Posted on

Testing Time for a Bootstrapped Entrepreneur: 7 Practical Lessons for Software Product Testing

What’s a bootstrapped entrepreneur’s favorite three alphabets?

The answer is DIY and there are no prizes for guessing!

One of the things every bootstrapped entrepreneur should do is to take ownership for testing their product and not leave it to the engineering team. Wondering why this is important? Here are four great reasons why you should get your hands dirty!

  1. Keep the working product aligned with your product vision

You are the custodian of the vision for your product and only you (along with your co-founder(s), if you are lucky) know what you wanted to build in the first place. Everybody else is subject to what I call the “idea transmission and distribution” (ID&T) loss.

  1. Wear the customer hat

Hands on testing is the best way to understand how your customers will perceive your product and interact with it. This is especially true if you are not a technical co-founder.

  1. Do you have a great product feature or a giant face palm?

Testing your product is a great way to find out if the key features you defined in the product specifications is actually worth all the hype you created.

  1. You don’t have the money, so…

You probably cannot afford to hire an independent QA team when you are a bootstrapped entrepreneur.

I learnt these lessons when testing my product

Let me share with you some of the practical lessons I learnt the hard way when I launched the beta version of Jodi Logik  Just to make it clear, I am no QA expert and I am also not a hardware guy. My experiences are all about software product testing.

Lesson #1 Are there errors in error messages?

Seemingly simple products have astonishingly a large number of scenarios where the user has to be shown an error message. It is your job to review all these error messages as well as all messages thrown up by the application when it encounters exceptions. I bet my last Rupee that if you have not looked into it yourself, you are screwing up customer experience and missing out on an opportunity to impress your customers.

Look for spelling mistakes, inconsistent language style, grammar mistakes and make sure your customer can understand what the problem is. Use these error messages to set a tone and give your product a personality.

JodiCheck out the message in the screen above. The error message not only has a “personality” but also nudges the user to complete the required task before performing an action.

Use error messages and notifications to create a personality for your product and make sure they are reviewed thoroughly.

Lesson #2 Use simple English that everybody understands

Avoid writing the error notifications like Agent Smith from The Matrix (aka machine). Example: Phrases like “Connection timed out”, “Server error” may be easy to understand if you are already exposed to the IT industry. However, it may not make any sense to the average customer who is already doing you a favor by trying your product. Make your customer’s life easier by using simple phrases that the average Joe or Kumar can understand.

In the case of Jodi Logik, when the Internet goes down, the error message is something along the lines of “It appears your Internet connection is down. Please check your Internet connectivity and try again.” As you can see the application handles this issue elegantly and communicates clearly what the issue is in a simple language.

Use simple and easy to understand language when communicating with your users. Avoid jargons and industry terminologies.

Lesson #3 Test for use cases that’s applicable to your target market

If you are launching a consumer product in India, one of the use cases you should watch out for is what happens to your software product when the Internet goes down. Reliable Internet, along with reliable power continues to be a challenge in most parts of India. Other use cases that’s applicable for markets like India include, low bandwidth performance of your application and support for mobile browsers. Just make sure your application is tested for real world scenarios using devices that your customers use.

Here is a tip – Google Analytics will tell you how your customers use your product (browser / location / operating system) Make sure your test cases takes this data into consideration.

Lesson #4 Banish “Cannot reproduce the error” excuse

Early in the days of testing Jodi Logik, I encountered a strange phenomenon with my engineers. They will outright deny the existence of an issue! Later on, I realized that they are probably overworked and believe in the philosophy – “If you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist”. This is very much like driving in India.

To counter this behavior, I started documenting the issues in a Word document and made it a point to include a screenshot. If a screenshot was not included, I made a note of the date and time when the issue was recorded. This allowed my team to check the server logs and unearth issues that seem to have a habit of disappearing when you actually want them to show up! If you are adventurous, use GitHub or any other open source bug tracking tool.

Document everything you do when you are testing the application.

Lesson #5 Don’t use an issue to introduce scope creep

Every issue or bug you identify during testing can give you ideas for improving the product. This is good and bad. It is good because you know how to improve your product (duh!) and it is really bad because you may go overboard to solve it and end up delaying the launch of the product!

Here is an example. One of the features we have in Jodi Logik is the option to upload the horoscope of the user when creating a marriage biodata. One of the issues I Identified was the inability of the application to handle a scenario where the user uploads a blank horoscope document. It was an easy fix as far as Word documents are concerned but the JavaScript we used did not provide for making sure PDF files and image files aren’t blank. We chose to tackle this issue later and did not attempt to fix it as we felt fixing this issue can is probably time consuming with no commensurate returns. We asked ourselves, “How many times a user will actually upload a blank document?” and then concluded that this will be a rare occurance.

Moral of the story – Don’t fix an issue for the sake for fixing it. Always consider time, costs and returns.

Lesson #6 Catch me if you can…

It doesn’t matter if you are testing your product on your own or if you have an accomplished QA team (highly unlikely), your product will have bugs and you will never catch them. All the bugs that slipped through your fine-toothed reviews will show up when a customer uses your product and that’s how the world works. The reason is simple – What is obvious to you is not obvious to a customer.

One of my customers wrote to me saying that a text field where she writes about herself is not working properly as the text appears spaced out. After some serious head-scratching and suppressing the urge to say, “I cannot reproduce the error”, I figured out that she copied the content into the application directly from a Word document. This introduced the formatting associated with the Word document into our application and completely messed up the interface! This is a scenario we never tested!

Find every opportunity you can to help a customer. You will be surprised with what you will discover.

Lesson #7: Are you looking in the right place?

A man lost a ring when walking in a dark alley. He was found searching for the ring under a lamp far away from where he lost the ring. His excuse was that it was dark! Sounds elementary, but I did just that for the first few product releases.

Here is my sorry tale. Jodi Logik runs on a Linux environment and I did all the testing on a Windows box before moving the code to the Linux server. I quickly realized that not having a staging platform that’s a mirror of the production servers only adds to our misery every time we wanted to ship code. I also realized that the development instances should also have been on Linux to begin with.

Get your staging platform up and running along with your production servers. This is one expense that you should always find a way to pay for.

Conclusion

Testing your product before going live is similar to a chef tasting the dishes he cooked before serving it. It demonstrates your ownership and a commitment to delivering only the best experience for your customers. The lessons I have shared are by no means comprehensive but I will be mighty pleased if you even get a single takeaway from this article. Please share your experiences and any other lesson you may have learned testing your product.

Guest Post by Srinivas K, JodiLogik 

Posted on

3 Marketing Hacks for Bootstrapped Entrepreneurs

If I say “the startup scene in India has taken off in a big way”, it’s probably the biggest understatement of this year! Startups are sprouting from every corner of this country fueled by big success stories. An eager online and print media are doing their best to fan the flames of entrepreneurship. That’s why India has now the third largest base of Startups in the world.

The glamour of starting a company masks a truly challenging task that every brave entrepreneur will confront and that is “how do you market your product idea in a highly competitive marketplace?”. If you are bootstrapping your company and have limited or no seed funding to rely on, you have even more challenges to deal with.

Assuming you have done the basics right, namely, identified a gap in the market that you can address or tap a unmet need and your target market has the required scale to fuel rapid growth for your product, the million Dollar question is how do you market your product or idea without spending money!

Let me narrate my own entrepreneurial journey. I started Jodi Logik in September 2015 with my own money. Till end of February 2016, Jodi Logik was a bootstrapped company and only recently a couple of individuals chose to invest to push my idea to the next level. For over 6-months, I was on my own but managed to move things along in terms of marketing without spending a single Rupee. Let me share 3 lessons I have learnt in my 6-month journey in terms of driving product marketing without spending money.

Lesson #1: Good karma pays off

One of the easiest thing an entrepreneur can do is to help others and let good karma pay you back! Let me explain this idea. Let’s say you have an idea to sell mangoes online. You can just set up an ecommerce site for your mangoes. However in order to attract customers, you will need to spend a lot of money advertising your site through the internet or traditional media outlets. To further compound the problem, you will have to deal with other sites selling mangoes! You will have to outspend your competition even if you are convinced that your mangoes are better than that of your competition!

There is a simple way to get your name out without burning cash.

People are looking for answers and that’s one of the reasons Google exists. As an entrepreneur selling mangoes, all you have to do is to find and answer questions people have about mangoes!

The first thing an entrepreneur should do to get started with product marketing is to seek questions that your target customers have about your product or product category and make sure you make a genuine effort to provide the best answer possible.

Here is an example of what I did. The target audience for my company include young Indians who are single. Jodi Logik offers an online solution to create a biodata for marriage and hence my area of interest was to answer questions from single Indians about marriages, arranged marriages, love marriages, dating and relationships.

So here is what I did. I was already a member of Quora and it has millions of users and a lot of them are young Indians. I quickly figured out that there were plenty of questions on the topics that fall squarely in my product category and the quality of answers for many of the questions that I consider as important were below par. I decided to invest my time in answering as many questions as I can on Quora and in 6-months, the number of views for my answers have grown significantly as seen below.

Quora
Figure 1: Answering questions on Q&A sites is good for business!

When you answer questions on Q&A sites like Quora, Yahoo Answers or in Discussion Forums, make sure you follow these guidelines:

  1. Provide a high quality response. Do your homework before answering anything. Providing an in-depth and meaningful response is always appreciated.
  2. Don’t try to pitch your product. Try answering the question genuinely.
  3. Don’t take a holier than thou stance even if the question is really “bad” or poorly framed.
  4. Don’t get into heated debates with anyone over your responses or someone else’s response.
  5. Humour always helps.
  6. Remain consistent. Find time every week to contribute to the community.

Here is a simple thing you can do on Quora. Create a headline that includes your brand! Every time you answer a question, you give your brand some free publicity and potential traffic!

An added bonus in answering questions is that you become very aware of your target customer’s need and expectations from the product category you are interested in and this feeds directly into your product road-map!

If you are selling a B2B product, LinkedIn and Industry forums / sites are a great place to demonstrate your competence and showcase your unique take on the subject matter.

Lesson #2: Cost of creating great content is ZERO

Google is a great leveler! It provides anyone (with access to the Internet of course) the same information on any topic and this is a boon for bootstrapped entrepreneurs. All you have to do is to create great content that people would love to read and share and see traffic to your site grow organically!

While I am still in the early days of launching a company, I decided to focus on creating great content in addition to a great product. I shared the content I created in two ways:

  1. Started writing detailed blog posts on topics that my target customers were interested about.
  2. Created in-depth guides to help my target customers and made it available free of cost.

Jodilogik

Guess how much I spent to do both? A big, fat zero. But, it’s not easy. Here are the challenges I overcame to create awesome content:

  • I worked almost 14 hours a day including weekends. I was obsessed with publishing once every day for 5 days a week. This went on for over four months. I dialed it back significantly after that and I will explain why later.
  • I had to go through a crash course on content marketing as I was new to online marketing for a consumer product. All my experiences were in the B2B space!
  • I did not have a co-founder who could share my burden and could not initially afford to hire a professional content writer.

Luckily, I was good at a few things that really helped me:

  • I was good at finding answers for questions and giving it my own spin.
  • I have a decent command over grammar and storytelling.
  • I was obsessed with creating great content!

The reason I listed the challenges and my skillset above is that every entrepreneur is different. Some are good at churning out content and some are good at churning out code. But there is one key trait every successful entrepreneur has – i.e. to craft and sell stories! This is a skill that every entrepreneur should develop and improve upon. Irrespective of your own skills, here are some free tools and resources I leveraged to churn out great content:

  1. Read the Quick Sprout Blog from Neil Patel
  2. Read Brian Dean’s Blog
  3. Read HubSpot’s marketing blog
  4. Start using Canva to create awesome images that will supplement your content
  5. Install the Grammarly plugin for Google Chrome to make sure everything you publish is free from grammar errors
  6. Learn to work with WordPress. It’s free and a great platform to launch your awesome content
  7. Familiarize yourself with basic SEO concepts and analyzing keywords for your content
  8. Learn to use Google Analytics to track how your content is performing

Recently, I published a post on The TechPanda listing 11 free tools that every bootstrapped entrepreneur should use.

In summary, it doesn’t cost you anything to create great content as long as you are willing to put in the effort. At least in the beginning, great content is one of the primary requirements to build traffic to your website and you can do it free of cost.

Lesson #3: Unleash your hidden PR skills

While it is true that great content on your website can drive traffic, it’s not that simple. For a while, I was under the impression that churning out great content will get me noticed on Google. Boy! I was wrong. I had great content going up on my blog page every day of the week but traffic was just trickling in and the expected take off never really happened. There is nothing more demotivating than to see your effort are not producing the results you expected.

The reason is simple. Even great content requires a vehicle to be delivered to your target audience. Let me explain a few lessons I learnt on the topic of getting the word out about your content or product.

  • If you are bootstrapping your company, you cannot afford a PR agency. Don’t waste time talking to any agency of any kind! Believe me. I already wasted my time.
  • Hiring a PR agency makes sense when you have traction in terms of customer acquisition and product engagement. Premature publicity can kill your product if you are not ready.
  • You need to back yourself to tell a story about your company or product at every available platform. Here are some simple ways of getting word out about your Startup that worked for me:
    • Use job boards such as Hasjob to advertise for any freelance positions you may have. I used Hasjob to hire UI designers and front-end developers for my product. Advertising for open positions (even if it’s just freelance positions) creates a good impression. Oh! Did I tell you it’s free?
    • Write guest posts on high quality sites. The idea of writing a guest post is not to gain publicity, but to build credibility and reputation. This one article I wrote for Youth Ki Awaaz created a lot of traffic for my site although I had no intention of driving traffic! Reach out to site owners proactively and offer to write. Everybody loves good content and you don’t have to pay anyone to write a guest post.
    • Partner with experts who can share useful insights that your potential customers will love! In my case, I reached out to top notch wedding photographers and I am already working on creating exclusive content that my audience will love. The advantage of this approach is that in addition to getting exclusive content, you can also leverage the expert’s network to get your name out! The key question you need to ask yourself before approaching an expert is “What is that you can offer them in return?”. If you think hard, you will invariably find a compelling answer!
    • Use Facebook groups to your advantage. One simple way to create some publicity for your brand would be identify active and large Facebook groups that may be interested in the awesome content you have created. Sharing relevant content with the right groups will certainly give you some free exposure. For example, if you have awesome content on how your mangoes can make a great mango lassi, try sharing it with a Facebook foodie group. Just remember to read about the group rules before you share your content!
  • If you follow the lessons I learnt in point 3 above, you will reap one more reward. Every time your company name gets mentioned or a backlink to your company is created on other sites, Google will attach a greater importance to your site and that’s good for boosting traffic to your website!

I am already seeing an uptick in traffic to my site. Check out the 6-month site traffic data for Jodi Logik here. Notice how increased focus on promotion in the last three months is boosting the numbers. For a first-time entrepreneur like me, seeing the steady uptick in traffic to my product with no external assistance is encouraging.

Google Analytics

In summary, the three lessons I have learnt in the last 6-months has given me greater appreciation of the fact that the Internet is a great leveler! You don’t have to be a marketing wiz kid nor do you need an army of digital marketing experts to get your brand off the ground. If you are willing to put in the time and effort, you can certainly kick start your marketing campaign for your Startup at no cost! Of course, I have provided only high-level information but will be glad to share in-depth insights. I look forward to your comments

Guest Post by Srinivas Krishnaswamy, Jodi Logik