u/Middle-Thanks5587

I'm going to skip the product pitch and talk about distribution because I know that's what this sub cares about.

We built a mobile app testing tool. Vision AI, tests in plain English, self-healing, the whole thing. But the product isn't the interesting part for this audience. The interesting part is how a 15 person team from Bengaluru got 14 paying companies, half of them in San Francisco, with minimal marketing spend.

What worked:

Cold DMs on LinkedIn. Specifically, I messaged QA leads and mobile engineering managers at companies with large apps. The message was short. I described the problem (their automated tests break every time the UI changes), said we built something that fixes it, and asked for 15 minutes. About 1 in 8 replied.

The first few demos were rough. One crashed mid call. But the problem is painful enough that people kept showing up even when the product had edges. One QA lead stopped me mid demo and said "wait, it actually finds the button by looking at the screen?" When people interrupt your pitch to ask you to repeat the demo, you know you're onto something.

What didn't work:

Content marketing. We tried a blog. Nobody read it. We tried Twitter threads. Minimal traction. Cold outreach to the right persona at the right company outperformed everything else by a factor of 10.

Community posts. We tried posting in testing subreddits and QA forums. Got flagged as spam. Turns out people don't want to hear about your tool unless they're actively looking for one. The cold DM works better because you're reaching people who have the problem right now.

Numbers:

·14 paid pilots

·$200K ARR

·Average sales cycle: 2-3 weeks from first DM to signed pilot

·Main objection: "we already have Appium" (overcome by showing the maintenance comparison)

·Zero paid ads, zero sponsorships, zero conference booths

Launching on Product Hunt today. It's the first time we're doing anything public after a year of silent selling. If you're a SaaS founder selling a developer tool, happy to answer questions about the cold outreach playbook. It's the only thing that worked for us and I've learned a lot about what to say and what not to say.

Link in comments :)

Every team I've talked to has some version of this problem. The developers don't have time to expand test coverage. But somehow they always find 15-20 hours a week to fix existing tests that broke because someone renamed a button or moved a field.

I've been building a mobile testing tool for the last year and a half. I talked to 40+ QA leads during that time. The pattern is always the same. Tests are tied to element IDs and selectors. A developer changes the UI. The selectors break. The tests fail. The app is working fine. The QA team spends two days at the start of every sprint repairing tests that were passing last week.

The fix we built is simple in concept. Instead of pointing tests at code level IDs, our tool uses vision AI to look at the screen the way a human would.

You write "tap the login button" and it finds the login button by seeing it. When the design changes, the test doesn't break because the button is still there on screen.

We've been running this in production with 14 paying companies for the last few months. Some of them have apps with 5 million plus downloads. The self-healing actually works. Their maintenance hours dropped by more than half.

We just launched on Product Hunt today. I'm not going to pretend this post isn't partly about that. just what to know for those of you dealing with this problem, what's your current approach?

Link in comments :)

I'm going to tell you about the DM I almost deleted before hitting send. Because without it, the company I'm launching today wouldn't exist.

It was October 2024. We were three months into building Drizz and we had nothing to show. Just a prototype that worked on one app and crashed on everything else.

I was scrolling LinkedIn late at night and saw a post from a mobile engineering lead at a unicorn startup in India. He was complaining about Appium breaking his team's tests after every release. Standard pain that every mobile team lives with.

I typed a DM. Something like "hey, we're building something that might help with this, can I show you a quick screen share?" Then I stared at it for 10 minutes. Who was I? Three guys in a room with a broken prototype. This person leads engineering at a company with millions of users. He'll ignore me or worse, he'll say yes and see how early we actually are.

I almost closed the tab. My cofounder walked by and asked what I was doing. I showed him the message. He said "just send it, what's the worst that happens."

I sent it. The guy replied in 20 minutes. We did a screen share the next day. The prototype crashed twice during the demo. I wanted to disappear.

But he got it. He understood what we were trying to do because he'd been facing exact problem for three years. He said "this is rough but the idea is right. Can you make it work on our app?"

We spent the next 4 weeks doing nothing else. We got it working. He ran a pilot with his team. They went from spending 20+ hours a week maintaining Appium tests to writing new tests in plain English that survived their next two releases without breaking.

He became our first paying customer. He's still a customer. He introduced us to three other companies. Two of them signed.

All of that from a DM I almost didn't send.

Today we're launching Drizz on Product Hunt. It's a vision AI agent for mobile app testing. You describe what to test in English, the AI looks at the screen and navigates the app like a human would. When the UI changes, the tests don't break because they were never tied to element IDs in the code.

We have enterprise customers now. We raised a seed round. We're a team of 15. But honestly, I think about that DM all the time. How close I was to closing the tab.

If you're building something and you're scared to reach out to someone because your product isn't ready, it probably won't ever feel ready. Send the message anyway. The worst that happens is silence. The best that happens is your first customer.

Link to Product Hunt is in my first comment. I'd love for you to try it and tell me honestly what you think.

This is kind of embarrassing to admit but here goes. For the first 8 months of our company, we didn't have a website. But we had paying customers.

Let me explain how that happened because it still doesn't make complete sense to me.

My cofounders and I quit our jobs in mid 2024 to build Drizz, a testing tool for mobile apps. We'd all worked at companies where the QA team spent more time fixing broken tests than finding actual bugs. The tests broke every release because they were built on selectors and element IDs that changed whenever a developer touched the UI. Everyone in mobile engineering knows this pain. Nobody had fixed it.

We decided to use vision AI. Instead of pointing tests at code level identifiers, our agent looks at the screen and finds elements by seeing them. Same way a human tester would. You write "tap the login button" and it finds the login button visually. When the designer moves it or recolors it, the test still works.

We built a rough version. Then instead of making a landing page, I did something that in hindsight was either smart or stupid. I started DMing QA leads directly. No pitch deck. No one pager. Just "can I show you something for 15 minutes on a screen share?"

Some of those calls went terribly. The prototype would crash. I'd scramble to restart it while making small talk about their testing setup. One time the app crashed three times in a 20-minute call. The QA lead laughed and said "well at least I can see it works when it works."

He signed up. A unicorn in India. Then two more through referrals. Then an enterprise deal.

By the time we raised our seed round, we had real customers spending 15+ hours a week on the platform. Our investor deck had revenue charts and customer quotes. We finally built a website a few months ago.

Today we're launching on Product Hunt. It still feels strange because for a year, our entire go to market was one on one conversations. No content marketing or ads. Just showing people the product and asking if it fixed their problem.

I'm not saying that's the right way to do it. It clearly doesn't scale. But I think there's something useful in being so early that you don't have a website to hide behind. Every conversation is just you, your product, and someone who has the problem you're trying to solve. You can't fake that.

If you work on mobile apps and testing is a pain point, I'd love to hear what your setup looks like. And if you want to try Drizz, the link is in my first comment.

The number most small business owners check first thing every morning is their bank balance. I know this because I did it for four years and basically every business owner I have talked to does the same thing. Wake up, check the account, feel good or feel stressed, go about the day

The problem is the bank balance is one of the least useful numbers for actually making business decisions

It tells you what is in the account right now. It does not tell you what is committed to go out this week. It does not tell you what is sitting in unpaid invoices that you are counting on but have not collected. It does not tell you what your actual financial position is once you account for everything you know is coming

I had a conversation with a bookkeeper friend a while back who described it this way and it stuck with me

She said checking your bank balance to understand your financial health is like checking the weather outside right now to decide whether to cancel a flight tomorrow. It is real information but it is not the right information for the decision you are trying to make

The number that is actually useful for running a small business day to day is cash flow, specifically the gap between what you know is coming in over the next 30 to 60 days and what you know is going out over the same period

That number tells you whether you can take on a new contractor. Whether you can make an equipment purchase. Whether you need to accelerate collections before the end of the month. Whether you can afford to let a slow paying client slide for another two weeks

The bank balance tells you none of that. It just tells you where you stand at this exact moment which is almost never the relevant moment for the decision you are actually trying to make

The reason most small business owners default to the bank balance is not because they do not understand this. It is because getting to the actual cash flow picture requires pulling together information from multiple places, outstanding invoices, scheduled payments, upcoming bills, committed expenses, and most people do not have a system that makes that easy to see at a glance

So they look at the one number that is always instantly available even though it is consistently the wrong number for the decisions they are making

If you are running your business off your bank balance right now I am not judging you because I did it for years. I just wish someone had explained earlier that there was a more useful number I should have been looking at instead

Last year I was building a different product. A content analytics dashboard for LinkedIn. Think Shield Analytics competitor. I talked to 100 people. They all said the same thing: "I want better analytics for my LinkedIn content."

So I built it. 6 months of development. Posting time optimization; Engagement benchmarks; A/B testing recommendations.

Launched to those same 100 people.

5 signed up. 2 paid. $40K gone.

What went wrong?

I went back to the people who didn't sign up. Asked why. The answer was always some version of:

"I don't need to know which posts perform better. I need to know which of my engagers are potential customers so I can reach out to them."

They didn't want analytics. They wanted leads.

But when I asked them what they needed, they said "analytics" because that's the vocabulary they knew. "I want better engagement data" was easy say in a user interview. What they actually meant was "I want to know who these people are and whether I should email them."

I scrapped the analytics product. Built traxy instead. One job: identify who engages with your content, qualify them, enrich their contact info, alert you in Slack. It doesn't do dashboards or graphs or engagement benchmarks. It tells you "this person who fits your ICP just liked your post, here's their email, go."

Here i'm Day 51. 211 users. 28 paying. More traction in 51 days than the analytics product got in 6 months.

The lesson that cost me $40K: don't build what people say they want. Watch what they do (or fail to do) and build for that gap.