Taking a Big Risk with Big Dreams
I quit my job as test and support engineer after 10 years. I couldn’t take it anymore.
The first three months of the year have been brutal. Not having the monthly pay cheque makes me question my decision everyday. The only thing that keeps me going everyday is the work I have been doing with early stage startups.
During this time I realized how much of a difference I could make working at this stage. Unlike my role earlier where things were monotonous and repetitive. I wasn’t making a difference and most importantly I wasn’t learning or becoming better.
Sometimes, in life to move forward we need to take a couple of steps back. As a result, I have had to cut out several things from my life:
- Going out to eat was something you took for granted and that was the primary recreational thing I used to do with friends. I just can’t justify the money or time on this any more.
- Spending endless hours scrolling through my Facebook and Instagram feed is a thing of the past. Having removed the applications from my phone and blocked on my laptop have given me back time I didn’t know I had.
- There are no more binge watching Netflix and endless TV shows that seemed to have filled up so much of my time earlier.
I suddenly had a lot of free time on my hands. With that, I started to put into motion a dream I always had. Running my own business where I would provide testing to smaller companies which needed the services the most. To validate the idea, I managed to find my first customer online and started providing them with testing services.
It was exciting at first and then it slowly started to become overwhelming. New tests and requirements were being sent to me from all over. I was getting Slack pings, emails and updates from Jira about new tests. As my work picked up, I convinced another friend to join me in fulfilling the demand of the initial client I had got. Things didn’t become better though.
Something needed to change.
That is when I had the idea TestRise. A service I could provide my existing clients to centralize all the tests they wanted me to run. I initially validated the service by using a Google Sheets hack. This gave customers an idea of what to expect of the service.
After I got enough feedback it was time to start building the service and we are now very close to launching it!
My goal with TestRise is to provide indie hackers and smaller startups with the ability to get quality web application testing done by real testers on real devices. We can offer competitive rates due to the fact that my team and I are based out of the Philippines. I am hoping to connect with founders, product managers and CTO’s to be one of the first users of TestRise!
Please reach out to me at analyn@testrise.com
