Testlio 2020 and 2021: An Open Letter of Gratitude and Insights for Our Clients

, CEO, Testlio

Dear Testlio Clients,

2020 was a year of abundant challenges. Health, political, economic, social, data, and other issues rippled through news headlines. Moreso, many of us—across organizations and nations—felt the burden of the year. We carried it on our shoulders and in our hearts. 

Yet, amid challenges, we found hope. We summoned resiliency. We designed new, innovative approaches. And we came together. For one another. In countless ways.

When I reflect on 2020, I remember the profoundly human moments. 

At Testlio, I saw our team display a powerful spirit of caring. It manifested in numerous forms, gentle and strong, broadcast and quiet. I hope that you, as a client of Testlio, experienced how much our team cares. For your products, ensuring that they are bug-free and world-class. For your business, working to understand your landscape and how we can best serve you. For you as a person, doing our best to learn about what’s important to you. 

While Testlio is a technology business, at our core, we’re a human business. We’re a collection of people, bound by our purpose and values, committed to serving you, our clients. So, like we did last year, we offer you this letter first and foremost as an expression of gratitude.

We appreciate the ongoing opportunity to serve you.

We also find that a letter like this can help us align on where we’ve been together—and where we’re planning to go next. We imagine that you might use the data below to challenge and push us. Are we doing what seems most important to you? How can we serve you better? Where might we continue our quest to deliver exceptional testing value?

With a spirit of gratitude and a desire to share, we turn to look back at 2020. We will then look ahead to 2021.

2020 Highlights

  • Values Emphasis: Testlio concentrates on six company values, including make an impact, give a damn, and be kind. This year more than ever, our values guided our team.
  • Networked Testing: we found clarity and conviction in networked testing as a descriptor for the mindset and approach that we undertake.
  • Roads & Rivers: you may have noticed a series of undulating curves across our website and materials. Our roads and rivers April 2020 rebranding is a tip of the hat to the non-linear pathway of building great products.
  • Co-Managed Testing: with Testlio 3.0, we introduced new ways for you to author tests, initiate runs, review issues, and more—along with us in the Testlio testing management platform. 
  • Collective Testing: Testlio 3.1 unveiled new roles and permissions, along with new team management and cross-organizational testing capabilities. Anyone in your organization can now test with us using the Testlio platform—with no license fees.
  • New Clients: we graciously welcomed new customers of all sizes, including athenahealth, Equinox, Hallmark, Insight Timer, Netflix, Quizlet, Wondery, and Zenly. Thank you to everyone who joined us this year!
  • Your Feedback: in 2020, our clients gave us a 75 NPS and a 4.7 G2 rating, both industry-leading. Your and your peers’ input was powerful and appreciated.
  • Team Growth: we grew our team nearly 30%, mostly in H2 of ‘20, ending the year at 91 amazing employees. 2020 saw several important hires, including Summer Weisberg, our head of services. And we reorganized the Services team, building Americas, EMEA, and APAC testing delivery continuums for follow-the-sun client work.
  • Network Strength: the Testlio freelance network expanded and became even more nimble. More than 10K expert testing professionals in 150+ countries are now available to solve your toughest testing challenges. In any language. On any device. With industry-leading vetting and validation, we continue to only accept ~3% of applicants.
  • Social Impact: 2020 saw Testlio’s first in-house social justice program, Ignite. Eight participants from four countries were paid over 12 weeks of structured learning.
  • Financial Performance: Testlio stayed profitable (now eight straight quarters) and cash flow positive in 2020. Revenue grew significantly, even in the midst of global COVID-19 challenges. We reinvested our earnings into our business and remained steadfast in our commitment to industry-leading testing value, for you.

2021 Plans

While 2021 has just begun, we enter the year with optimism and energy. We have a robust 63-page plan that we’ve shared with our entire company. Highlights of the Testlio plan for 2021 include:

  • Enable Scale: we are working on platform and process initiatives that equip testing to be even more fluid, flexible, impactful, burstable. We are building a sustainable company with all of the anticipated benefits for you that a much larger organization entails. We are thinking and operating in 10x terms. We yearn to become the biggest, and best, testing company on the planet.
  • Increase Investments: with several years of profitable growth, we are ramping spend in key areas, especially our testing management platform. Our product, design, DevSecOps, AI/data science, and engineering teams will approach 50 people this year.
  • Connect Regions: increasingly, our work for you will include services and freelance professionals located in multiple geographic regions. With our 2020 structure, we can provide new forms of in-day, overnight, and weekend testing work—ensuring seamless handoffs and consistent, knowledgeable professionals.
  • Deliver Purpose: our newly articulated purpose is: “We power networked testing to enable human possibilities.” We describe the broad array of human possibilities we connect with on our website—and offer why this purpose is so important to us (and hopefully meaningful to you). 
  • Equip Vision: our new vision is: “We imagine software experiences that energize the world.” You can also read more about our new vision statement on Testlio.com.
  • Instrument Testing: with Testlio 3.2 (announced this week), we now provide means to hook SDKs into your mobile apps—powering rich telemetry collection and more.
  • Automate Testing: coming mid-year, Testlio 3.3 will fuse manual and automated testing experiences in a single platform, driving new levels of efficiency and holistic impact.
  • Surface Insights: a driver for Testlio’s platform work is “Insight-Driven Testing.” We hold that all key testing decisions (what, how, when, where, etc.) should be data-powered. Increasingly, our platform will help you experiment, learn, and iterate. Testing will become broader, more varied, further tuned, and clearly aligned with business and product KPIs. We’re thrilled to take this journey with you.
  • Maintain Financials: to serve you best, we will continue to operate soundly. We are in the midst of significant growth and investment—without new outside capital. Still, we pledge to maintain solvency, to use intelligent financial tools, to stay fluid, and to keep our eye on what matters most: serving you.

Per above, 2021 is a year of enabling scale. Doing more inside Testlio, with technology, people, and processes. At the same time, it’s a year to help you better scale—leveraging our partnership to ensure that networked testing is a strategic advantage for your organization. 

As you’ve read, we continue to invest heavily in our testing management platform. Our roadmap is robust. It’s driven by what you, and others in the market, see and need. If you haven’t already, please engage with us on where we’re going with the Testlio platform. We’d love to work with you to tune our investments to your benefit.

In summary, for 2021: we pledge to do all that we can to help you test quickly, release confidently, and continuously improve your software products.

Thank you for the ongoing partnership.

With gratitude,
Steve Semelsberger
CEO
Testlio