Roast Our Offer
I'm launching software testing as a productized service. Testing with a productized service model is still untested, so we have worked on our offer and guarantee.
To start with a great offer, we include a guarantee. You get one month for free if we miss major bugs or don't test your feature within 48 hours.
Additionally, we have made an offer/campaign for January that gives you two weeks of free testing so that we can start with a bang.
Is it still too conservative? Could we do better?
I'm probably not in your target audience because this is too much money for me to spend on testing. However, if I had the money to spend on it, my immediate concern would be how well you can integrate the service with an existing team and tooling. In particular, getting you access to the right development tooling and environments might be tricky to coordinate and maintain while complying with company access controls, data policies, etc. However, people work with third parties frequently, and QA is precious, so I would still consider buying. You would also need to convince me of the benefits of doing this over hiring someone; in that case, I'd be concerned about retaining institutional knowledge and how comparatively effective and efficient both options are. One thing about having someone in-house is that they'll get more experience with one specific product over time and become more effective at testing it and catching easy-to-miss bugs. But, having access to on-demand QA is compelling and would mean that I wouldn't have to deal with the hiring process.
You raise good points. I have been thinking about the access control issue, which is a problem. Especially if it's a big corp and they have its IT support silos, then getting access to anything can be a big hassle and eat up a big part of our promise for speed.
Team integration is something that I'm a bit worried about as well, as that is something traditional outsourcing can do very well as they sit in the same meetings and slack channels, thus being essentially part of the team. When you productize that, you need a "handler" between you and the team, which is definitely a pain point for some. We would need someone to experiment with to know how to alleviate the issue.
I agree that QA is precious when you have it within your organisation. Many times, I have seen that QA org is the one who knows your product, its problems, and the release schedule best. This is, however, the problem when outsourcing anything, and sometimes the benefits (expertise, easy to cancel, quick to hire) outweigh the losses. With productization, keeping the same people available (with pausing) can help alleviate some of this problem, compared to traditional pay-per-hour outsourcing.
Our ideal customer would be a SaaS organisation with ~15 employees who want to start doing QA, but full-time or in-house QA seems too daunting. B2C SaaS is a big plus as then you would not need access controls as much as we can just jump in like everyone else or have VPN access to their staging environment. They probably could afford our price tag as well.
We probably would need to incorporate some of this into our marketing materials or FAQ. Thanks, David!