SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Can this company leverage 250 engineer beta testers for bug testing tool to close $3m pre seed round?
29 Sep 2023
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, CAC, valuation, or other metrics, the easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com.
Chapter 2: How does QuashBugs.com help companies with bug testing?
QuashBugs.com currently helps 20 companies and 250 engineers identify on average 50 bugs per week, which they can then go smash or quash, as the URL says. The company today is seeking $500,000 in a pre-seed round of $3 million post-money valuation. That means they want to sell 15% of the company. There's three co-founders, two others building this so far.
Again, the goal now is can they convert these free beta users into real paying customers?
Chapter 3: What is the funding goal for QuashBugs.com?
We'll see if they can do it over the course of the rest of the year. Hey folks, my guest today is Amir Hamza graduating with an interaction design degree from India's top school. He first ventured into Honeywell as a product designer.
After spending two years there leading the design and user strategy for multiple products, he launched his own product design agency, alongside his current co founder, Prakhar. They built multiple products zero to one for clients in the agency.
Chapter 4: How does the guest plan to convert beta users into paying customers?
And from there, they came together as three co founders to build quash, a platform to make mobile testing faster and easier. Hamza, are you ready to take us to the top? Yes, that's great. Honeywell, you know, people think Honeywell, they think physical products. So just to be clear, what do you think mobile testing?
Chapter 5: What customer success stories does the guest share?
Were you working on like the Honeywell mobile app and that's where you identified this problem? No. So Honeywell recently, like a couple years back, came up with their own software wing where they're offering is an enterprise performance solution. It's a SaaS offering. It's all software focused.
Chapter 6: What challenges does the company face in launching its product?
So Honeywell is going into that business and that's where I was involved in. I was not specifically involved in any mobile applications, but I got to got the hang of SAS and B2B products and how they're built scratch up because that was a very new vertical for Honeywell. So I got that experience there. Very cool. Okay.
Chapter 7: How does the team plan to structure their pricing model?
So what are, I guess, give me a customer story today. Can you name somebody that's using you? Uh, so, uh, we have a customer, uh, Ricky, Ricky is, uh, uh, it's, uh, uh, So they make tools for content creators to match them to prospective deals that they can get, that they can advertise using their content. So they have a platform for that and they are one of our customers.
Chapter 8: What insights does the guest offer about equity and funding?
So we deployed our POC there. That was one of the very initial versions that we had created of Squash, which had very limited capabilities. But yeah, so after being deployed there, we had a very good response. There were some major feature requests that we were getting.
So the only thing that that version could do was let testers report bugs directly from the mobile device that they were testing on. And then it would just export all of the bugs into a Google Sheet. So then after testing that, we got some validation from there and they started asking for Jira integrations and a dashboard, a place to manage all of the bugs that were being reported.
So we have right now built all of that and we would be having a formal version one launch in the coming weeks. So are you pre-revenue today or do you have a customer paying you? We do not have a customer paying us at the moment. We will be releasing free trials of the VPN of the product in the coming week. And we are in deals with some of these companies who are ready to pay us.
But the first one would, of course, still be a trial. How do you know they're ready to pay you? We have been talking to them. So they have already been using our product, whatever state it had been up until this point. And they are interested in it. And we... How do you know that, though? I mean, try and use numbers here, Hamza.
So when they're using you, did they quash six bugs on average per month for the past six months? And that's why you know they're willing to pay? No, the numbers are way higher than that in terms of the bugs being reported. What's the number? So an average mobile company in India reports 50 bugs in a week. Like that's an average number that we have reached. That's for your beta users? Yes.
Okay, 50 bugs per week. And how many of those bugs do you help them? Like how many were fixed? So all of them are in fact fixed. So where we come in is not the actual task of fixing bugs. Our product helps customers and do-ins. One is to report the bugs easily. And then the second value proposition that we have is for the developers who need to fix the bugs.
So we make sure that the tickets that they're getting from the bugs being reported are very comprehensive in terms of the session recordings of where the apps crash and the logs, the exact logs of the crash that the developer needs in order to- Understood. I don't mean to cut you off, but it's a quick show, so I apologize for that. How many beta users do you have on the platform today?
20 customers. Okay. So there's 20 users on average reported 50 bugs last week each. Not 20 users, 20 companies using our product. The number of users would be somewhere around 250. Okay. So 20 companies with 250 users, they reported on average 50 bugs per company last week. Yes. Okay. And when did you launch the beta program? What month? Two months back. So that would be July. Okay.
And when did you guys write the first line of code for the platform? The first line of code was written back in March. So my other co-founder Ayush had been working on building this up individually in his own capacity. for like some time now because our application is also an SDK.
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