Software Quality Assurance Forums: uTest - The Beginning of the Crowdsourcing Era?

Hey Roy,

Glad to see you at the forums. I have a question as well.

You're business model appears to be a good one. Unfortunately it would appear that your execution is lacking. I attempted to sign up and got the message as outlined in my message from the 21st.

I sent an email to your support team, but never got a response. Is this the service your team is dedicated to providing to the testing community?

I think it's actually unfortunate for you, because there are a couple of factors that will ultimately lead to the demise of a website. 1) Someone does it better than you; 2) You don't communicate with your public; 3) You gain a bad reputation.

So in the first case, because you have a strong business model, it goes without saying that we'll probably see more of these types of sites pop up around the web (well there kinda already is with eLance, etc., but we'll say there isn't). Testers are fairly resilient to errors, but we're also probably the most harsh when it comes to technical screwups. So we might give you the benefit of the doubt in most cases, but when you leave something go long enough, after we've told you about it, then we'll probably just leave you in our dust and never look back. Are you concerned about competition at this point? Do you have a plan to stifle competition enough to continuously increase your partner-base?

Secondly, Communication. Again, testers will probably let you off with more than the regular Joe, so you're lucky there. However, if someone can't even get an email response within a week, then you're doomed to fail. Also, if I can't get an email response then what do you think my expectations are for actually getting paid for the work that I do? Probably not very high. So then I must ask myself, why would I work for free? I have no reason to work for free. So why would I sign up? Continue? I probably wouldn't.

Finally, well, I mean it's obviously already happening. Unfortunately I don't see a lot about how you've managed to succeed or plan to succeed in the future. Based on the comments I'm seeing, there would be no professional who would sign up (even if they could) at the rate you're looking at.

Here's my wild stab at things. You're probably a younger entrepreneur, set up this as a school project, but it seemed like a good busienss model, so you shopped it around to venture capitalists in your area. You managed to find someone who saw the promise of the site and invested, maybe, a couple million bucks. You're greedy, though, (or a miser) and don't use the money properly, to grow your product. You try to stash as much of the money away as possible and do as much of the work on the site as you can, by yourself, because you want to stretch every dollar.

There was probably an agreement to allow the VC to work with you as an advisor (because that's what always happens when they give you tons of cash). However, he doesn't know squat about the software side of things, he's more intereted in the business end.

He helps you with everything from getting partners to promotions. He (and now your partners who have products waiting) rushes you to push out a product so he can get some sort of ROI. You give in like a virgin on prom night and release the product when it's, obviously, not ready.

Media picks up on the concept and runs with it. Unfortunately, there will be a couple of downfalls to the model. First, Partners won't give you untested code to really allow testers to make any REAL money. So testers won't test it and Partners won't see a real value to it.

Secondly, as a result of your frugal spending, you don't have the staff to manage your business. Turn-around time on critical things like emails and site-related issues will cause testers to leave because it's just not worth their time to wait anymore.

Finally, when partners realize that their software is getting tested by a bunch of monkeys who just happened to punch the correct keys on the signup form to fit their requirements, the partners will leave.

Anyway, in my opinon, I don't think this is at ALL the future of testing. While it seems like a great concept, in the end, I think it will end up like those "Get Paid To Read Emails" models where it just isn't worth your time to do it. Yes, at first it might seem like, "Hey, well at 10 cents an email, if I read 200 emails a day, that's like $20 a day!" even though that breaks down to like $2 an hour and they won't even send you more than 4 a day.

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Brent
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9 out of 10 people I prove wrong agree that I'm right. The other person is my wife.
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