Building an $80k/month business with a software testing community | Hacker News Reader

Building an $80k/month business with a software testing community

indiehackers.com

314 pointsrosiesherry59 comments

@rosiesherry - Congratulations for building up a good business along with what I assume a very hectic personal life (4 kids!). :-)

You've discontinued testing services, but I think there is a big market out there. We've been looking for a platform where we can list our website & its high level use cases, and then 1 or more testers can test it out thoroughly. We've tried sites like MyCrowd in the past, but didn't get a great result from them. Most testers just submitted cosmetic bugs and weren't as detail oriented as we'd like.

I'm sure there would be other startups who have similar needs for getting their sites/apps tested and can easily pay for such a service.

Are you (or anyone else here on HN) aware of any good testing services out there or a place where we can find good freelance testers?

Co-founder of MyCrowd here. Sorry to hear you had a bad experience on our platform, but a lot has changed and improved in the 1.5 years since you ran a test. During that time, we launched MyCrowd Studio which is a self-service platform for explorative bug hunts as well as test cases run by the crowd.

Quality testing has been our #1 priority and we have made huge steps forward providing on-demand testing for our 450+ startup and enterprise customers.

Would welcome the opportunity to impress you at https://mycrowd.com

Thanks for responding here. Appreciate it.

Yeah, it's been a while since we used MyCrowd. Good to know it has improved a lot since then. Will check it out again.

@luckystrike - yeah, I felt sad to stop the testing services. I think we will go back to it once we have a bit more headspace (and/or money).

Testing is funny because there's not really the same kind of freelancers out there for testing as you get in the designer/programming/tech world. Most testers are either full time employed or work on full time contracts. There are freelancers, but there should be more.

Asfaik - there isn't a place to find good testing freelancers. We have a job board on our website, or sometimes I try to recommend people.

I've looked into pen testing but felt it was way too much work for little pay, unless you get lucky and are very talented (i.e. already do it full time). I've never considered general testing, which sounds right up my alley. I'll check out your sites. Thanks.

May be you can think about building a platform where clients can submit their gigs and testers can work on those short projects. You already have a community, and some of them might like to earn additional income but can't find such opportunities easily.

From a client's perspective, we are looking 'vetted' testers who are detail oriented and can be relied upon for a thorough job.

My email address is in the HN profile. Feel free to contact me in case you'd like to discuss this further.

Wish you a lot more success in the future!

Yes, thanks. Have thought about many of these things. Need to see if I can find the time/energy/resources to do some of them.

My guess is that the lack of part-time testers is because there is no clear deliverable. You pay for time spent testing, not for an outcome, so why settle for less than full time once you've vetted a good tester?

Have you tried rain forest's testing services? https://www.rainforestqa.com/

Doesn't seem to have pricing publicly available. :(

No. I'll check it out. Thanks for the suggestion.

Have you looked at agileasaservice.com? You can connect your repository via github or bitbucket and we'll be in touch to collect videos from you.

We then convert those videos into tests that are merged into your repository as a part of your CI process.

Thanks. I'll check it out.

>> Are you (or anyone else here on HN) aware of any good testing services out there or a place where we can find good freelance testers?

@luckystrike - a friend of mine runs 10g-force.com and they have a very thorough testing process.

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll check it out.

You may want to check https://99tests.com/ , it does exactly what you require and have been around for a long time. Do give it a look.

Thanks. Do you know someone who has used it? Are they good?

Interesting post, but I would suggest coming up with an original logo, rather than using another company's world famous logo and slapping a ninja icon on it.

Ministry of Sound logo:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/27/Ministry-of-s...

The logo this company (Ministry of Testing) is using:

https://www.indiehackers.com/images/business-icons/ministry-...

You're right, it's definitely a bit of a rip-off, but

1) The Ministry of Sound logo is imitation of an official government ministry logo anyway, eg https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/the-office-of-th... or https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations

2) The Ministry of Sound changed their logo: http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/new_logo...

1. They used the same state emblems to create a completely different design.

2. Doesn't mean other people can use their "old" logo (which they're currently still using).

FWIW, I'm no fan of MOS (one of the reasons I posted is because they're notoriously litigious, even suing Spotify over the order of user playlists), but I'm also no fan of design work being so blatantly ripped off, particularly by companies that can easily afford to hand work to a real designer.

Actually, a lot of the force of your criticism disappears when you realise that they are both derivatives of governmental logos used in the UK -- not surprising since both bodies are British.

The Ministry of Sound logo is a derivative of the crowned portcullis logo of the Parliament of the UK - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliament_of_the_United_Kingd...

> they are both derivatives of governmental logos used in the UK

No they aren't. The MOS logo uses emblems of the British state (crown and portcullis) to create a design that's completely different from that of any British state institution, as demonstrated by your own example.

The logo of "Ministry of Testing" is not inspired by any Government emblem, it's literally just the MOS logo with one word changed and a ninja instead of a portcullis/speaker.

A company that makes $100k/month and brags about its "uber cool" design should be able to do better than that.

@MinistryOfTesting incase you need better logo let me know would love to make one for free :) mail @ eyuva.com

They're pulling $50k+ per month and you want to make them a logo for free?

And people wonder why so many clients feel entitled to free creative work.

It's either a fiverr logo or somebody tried their hand in Photoshop

Since Indiehackers has now changed the URL of the Ministry of Testing logo, breaking it in the parent post (it's still on the Indiehackers page, with a new URL), here it is on Imgur, alongside the Ministry of Sound logo:

http://i.imgur.com/qsfhevt.png

In case anyone thinks I broke the URL for nefarious reasons, it's actually because all assets are fingerprinted based on my last deploy, and I just deployed :)

Congrats, Rosie, always nice to hear about these 6 year "overnight success" stories.

$80K/month in revenue, not profit. Didn't see any mention of costs, so it's hard to tell if this is a success or not. Can't criticize though, nice story.

Also, the maximum yearly revenue they've seen is £600k, which is definitely not £80k/month. It's misleading to report the revenue of a peak month - say today I send an invoice for a consulting gig that lasted two months and amounts to $15k, do I make $15k a day or $7.5k a month?

That said, they seem to have good growth and the project is nice.

Yes, because we've been growing alot, I took the $80k as an average from the past 6 months. I didn't feel like the article was the right place to go into further detail of finances. We are profitable.

Their average revenue comes from recent months. Seems a fair way to do it for companies that are continuing to grow rapidly.

It's fairly common to amortize the last three months' earnings over a year to determine yearly revenue.

I think indiehackers.com is doing a great job at motivating people to get out there and work on projects --especially ones that find a niche and exploit it for profit.

However, I believe it's incredibly misleading and irresponsible for indiehackers.com to only report revenue. While these testimonies serve as great motivational material, some developers who lack the background to do market research may begin spending copious amounts of time on similar "indie projects" that will most likely not sustain them.

That's not to say developers shouldn't try. But, indiehackers is only providing numbers in terms of revenue; maybe projections to profitable would be more responsible.

Looking at the comments on HN that have been posted over the last few articles (ex. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12575665), people are not only using the site for motivation, they are also using it for market research.

Wasn't indehackers the domain that posted about the domain squatters who made '$xxx in a month' just the other day? Is this a real site that people go to or a thinly veiled marketing service?

IndieHackers showcases startups that are largely bootstrapped and tells the stories of their struggles and triumphs. The sort of businesses that serve as an inspiration and motivation for a lot of HN readers (who are interested, or are involved in startups in some way).

It's a big difference from other mainline news sites that seem to be only interested in unicorns or startups with millions in funding, or keep talking about the same dozen startups week after week.

Disclaimer: I have a startup, was interviewed by IndieHackers, and am listed on their site.

Creator of Indie Hackers here. And yes, it's a real site people go to!

For readers (particularly developers interested in starting their own business), it's a source of inspiration, motivation, and community. There aren't many (any?) other places you can go online and read this many founder stories, complete with revenue stats, for smaller non-unicorn businesses.

For the people who agree to be interviewed, it's definitely free marketing for their businesses. It's also a chance to share their story, their successes, and their advice with the world. When you've been toiling away for years (likely in obscurity), sharing feels great.

So it's a win-win, really.

For what it's worth I love reading about businesses with realistic revenue numbers. You can read about $10M/month businesses in any financial publication. It's hard to find a lot of material about businesses comparable to mine (I own a non-tech business in the $25k/mo range and am a programmer so am constantly looking for ways to push that business into the tech space).

Aren't all of these sites a "thinly veiled marketing service", including Hacker News.

If someone reads it and it generates some interest, marketing started!

Yea. I really don't understand why "marketing" here means "hey, look how much I earn, I must be really cool". Money likes silence.

Business 101 - Money is usually the #1 benchmark that measures the success (or not) of a company.

@rosiesherry Thanks for this, and congrats on the business. I wish you all the best going forward in your industry (which I had never heard much of before now).

It's incredible looking at the revenue breakdown just how much 'training courses and events' were bringing in compared to the actual 'testing services'.

I'm launching 2 free and open-source toolkits for Web designers/developers next month and your revenue breakdown has convinced me that my initial plan of monetizing on training is probably the way to go.

Do you have any specific tips on how you built up that initial community (besides setting up the forum)? What were some of the specific tactics you used to draw those initial users in?

I'd be happy to chat in detail 'offline'. Mostly I just try to be human and genuinely helpful.

I try to find ways that help testers and I keep doing it consistently (even if it gets really tedious).

One example is me maintaining a feed for testing related blogs. Testers can either submit or if I find a new one I add it to our feed. The feed gets shared publicly, but then I also socially share some of the blog posts. People often explain their spike in traffic as the 'sherry' effect :)

I ask for nothing in return, I do it as a way to try to grow and bring the community together.

Awesome, inspiring story. Congrats.

Are there any remote testing job sites? There are so many for developers, but I scarcely see any remote posts that would look for dedicated application testers. I suppose this is due to startups cutting costs and leaving developers to test the product. In my experience, such structures are not good either for the developers, nor the company's products.

We run a job board on our website. Some remote jobs get posted there. I haven't seen much else.

Often jobs/projects get posted on various freelance type sites, but tbh they attract such old school type of testing/testers that it's just not worth it. Unfortunately as testers we still suffer with a bad image, I'm trying to change that.

There are a bunch of other crowdsourcing type sites, but either they don't hire proper testers, or if they do then their model is to own the relationship. It kinda sucks.

One example: https://www.usertesting.com/be-a-user-tester

but you can look for alternatives of course.

Thank you, but I did not mean UAT. More along the lines of regression, smoke, load, etc. Ya know, things where ISTQB knowledge, familiarity with linux, bash and python is a requirement or at least desired.

Ah, that kind. No idea, you should definitely message the owner ( @rosiesherry ) if you haven't already.

Didn't SV and Redmond outsource all these jobs to Indian houses? Microsoft basically killed their STE workforce and just use Indian shops.

Nice story, what's the actual cashflow though?

What would they all do for marketing ?

Nice to see someone use the word 'interwebs'

If you are making 80k per month then your developer should get a real salary and benefits.

Not sure where it says I don't pay a real salary? My husband leads the tech along with a part time freelance developer.

It's her husband :) I'm sure he gets the benefits and the cash as well.

Nice article, couldn't really bring myself to reading it all. Just wish it was a bit more shorter and concise, was more of a marketing spill.

Update: For the down votes are you serious?

> Update: For the down votes are you serious?

Yes. A comment that proudly states that you haven't read the article and then goes on to offer derogatory drive-by criticism is pretty much the anti-thesis of a valuable contribution to the community.

None of my comment was derogatory of the above article. My comment pointed out the article was too long and didn't captivate me as a reader. I tend to read lengthy post but tend to ignore article's just like the one posted.

Now I even shoved it into smmry to get the general gist of the article and even smmry after condensing the article down to 14 to 20 sentences didnt even look very appealing (to me the reader).

Congratulations are in order for what she achieved and with a small family it is even more remarkable.

The problem I mostly have about the article after coming back here was I got more knowledge about her as a person and the company than the damn article she wrote. Though I will never know because the whole thing just read like a marketing blog post.

The `serious` is more in line of `you got to be joking me` that some people take things way too seriously.

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