As the world of software is growing, we’re seeing the rise of new software categories as well. One such category that has emerged recently is automated testing software which makes it easier for conducting testing of your products to ensure that outcomes are correct, making it much more scalable than manual testing. ProdPerfect, launched in January 2018, is bringing the power of machine learning to the full lifecycle of end-to-end quality assurance testing. We recently managed to talk to its co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer, ProdPerfect about the company’s inception, its journey, and roadmap.
PS: The interview has been edited for the sake of brevity.
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1) Hi Erik, before we begin talking about ProdPerfect, our readers would love to know your journey into the world of SaaS?
Well, in my case, the journey started with ProdPerfect itself. Before that, I was an industrial engineer, fixing factories and refineries. But I knew that software was taking over the world. A dear friend and colleague from a previous hardware startup asked me to help him fix software deployments the way I’d fixed sulphur degassers and extraction systems, and blow molders. I’m a bit of a madman and think I can fix anything, so I agreed and made the leap to SaaS.
2) What insights led you to launch ProdPerfect?
For one, I saw a huge market opportunity. I looked at what everyone else was doing, and I noticed that they were all building tools for QA automation engineers to use. But most engineers would rather build their product. They thought their customers were QA automation engineers, but QA automation engineers are developers waiting their turn, so we figured that another tool would never truly be the answer. We had to automate the testing process.
We had an insight as to how to do this. QA automation engineers try to design test cases with the end-user in mind and try to test their app as a user would. We realized that users are already telling us exactly what they are doing. We just need to watch what they do, and then test that in an automated manner.
3) Could you share the evolution of ProdPerfect since its inception in 2018?
When we first started, it was a truly patched-together service. We had to custom-integrate into every customer and deploy custom data science on every application to test it. This worked great for our customers, but it was a mess for us behind the scenes. Since then, we have standardized and streamlined a lot of it. More importantly, we turned our service into a platform called Mission Control. Not only does this put our customers in the driver’s seat, but it also allows us to massively improve how quickly our customers can debug their code – far quicker than with conventional testing toolsets.
4) How many businesses are currently using ProdPerfect? Which are your biggest geographies?
Right now, there are over 50. Almost all of these are in North America. We tend to work with elite software engineering teams that are well-capitalized and have big growth plans. These customers tend to be able to extract a lot of value from what ProdPerfect provides.
5) Continuing with that, are there any specific genre of industries that you are catering to with ProdPerfect?
We’ve had particular success working with companies that require a picture-perfect customer experience. We’ve done really well in industries like e-Learning, eCommerce and retail, finance like banking and insurance, and SaaS. Basically, any company that cannot afford for things to go wrong. Would you trust a bank app that showed you an incorrect balance or showed you another customer’s data? We help the kind of industries that stand to lose the most from letting mistakes slip through into production.
6) How do you stand out from other automated testing tools?
The big difference is that we’re not a tool. The other automated testing tools are built for QA engineers to use to build the tests that they have devised. QA engineers still have to put a lot of time and hard work into figuring out what those tests should be. Then you have to do things like measure e2e test coverage and spend a lot of time figuring out if you’re actually testing the right things. Instead, we autonomously build and maintain tests based on what their customers are actually doing.
7) Could you shed light on your marketing strategy to reach out to businesses?
We’re such a radically different approach to software testing that we just need to get ourselves in front of people. We can’t depend on people to find us and compare us to something else when they probably don’t even know we’re an option yet. So for us, everything is about exposure and market education; we want to show the world there’s a radically better way.
8) How has the ongoing pandemic affected ProdPerfect – both in terms of business and number of users?
As it so happened, we were already a remote company as of 2019. So, we pretty much carried on without losing a heartbeat. Unfortunately, we did lose some customers. We had some that were focused on industries that suffered heavily in the pandemic. But at the same time, there were a lot of businesses that had to move very rapidly to relying on digital, and they came calling.
9) What’s next for ProdPerfect? Any new features that you are working on?
We’ve mastered autonomous E2E functional testing, so now we’re working on adding more kinds of testing to our platform. Next is performance and load testing, and further ahead, we plan to incorporate API testing and even UX testing too. There’s so much we can learn about what application users want and make sure it’s happening. It’s incredibly exciting!
10) What are your favorite SaaS products out there?
We’ll tell you what we use since we’re voting with our wallets. And these software are Lattice, JustWorks, Monday.com, Divvy, LaunchDarkly, and Datadog.
