Blogs

Our "return gift" model...

8/3/2016

Few days back, my family was invited to a birthday party. It was the fifth birthday of one of our new neighbor's son.

My son wanted to buy a big set of Lego for him because "he seems like a nice guy". So we bought it.

The birthday boy was so happy and excited receiving our gift! We had a great time there.

Then, after a few hours, when it was time to say goodbye, he offered his favorite video game to my son. As a return gift.

They are good friends since then.

I found something very interesting in that transaction. Our neighbors didn't have to invite us, we didn't have to buy a big gift and then they didn't have to be so generous about the return gift! All our actions were our own choices.

Me and my friend, Palash, thought a lot about this and decided to try the same concept to run our small business, Testing Algorithms.

We believe that our automated test case design product can reduce 90% of test case creation and documentation time if used with right philosophy, attitude and technique.

So we want to give this to all as gifts, just like the Lego, if we are invited to do so.

Please note, return gift is not mandatory, but appreciated.

We don’t have a price tag in our product...

8/1/2016

I heard the following story a few months back.

A wise man, living in a small town, invited all residents of his hometown in his house. There were around a hundred people who showed up on the scheduled day. He had one of his bigger rooms already filled up with hundreds of balloons. Each balloon had name of a guest written on it.

He asked everyone to enter the room and find the balloon that had her name on it in three minutes. He declared a handsome prize for those who would be able to find theirs.

He started his stopwatch and everyone started rushing to look at each and every balloon to check if those had their names. When the watch stopped after three minutes, unfortunately, everyone came out of the room without their own balloons. Three minutes was too short a time for this exercise!

Then the host, the wise man, asked everyone to repeat the exercise, but this time he showed everyone a trick. The trick was to pick up a balloon, read the name on it, find the person and hand over the balloon to her, then pick up the next balloon and repeat the same steps.

The exercise was repeated and this time everyone was able to come out of the room with their own balloons within three minutes.

During our journey of creating our product and our company, we realized that most companies follow the first approach to sell their products or services. However, we want to take the alternate approach, as shown by the wise man of the story. Our automated test case design solution will be ready for everyone, who believes in our approach and philosophy, in a few weeks, for free.

However, we are a small company with a few people who want to make a living by doing what we believe in and what we love to do. And we understand that the value perception of our solution would be different for different users. Therefore, we will have a ‘pay what you want’ provision where anyone can contribute any amount according to how much value they see in our methodology and how much this is helping in your test design. We would appreciate any contribution and we promise that your contribution will be spend only on enhancing the product and customer experience.

One more thing.

We will keep providing the support and answering all your questions via email. We plan to have a feedback mechanism so that our solution can be improved based on your suggestions. We also plan to have a LinkedIn group created only for our users so that all communications are transparent to everyone belonging to the user community. However, if anyone needs any training or consultation about our methodology or product, or any other verbal assistance, we will charge for our times. I hope that is reasonable for a small startup company with no funding.

This is not a marketing gimmick. We, the founders of Testing Algorithms, believe that entrepreneurship is about caring for others, growing as a community and trying to make a difference. So we just want to take the first step of handing over the first balloon to you. I am sure you all will join us in this journey if you believe in our philosophy and approach.