshots of any website or web app on different browsers and operating systems in a single click.
• Responsive testing — Using this feature, users can check the responsiveness of their websites on a list of mobile devices.
• Smart Testing — With this feature, you can run a pixel-by-pixel comparison of two images. For example, you can compare the design created by your designer with the screenshot of your website coded by the developer to identify any visual discrepancies.

Since the launch in November 2017, we are now live with around 16 integrations, a Slack app, a WordPress plugin, and a very successful Chrome Extension.

How have you attracted users and grown LambdaTest?

The process of validating the use case actually gave us our first customer. I made a lot of calls to developers and testers to find out their pain points and one of them was one of the early ambassadors of our product. The launch was without much fanfare. We had a minimal marketing budget at that time, so no fancy ads or paid backing from influencers.

However, one benefit of an experienced team is that each team member had a lot of contacts in their mailing lists. We started from there. Then we reached out on social media, took help from well-wishers, and got a boost through communities like Quora, Hacker News, and Reddit. I see a lot of product owners in this post getting a lot of initial traffic through Hacker News, but that didn’t pan out that well for us. We were new to the platform and had absolutely no idea how that community worked.

Our Product Hunt launch, on the other hand, was a little more successful. Though we didn’t bag top product of the day trophies, we scored 800+ upvotes and got around 1000 users in a single day.

This initial boost and positive product feedback again validated the product idea, and we started investing more in promotion and marketing. We now paid more attention to the website, learned about SEO through online blogs (Neil Patel is the boss), implemented it, and started ranking on a few choice keywords that started bringing us organic traffic.

The next boost was via word of mouth from users. We had a very robust support and feedback cycle and we made it a point to personally connect with everyone who signed up. This level of personalized support was something that users had not seen in this industry, and because of that, word started to spread about LambdaTest.

What's your business model, and how have you grown your revenue?

Our core product offering revolves around the need for scalable, on-demand infrastructure that is reliable, requires no maintenance, and is affordable. Every web owner/developer understands the importance of cross-browser compatibility testing and responsive testing. They also understand that the investment and effort put into building and maintaining a device lab is a very big pain point.

LambdaTest’s current business model revolves around building and maintaining this infrastructure in a cloud-based, on-demand setting. Our plans revolve around the number of concurrent sessions, i.e., the number of machines your team can engage at a single moment. The higher the concurrent sessions, the greater the amount charged.

As I said earlier, the first paying customers were those we surveyed before building the product. The next set of users were acquired through word-of-mouth referrals, emailing our contact lists, and active participation in communities such as Quora, Reddit, and LinkedIn. By then, we had started to generate organic search traffic, which is still the channel that brings us the majority of our traffic (and business).

Revenue-wise, we are growing by an average rate of 26% month over month.

My advice to people starting off is to begin with all possible revenue and promotion channels initially and then scale up the ones performing best. This is time-consuming and requires some good old elbow grease. But this approach has the highest chance of scaling up.

What are your goals for the future?

Our aim from the very beginning has been to take the entire testing ecosystem to the cloud. We are in the middle of raising Series A funding for growth and product development in our roadmap. We do not see any roadblocks in our way as we have the right team, funding, and resources that are required to reach the ultimate goal.

What are the biggest challenges you've faced and obstacles you've overcome? If you had to start over, what would you do differently?

Our most important lessons learned have been related to analytics. For example, we use Stripe as our payment gateway, but it’s not built for analysis like lifetime value and sales projections. That’s what CRMs are for. Similarly, big CRMs like Salesforce have awesome analytics that you can use to analyze platform usage, but they have limitations related to data storage and API hits that require you to pay a huge amount of money to get. So if you are planning on building a product that targets a big audience and need to be frugal about the tools you use, you would have to use some free/open source platforms and do some in-house stitching up.

So it’s really important to have a solid CRM and analytics platform built beforehand. Afterward, you will never be able to find time in-house to work on it. It’s also really important to take into consideration the price of the tool right now versus the price of scaling it up.

We have also seen people rely too much on online communication, dismissing actual one-to-one interaction as archaic or ineffective. Surveying your customers now means sending Typeform or SurveyMonkey emails, and feedback is acquired via feedback forms. In our experience, nothing tops a phone call, at least not in the initial stages of your business when your product is not mature enough to speak for itself. All it takes is a few minutes of one-to-one, human-to-human interaction for a feedback call to turn into a first sale, and the customer becoming a staunch ambassador and admirer of your product and your business.

Have you found anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

I personally like the book Zero to One by Blake Masters and Peter Thiel, and I also recommend Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen.

What's your advice for indie hackers who are just starting out?

The first and most important advice for anyone reading this interview is to be sure. Before taking your entrepreneurial journey, you need to ask yourself this question a hundred times: “Am I sure?” Are you sure you have noted down the exact pain points? Are you sure your tech and product are scalable enough? Are you sure you are working with the right team? Are you sure that your product has the best possible user experience?

The second piece of advice I would offer is to remain motivated. Both success and failure will inevitably be a part of your journey. Your success will depend on how motivated you are about your startup. This one single quality will tell you where you will take your startup in the coming years.

Where can we go to learn more?

Indie hackers, I hope you enjoyed reading this interview. Please feel free to ask any questions in the comment section, and I will be happy to answer.

Visit LambdaTest at https://www.lambdatest.com/. You can also find and connect with me on LinkedIn.