Testlio 2022 Reflections: An Open Client Letter of Gratitude

, CEO, Testlio

Dear Testlio Client,

With 2023 in full swing, I wanted to take a moment to say thanks—and offer information. 

While the world has many challenges, and many of us are charting a course through turbulent waters, I sincerely hope that the year ahead is as good as possible for you, your family, your colleagues, your company, and your community. 

You likely received my email of appreciation in December. Building on that, I’m honored here to share deeper gratitude along with insights into Testlio’s 2022 journey. My hope is that the transparency of what’s below further confirms your confidence in us as your long-term software testing partner. 2022 wasn’t an easy year for us, but I’m proud of what our team has accomplished.

I also sincerely hope that some of the prompts here encourage you to challenge us to do more—and better—work on your behalf. 

Here’s the TL/DR version:

  • We grew, matured, and advanced in 2022. The business is stable and well-equipped.
  • We invested in people, partnerships, solutions, platform, integrations, and social impact.
  • We were honored to receive numerous awards, positive reviews, and other recognition. 

And here’s the full unpack of what we’d humbly like to share:

Anniversary

In November, Testlio turned 10 years old. While we still operate nimbly, we’ve now gained a level of heft, scale, and wisdom that equips us to do more. And if you’re ever curious about our founding story, and journey during the early years, we offer a short video here.

People

We’re now more than 220 full-time “TestLions” (this is what we call our people, based on multiple lion connections that are deep in our culture). In 2022, we grew our Services team by 74%, adding more Testing Managers, Test Coordinators, Engagement Managers, and other roles to serve you across EMEA, AMER, and APAC. Additionally, each quarter we work with ~1K freelancers (from our network of 10K+). Our people are available to work in more than 100 languages and are equipped to test on 1,200+ real device types. Our full-time folks are generally positive, too: our year-end eNPS is 64 and our Glassdoor rating is 4.8. We invest quite a lot in our people, with the philosophy that engaged people provide exceptional client service.

Clients

We welcomed 60+ new clients to Testlio in 2022 across industries, including Media, Software, Healthcare, Mobility, Learning, Commerce, and Finance. Fifty of our clients have given us an aggregate 4.7 rating on G2, which we believe is #1 in the software testing industry. If you are new to Testlio: thank you for entrusting us. If you renewed with Testlio in 2022: thank you for continuing your journey with us. 

Solutions

2022 was a year of significant offering expansion and improvements. We invested in Accessibility Testing, Usability Testing, Quality Assurance, and Quality Engineering Centers of Excellence. We launched fused testing and partnered with 20+ clients who are using Testlio for integrated manual and automated testing. We provided clients with more Performance Testing, Localization Testing, and Payments Testing services. We added outsourcing (full-time staffing) capabilities to our crowdsourcing (on-demand) approach. And we tackled key areas of challenge, inclusive of escaped issues. We highlight this as we strive to constantly get better as we seek to fulfill our aim to be your holistic partner for software testing.

LionFest

In 2022, we gathered approximately 160 of our full-time people from more than 30 countries in the birthplace of Testlio: Tallinn, Estonia. There, we learned, laughed, bonded, and celebrated together. Given the two years of COVID lockdown, and our distributed by design approach, many of our TestLions had never met one another. It was a joyous event in the spirit of re-energizing our people to care for you. Please see our summary, including a fun video highlight reel with some of the TestLions you probably know well, here (and yes, that’s me playing the drums at the end).

Social Impact

During 2022, we took a stand to support people everywhere, prompted by the war in Ukraine. We formalized freelancer crisis aid. We powered our third Ignite paid training program. We launched a broad social impact framework. Without you, our clients, we wouldn’t be able to do any of this. We’re truly grateful to be able to do this worthy work. 

Platform

Our software testing Platform took significant leaps forward in 2022, inclusive of our expansion into automated testing management and execution. We’ve made hundreds of usability and optimization improvements and launched a new utilization tracking and reporting environment. As a reminder, we offer you and your company unlimited licenses and access to our Platform. If you’d like to learn more, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with your Engagement Manager.

Partners and Integrations

2022 was a year of massive expansion of integrations into modern DevOps toolsets. Our platform now integrates with, and/or we have partnerships with, ~30 providers across seven categories of technologies: 1) Issue Trackers (e.g. JIRA); 2) Testing Management (e.g. TestRail); 3) Collaboration (e.g. Slack); 4) CI/CD (e.g. Jenkins); 5) Test Automation (e.g. BrowserStack); 6) Ratings (e.g. Apple Store); and 7) Performance Monitoring (e.g. New Relic). We hold that multiple integrations into your DevOps tools unlock the most value from your Testlio service. To learn more, please contact your Testing Manager.

Financials

As we embark on 2023, Testlio is financially solvent. We recently achieved a ~$30M/year revenue run rate, have a good cash position, are managing our burn, and in 2022 grew new sales nearly 50% YoY. Yet, like it was for many companies, 2022 was a harder year for us economically. We missed several financial targets and undertook a selection of austerity measures mid-year. While there continue to be global headwinds and the first half of 2023 looks challenging to us, we remain bullish over the medium term. If you would like to ever discuss the state of your, or our, financials, please reach out to your Account Director (or me). 

Awards

We were grateful to receive recognition in 2022, including an Inc. Top Workplace, multiple G2 awards, and an Inc Top 100 Female Founder citation. We share this in the hope that this helps you feel proud of the company that you’ve chosen as your software testing partner.

Content

In 2022, Testlio published more than 100 articles, posts, e-books, guides, webinars, case studies, and other forms of information, focusing mostly on software testing approaches and trends. If you haven’t recently, please check out our library. We believe that it can help you evolve your overall quality approach.

Diversity

Last, but certainly not least, 2022 was a year of re-defining our diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) strategy. As a female-founded (via the incredible Kristel Kruustük), global, distributed business, we are committed to gender, racial, preference, religious, ability, cognitive, age, and other aspects of diversity. Currently, our company is estimated to be 46% women, 27% people of color, 9% LGBTQIA+, and 8% neurodiverse. We will gather updated company diversity data soon and plan to publish more information about our DEI initiatives. We continue to hold that the more diverse, equitable, and inclusive that we are, the better equipped we are to innovate and serve. 

If you’re still reading…well…thank you again. I know there’s a lot here. 

In summary, I wanted to offer a broad overview of what we’ve been doing over the last year, all in support of continuing to actualize our purpose (“we power networked testing to enable human possibilities”) and vision (“we imagine software experiences that energize the world”). 

On behalf of the entire Testlio corporation, I deeply appreciate our opportunity to aid you with your grandest software testing challenges—and your loftiest quality aspirations. If I, or anyone on my team, can ever do more and/or answer any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Thanks,

Steve Semelsberger

CEO

Testlio Inc.