Let’s imagine a tall tree. Its base – the roots – is your ambitious and potentially super-successful startup, and the top – the place that this startup of yours will take on the Decacorns-2022 list. Let’s consider everything between the roots and the top – numerous branches – your opportunities. It depends only on you which of the forks you will turn in which direction and which path of development of your startup you will choose at each moment. For our part, as caring and experienced gardeners, we will try to offer you some tips that may allow you to grow your current project into a multi-billion dollar Decacorn in the shortest possible time and with minimal losses.
The first fork: Self-reliance or the search for outside experts?
The answer to this question depends on several factors. Here are just the main ones:
- Do you immediately create a large company aimed at regularly releasing new versions of a complex and expensive product?
- Do you have enough funds, and is your budget sufficient to immediately hire your own team of testers? Just do not confuse testers with developers. No matter how much you want to use developers in testing, these are still entirely different areas of activity.
- Do you clearly see the amount of work that will be able to load your QA team in the long term, and do you see such an approach as economically feasible?
- Are you so concerned about keeping your business idea absolutely secret that you’re willing to go to the extra expense to put together a team that’s always on your radar? At the same time, are you absolutely sure of the exceptional reliability of each of its members?
If you can answer all these questions resolutely and without hesitation: “Yes!”, then, perhaps, you have already decided everything, and further reasoning is unlikely to seem interesting to you.
Just a side note, in case you’re pondering building your own QA team: The average monthly salary for a single tester is $85,000.
If at least some of the above points cause you doubts, then let’s turn to the generalized practical experience of one of the most famous and respected companies in the QA market, software testing outsourcing company TestFort – and try to explore various options for organizing pre-release preparation for your startup.
The second fork: What tasks should be set for outsourced QA testers?
First of all, you should contact reliable QA experts to decide on testing process models for your startup.
Having studied your project, QA specialists will be able to suggest what is more appropriate in your particular case. There could be two options:
- connecting the test team at an early stage and letting them work in parallel with the developers:
- Involving the QA engineers after the alpha version or MVP release.
The first approach avoids errors in the development process and shortens the pre-release period, but can be more expensive.
In the second case, you may save some money but delay your product’s time to market. The choice of priorities, of course, is yours.
Having chosen a model of interaction with an outsourced QA team, you need to decide on QA performance metrics and, based on them, build a strategy for testing the product that forms the basis of your startup.
The third fork: Invest in QA to the fullest, or save money until the project takes off?
Of course, when conceiving and creating your startup, you are aimed at success. This is natural. This is precisely how it should be. However, let me give you just two numbers:
- Out of every 10 startups, only one survives.
- If you have venture support initially, the odds are slightly higher: 7.5 vs. 2.5.
By the way, the highest failure rate – 63% – is among IT startups. However, the most significant number of unicorns also graze in this clearing.
There are many reasons why startups fail. You can find many different lists on the Internet. However, each of them will necessarily indicate this sacramental factor: the mismatch of the product with the expectations of the target user group.
With the fierce competition in the market you have entered to become a winner, the lack of polish in your product can be a final and irrevocable verdict. In other words, you may not get a second chance to make an excellent first impression.
A few considerations before the curtain falls
The size of the global outsourcing market reached $92.5 billion in 2021.
The same year, 2021, was a record year for the number of venture investments in startups. In the third quarter of 2021 alone, that figure was $160 billion worldwide. And this rapid dynamic continues into 2022.
Do you think these two facts are related? Personally, as an analyst who has been studying this topic for a long time, I have no doubts: that this connection is more than evident.
