Testfly

A marketplace for on-demand beta tests. Makers wrote a test instruction, and verified testers around the world ran it and sent back screenshots and written feedback.

The bet

We already had the testers. Steemhunt, Reviewhunt and LOL Hunt had gathered an audience, and the site promoted the top 25% of members from those communities into a verified tester pool. Testfly was the attempt to sell that pool to app makers: on-demand testers and feedback for a dollar. The pitch claimed 65,000 or more verified testers in 150 or more countries.

What worked

The loop worked end to end. A maker filled in three fields, app name, store link and a test instruction, and the job went out to the tester pool. Testers ran it and returned proof, either a screenshot or a video capture, with written feedback attached. Our own demo campaign ran against Bark, a map-based social app, and over two days in March 2020 the dashboard filled with dated testers from the Philippines, Bangladesh, South Korea, Vietnam and elsewhere. The feedback that came back read as real paragraphs, not boilerplate.

What broke

The team's read is that demand failed, not supply. Testers were never the constraint, but makers with a real beta-test need were. Nothing public survives about how many campaigns ran, and testfly.app no longer resolves.

What it seeded

Testfly is a clear case of one of our products feeding the next: its supply side was cut straight out of Steemhunt, Reviewhunt and LOL Hunt, so a crowd we already ran became the raw material for a new product. Building a product on a crowd we already had, instead of buying one, is the pattern this entry records.