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Comment by ssong | Hacker News Reader

OP here. I quit my full-time job almost a year ago to travel and work on startup ideas, and this is the fruit of my labor in the past six months that I hope you'll find useful. I wanted to make it easy for startups and indie devs to test their iOS applications. How does testelf work? You upload a build of your app without providing any additional instructions, and we'll test your app from a user's perspective, logging what we did or saw. The goal is to charge a flat price per test, provide good coverage and actionable feedback, and have a 36-hour turnaround time.

Over the past few months, I recruited and trained a small team of testers, developed internal testing tools, and worked with a handful of startups who are piloting our service. The service is now open for beta -- I would love to hear feedback from hackers and startups on HN who can give it a shot.

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"You upload a build of your app without providing any additional instructions, and we'll test your app from a user's perspective..."

It seems like a user should have at least some idea of what the app is. For example, I'll read the first couple sentences of an app's description and look at some screenshots/video before I decide to download it. This might be something you want to consider instead of having absolutely no idea what the app is before running it, since I assume most users have at least some context when opening an app.

It's usually a good idea when user testing to tell testers as little as possible about the product. It's true that real-world users have more context than that, but it can be worth it to get more unfiltered feedback— the first few moments you watch a user flounder to even understand what they're looking at can be the most valuable.

Good point! There is an option to attach additional information (description, notes, link to website/app store) when uploading an individual build. We do ask for a little bit of information about the app in general when the first build is uploaded so that we have some context.

This is a pretty cool idea, and something I would have considered trying to get my boss to pay for when I was a developer. I didn't see on your website - do you test on a wide variety of hardware platforms, or just iPhone 5 and iPad? Different versions of iOS?

Also, do you have any terms, in particular, regarding confidentiality?

Thanks for asking! We do test on common devices (retina/non-retina iPad, iOS 5/6), and we're going to carefully consider which devices to cover as we grow. I am also very aware of the importance of confidentiality, such as keeping test results private -- I think the service wouldn't make sense without it. Our exact terms will be available before we publicly launch.

Brilliant idea for a business. I would love if you guys would do simple games some day. Hoping to give your service a try soon.

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