Vinovest Case Study

“Testlio has been instrumental in helping us refine our product and ensure customers  can trust us. The team is smart, they know what they’re doing and cover the entire QA process without hand-holding. That operational offload has been critical for us as we scale” 

Conrad Kurth, Director of Engineering

Vinovest is on a mission to democratize investing in fine wine. Through an elite network of top wineries and trusted wine merchants, they provide access to an alternative asset class that was previously only available to 1% of all investors. Vinovest’s digital platform empowers people to build and manage a diversified wine portfolio online.

THE CHALLENGE

Vinovest was growing rapidly, expanding into new markets and adding new offerings

After raising a Series A, Vinovest took off, achieving 500% year-over-year growth in assets under management with opportunities to launch in new markets and release new products. However, they didn’t have dedicated testing resources or systems in house. Their 11 engineers would spend two full days in each sprint on QA rather than coding yet still could not cover all the device types and locations needed to support new initiatives. 

As a result, issues were reaching customers, which ate up even more engineering time to address and also put their brand reputation at risk. 

“When you deal with people’s money, there is understandably an extra level of scrutiny compared to other types of apps,” said Conrad Kurth, Director of Engineering at Vinovest. “We would release, there’d be an issue, and we’d need to drop everything to fix it. It wasn’t sustainable.”

To maintain their pace of innovation with the level of quality expected by their users, Conrad knew they had to stand up a new approach to QA. They needed people and processes that could scale with his team, both in terms of breadth and depth, without impacting their current momentum.

“Hiring and onboarding is hard, and we were already bringing on a ton of new developers,” he said. “Building another department was not in the cards, economically or operationally. We needed a smarter solution.”

The solution

Vinovest brought in Testlio as a full-service QA partner with expert testers across the globe

With new mobile apps and an expansion into China on the horizon, Conrad decided to partner with Testlio. In addition to fully-managed QA services, Testlio provided access to expert global testers and the ability to expand into automated testing in the future. 

After a two-week onboarding and close consultation with the engineering team, Vinovest’s dedicated Testlio engagement manager and testing manager built a flexible yet stable workflow for testing new features and core functionality. 

“Testlio went above and beyond, consistently making recommendations based on what’s worked with other clients – recommendations that made our lives better,” Conrad said. 

To execute the initial test plans, Testlio deployed 24 testers in 10 locations with 66 device/OS combinations that matched Vinovest’s end users. Testlio could conduct runs in less than 8 hours, often overnight or on the weekends, while the engineers remained fully focused on building the product. 

Testlio also saved the team time by providing an integrated testing platform where the Vinovest engineers could initiate, monitor, manage and analyze runs.

“The platform is surprisingly easy to use and integrate, basically fire and forget,” he said. “Our favorite feature is the mind map. We can quickly identify problem areas by feature and make decisions accordingly.”

The outcome

Vinovest improved quality and engineering efficiency while successfully expanding into new markets

Today, Vinovest can focus its time and resources on scaling and innovating while Testlio’s team conducts thorough tests, typically done overnight and on weekends. This new workflow, where QA requires zero internal resources and happens during engineering downtime, frees up two days of development time within every two-week sprint. That 20% increase in engineering efficiency goes directly towards delivering new features and better functionality.

The impact on customer experience has also been dramatic. In the first quarter working together, Testlio reported 191 bugs. Issues ranged from broken sign-up flows to small yet critical details like changing exchange rates. 

“I have been blown away by how thorough our testers are,” said Conrad. “The bug reports include screen recordings, notes from multiple testers across different devices, and very specific steps on how to reproduce issues. That alone is so valuable because we don’t want our developers spending time trying to reproduce a bug. Overall, the level of detail makes it easy to determine severity and prioritize fixes.”

Since partnering with Testlio, Vinovest has launched in China and released native mobile apps, all at the level of quality their customers expect. Following the launch of the iOS app in November, one user shared a 5-star review saying, “This app is the final piece for what is an amazing investment platform. So far I’ve had no issues, it’s been super smooth and easy to use. It looks really slick and makes checking my portfolio really easy and straightforward.”

Conrad calculated that Testlio’s comprehensive solution with managers, testers, and software saves Vinovest over $300,000 annually compared to building their own team, with a breadth of locations and devices covered that would have been impossible to staff in-house.

“For a startup, the overhead of QA is very high. Testlio provides everything we need and more, without the operational expenses, which helps us scale.”

Conrad Kurth, Director of Engineering