The challenge with beta testing is a multi-faceted one, and for each one there is a reasonably good solution. Need to get your list of customers? go to your favorite CRM or ask your sales leads. Need to get your testers to sign up? Here's a Google sign up form. NDAs for your tester to sign? DocuSign for the rescue. Instructions for your testers to follow? Share a PDF or a spreadsheet. Collect feedback from your testers? How about a survey with Google forms?
Existing tools are not working for product teams. They work individually, but as a collective they don’t. I interviewed a product person who cited 3 different spreadsheets just to track where everything is! I’ve seen 20+ page internal documents trying to put order to the chaos. I’ve heard a product person contemplating skipping beta testing altogether because it’s just too cumbersome to manage... The horror stories went on and on so it was clear to us how to solve the problem: a one-stop platform that brings all of those aspects of the process in one place and integrates seamlessly in the current workflow (stay tuned for the integration part!)
We can look at a lot of specialized tools such as CRM or accounting platforms and make the case that the job can be done with a collection of general tools (spreadsheets, docs, emails…etc). Those tools exist for a critical reason: they make the specialized user 10x more effective at their specialized job. A couple of sales people can be effective using spreadsheets to track their funnel but a team of 10 sales professionals trying to close millions of dollars in quota every quarter will be much more effective using a CRM tool. Not because that group loves specialized tools but because those specialized tools enable them to focus on their core job: fill the funnel and close deals.
Reality is no one likes another tool. I sure didn’t like having more tools. I just wanted to stay in my email/slack/google docs world. But when the pain is so big you start making the wrong decisions for your product, your current tools are just wrong for the job. So we decided to build the right tool for this job: Stomio is your beta testing management platform that enables you, as a product professional, to focus on your core job: get feedback from your customers and improve your product.
Ayham Ereksousi
Co-Founder CEO