…RainforestQA的早期

by Rodrigo Martinez

罗德里戈·马丁内斯(Rodrigo Martinez)

…RainforestQA的早期 (The Early Days of… RainforestQA)

The market for developer tools is a deceptively large one. More and more great companies being built in this space — and Point Nine is proud to be investing in some of them like Algolia, Contentful, and Sqreen.

开发人员工具的市场看似庞大。 在这个领域中建立了越来越多的伟大公司-Point Nine很自豪能够投资其中一些公司，例如A lgolia ，C ontentful和S qreen 。

In this series of interviews, we’ll explore the early days of some of these companies. There are valuable insights to be found here for anyone building (or interested in building) a business in this space.

在这一系列采访中，我们将探讨其中一些公司的早期情况。 对于在此空间中建立(或有兴趣建立)业务的任何人来说，这里都有宝贵的见解。

Here’s my first interview, with RainforestQA CEO Fred Stevens-Smith.

这是我对RainforestQA首席执行官Fred Stevens-Smith的首次采访。

RainforestQA is all about helping companies with quality assurance and testing. They were part of the Y-Combinator 2012 class, and recently raised a Series A of $12 million, which was led by Bessemer Venture Partners. If you want to learn more about his journey, check out this episode of Flyover Labs.

RainforestQA旨在帮助公司进行质量保证和测试。 他们是Y-Combinator 2012类别的一部分，最近筹集了1200万美元的A轮融资，该轮融资由Bessemer Venture Partners领投。 如果您想了解有关他的旅程的更多信息， 请查看Flyover Labs的这一集。

我：您能告诉我们RainforestQA的早期吗？ (Me: Could you tell us about the early days of RainforestQA?)

Fred: Originally I was a designer, and decided that I wanted to start a tech company. My cofounder was one of the first AWS experts in Europe. So, together we saw a great opportunity to start a company in the developer tools space.

弗雷德(Fred)：最初我是一名设计师，后来决定想创办一家科技公司。 我的共同创始人是欧洲最早的AWS专家之一。 因此，我们一起看到了一个在开发人员工具领域成立公司的绝佳机会。

We liked dev tools for several reasons:

我们喜欢开发工具的原因有几个：

• There was a clear need in the industry to increase developers’ productivity- people were already starting to invest in tools to make them more efficient.
  业界显然需要提高开发人员的生产力，人们已经开始投资工具以提高其效率。
• It was less risky than trying to build the next ‘cool’ app, because companies always need tools to help them build software. We thought that building a core piece of infrastructure would allow us to diversify our risk. The guys who got rich during the gold rush were selling shovels.
  它比尝试构建下一个“炫酷”应用程序的风险要小，因为公司始终需要工具来帮助他们构建软件。 我们认为，构建核心基础架构将使我们能够分散风险。 在淘金热期间致富的家伙正在卖铁锹。
• We looked at the industry and saw that there were few competitors in this space.
  我们观察了这个行业，发现在这个领域几乎没有竞争对手。

We got accepted to YC, and after several false starts working on tools that people only wanted to pay $10/mo. for, we started looking at opportunities to generate more value and therefore charge more. We realized we didn’t want to start building a company from the very bottom of the market, but rather, start at a higher price point — it’s just so hard to get to 100mm ARR at $1000 ACV.

我们被YC接受，在几次虚假的工作之后，人们只想支付10美元/月。 为此，我们开始寻找机会，以创造更多价值并因此收取更多费用。 我们意识到，我们不想从市场的最底层开始建立公司，而是以更高的价格开始-很难以100美元的ACV获得100mm ARR。

At that time, we were doing a lot of customer development with YC companies. For example, we asked 60 founders, “What problem do you have that you’d pay $1,000 a month to fix?” Not everyone replied, but those that did referred to QA & testing as a pain point.

当时，我们与YC公司进行了大量的客户开发。 例如，我们问60位创始人，“您每月要付1,000美元来解决什么问题？” 不是每个人都回答，但是那些确实将质量检查和测试称为痛点的人。

We looked at the competitive landscape and we saw that in the testing space, most products were really shitty, had been built as productivity enhancements for QA teams or as testing robots so that devs could speak code. None of them were fit for purpose, and we felt like we had a differentiated and potentially exciting approach.

我们查看了竞争格局，发现在测试领域，大多数产品确实很糟糕，它们是为提高质量保证团队的生产力或测试机器人而开发的，以便开发人员可以说出代码。 它们都不适合目标，我们觉得我们采取了与众不同且可能令人兴奋的方法。

So, after 4 pivots, we started to feel that we were onto something.

因此，经过4个关键点，我们开始觉得自己已经踏上了一步。

您是如何将这个机会转化为业务的？ (How did you turn that opportunity into a business?)

Before writing a line of code, we carefully researched all the solutions in the market to do testing. Our starting point was: The future is AI, but how do we get there? There are many automation testing tools, but they weren’t so great and it took a fair amount of energy to get them ready.

在编写一行代码之前，我们仔细研究了市场上的所有解决方案以进行测试。 我们的出发点是：未来就是AI，但我们如何到达那里？ 有许多自动化测试工具，但是它们并不是那么好，并且花费了大量精力来准备它们。

Since our premise was to build something that people were willing to pay good money for, we started charging our early-adopter customers 1k a month to take care of their testing, even before having a real product. Obviously, after a while, we ended up losing all of them but one. We learned a great deal by doing that.

由于我们的前提是要建造人们愿意花钱买的东西，因此我们开始向采用该产品的早期采用者每月收取1k的费用，以照顾他们的测试，甚至在拥有真正产品之前。 显然，过了一会儿，我们最终输了，只剩下一个。 通过这样做，我们学到了很多东西。

Doing things that don’t scale is core to figuring out initial product market fit.

做无法扩展的事情是弄清初始产品市场契合度的核心。

We started doing testing for those 10 companies manually, which was a labor intensive process. We had to grow our team to be able to handle more testing. At the same time, we also saw some consumer startups (Homejoy, Uber, etc.) using crowds to solve problems in a distributed manner. A good friend of ours pointed us in the direction of Mechanical Turk, and we never looked back.

我们开始手动为这10家公司进行测试，这是一个劳动密集型过程。 我们必须壮大团队才能处理更多测试。 同时，我们还看到一些消费者创业公司(如Homejoy，Uber等)使用人群以分布式方式解决问题。 我们的一个好朋友向我们指出了机械土耳其人的方向，我们再也没有回头。

那第一批客户呢？ (And what about the first customers?)

Being part of YC brings you many benefits. One of the most important ones is that you’re part of a select group of early adopters. Everybody is optimizing for growth and everybody trusts each other. Therefore, it was probably easier to get those 10 first customers because we were within the YC circle of trust. That said, you can reproduce this approach with your own local network, be it a coworking space, an investment portfolio or just friends in the industry.

成为YC的一部分可以为您带来很多好处。 最重要的问题之一是，您属于一组早期采用者。 每个人都在为增长而优化，每个人都相互信任。 因此，由于我们处于YC信任圈之内，因此获得这10个首批客户可能更容易。 也就是说，您可以在自己的本地网络中重现此方法，无论是共享办公空间，投资组合还是行业内的朋友。

All of our early adopters wanted to be focused on growth and speed rather than QA. This was the start of a trend that has driven most of our business since. We persuaded those first 10 customers to offload their testing to us, rather than have their devs spending time testing. It was a pretty easy sell — no dev wants to spend time writing tests, and the prospect of pitching hundreds of investors at the end of the YC program has a funny way of focusing the mind on growth.

我们所有的早期采用者都希望专注于增长和速度，而不是质量检查。 从那以后，这就是驱动我们大多数业务的趋势的开始。 我们说服了前10个客户将测试工作交给了我们，而不是让他们的开发人员花时间进行测试。 这是一个很容易的卖出–没有开发人员愿意花时间编写测试，并且在YC计划结束时吸引数百名投资者的前景以一种有趣的方式将注意力集中在增长上。

We didn’t over-engineer our initial pricing, our $1000 per month number was purely a threshold to find a problem that was big enough for companies to pay us decent money. We are also lucky that the substitute good of Rainforest QA tends to be a human on a company’s payroll. And that’s expensive! Almost the most expensive way to solve a problem.

我们并没有对最初的价格进行过度的设计，我们每月1000美元的数字纯粹是一个发现问题的门槛，这个问题足以让公司向我们支付体面的钱。 我们也很幸运，Rainforest QA的替代品往往会成为公司薪水上的佼佼者。 那很贵！ 解决问题的方法几乎是最昂贵的。

Therefore, our potential customers have a higher willingness to pay us compared to some other dev tools where the benefits are productivity — which tend to be harder to quantify.

因此，与其他一些开发工具相比，我们的潜在客户更愿意向我们付款，而其他开发工具却带来了收益，而生产率往往难以量化。

It’s relatively easy to go to a company and say “look, you’re thinking of hiring a person to do QA. Why not try our service for half the cost?”

去一家公司说“看，您正在考虑雇用一个人进行质量检查”相对容易。 为什么不花一半费用尝试我们的服务？”

告诉我们您的销售和营销策略。 (Tell us about your sales and marketing strategies.)

As I mentioned before, our first 10 clients came from YC. And although we ended up losing all of them but one, we learned a lot of valuable lessons during that process.

如前所述，我们的前10位客户来自YC。 尽管我们最终失去了所有的人，但最终却一无所有，但在此过程中我们吸取了很多宝贵的经验教训。

Initially, and even now, most of our leads come from referrals. Our first customers started to spread our product among their friends and networks. One of the benefits of being in San Francisco is that developers from different companies hang together. If you build a great product, they will speak about it and word will get out.

最初，甚至现在，我们的大部分销售线索都来自推荐。 我们的第一个客户开始在他们的朋友和网络中传播我们的产品。 在旧金山的好处之一是来自不同公司的开发人员在一起。 如果您生产出优质的产品，他们会谈论它，并且言传身教。

I should also point out that initially we did pretty much anything to get uniques, including some relatively controversial blog posts, such as MongoDB gotchas & how to avoid them. It wasn’t a proper content marketing strategy, but rather us being very vocal about our view. That also brought a fair amount of leads. One of those articles, even today, gets a couple of thousand visits a day.

我还应该指出，最初，我们做了很多工作来获得唯一性，包括一些相对有争议的博客文章，例如MongoDB陷阱以及如何避免它们 。 这不是一个适当的内容营销策略，而是我们非常在意我们的观点。 这也带来了大量潜在客户。 其中的一篇文章，即使在今天，每天也有数千次访问。

On the pricing front, we tested a lot of different things. We didn’t do much research for price optimization, but instead preferred to make hypotheses and go out and test them with prospects. We weren’t afraid of changing prices. I see many people struggling with that.

在定价方面，我们测试了许多不同的事物。 我们没有对价格优化进行过多研究，而是更喜欢提出假设并进行前景测试。 我们不怕价格变动。 我看到许多人为此而苦苦挣扎。

For example, we introduced a $99/mo. plan because it sounded ok, but we quickly saw that this attracted the wrong kind of customers; those customers were churning faster and creating more noise. In this world, I think you need to have an opinion and not be afraid of testing it and changing it if you’re wrong- the worst thing, I think, is to refuse to ever take an opinion.

例如，我们推出了$ 99 /月的服务。 计划，因为听起来不错，但我们很快就发现这吸引了错误的客户； 这些客户的搅拌速度更快，并且产生了更多的噪音。 在这个世界上，我认为您需要发表意见，而不要害怕测试并在错误时更改它-我认为最糟糕的事情是拒绝发表意见。

At some point, we saw that among our early adopters there was a group of people who were very happy with our solution. We saw that they were more willing to commit, paid more and stuck around longer. That group of startups had something in common: founder CTOs who had previously worked for large companies. They knew the pain of building a large QA & testing team and they were willing to give Rainforest a try. If they could forget about building that team from day 0, then they could save a lot of time and focus their energy elsewhere.

在某个时候，我们看到在我们的早期采用者中，有一群人对我们的解决方案感到非常满意。 我们看到他们更愿意承诺，付出更多并停留更长的时间。 那群初创公司有一个共同点：曾在大公司工作的创始人CTO。 他们知道组建大型质量检查和测试团队的痛苦，并且愿意尝试Rainforest。 如果他们可以忘记从第0天开始组建该团队，那么他们可以节省大量时间，将精力集中在其他地方。

These types of customers were benchmarking us against the cost of running a team, and we quickly realized that we could charge a lot more for Rainforest. Figuring out the substitute good for your product is so valuable since it gives you a range to price within. We started increasing prices — actually, we doubled our prices several times in a year to test how much people were willing to pay.

这些类型的客户将我们作为团队运营成本的基准，我们很快意识到我们可以为Rainforest收取更多费用。 找出产品的替代品非常有价值，因为它为您提供了价格范围。 我们开始提高价格-实际上，我们一年内将价格提高了一倍，以测试人们愿意支付多少。

The YC customer who survived our beta phase was the first one to expand into a 6 figure deal. We were also amazed when we saw another customer coming in, trying Rainforest for a couple of months at 1k a month, and then jumping into 6 figure deal.

在我们测试阶段幸存下来的YC客户是第一个扩展为6位数字交易的客户。 当我们看到另一个客户进来时，我们也感到惊讶，他们以每月1k的价格尝试Rainforest几个月，然后跳到6位数字交易。

Again, in both cases, the same profile: experienced CTOs. In this case, running a multi-product project for a government agency and not willing to build a QA team.

同样，在两种情况下，个人资料均相同：经验丰富的CTO。 在这种情况下，为政府机构运行一个多产品项目，而不愿意建立质量检查团队。

After that, we started to see that this is a common path for new customers: they test with a small budget and then quickly scale up.

之后，我们开始发现这是新客户的通用途径：他们以较小的预算进行测试，然后Swift扩大规模。

Tell us about the evolution of your role and the team

告诉我们您的角色和团队的演变

Our initial team was comprised of all tech roles. And for those initial hires, we had a very simple rule: we were looking for core contributors to large OSS projects. As n00bs hiring our first team, we felt that in the worst case scenario at least they loved coding and they were pretty good at it. Our first 3 hires were developers, all of whom came through Hacker News. This is an amazing source for quality candidates. It’s so good, that almost all of our 30 first employees came from there.

我们最初的团队由所有技术人员组成。 对于那些最初的雇员，我们有一个非常简单的规则：我们正在寻找大型OSS项目的核心贡献者。 当n00bs雇用我们的第一支团队时，我们感到，在最坏的情况下，至少他们喜欢编码并且非常擅长编码。 我们的前3名员工是开发人员，所有人员都是通过Hacker News来的。 对于高质量的候选人来说，这是一个了不起的来源。 太好了，几乎我们30名第一批员工都来自那里。

I should consider myself our first non-tech hire, because I have a background as a designer, but our first real non-tech hires were all salespeople. As soon as we started closing some sales, we did 4 first-sale-guy hires. Yes, I say first sales hires because each of them was failing for a different reason and it took us some time to figure out what our first sales folks should look like.

我应该认为自己是我们的第一位非技术人员，因为我有设计背景，但是我们的第一批真正的非技术人员都是销售人员。 我们开始完成一些销售后，便雇用了4名第一批销售人员。 是的，我说的是第一批销售人员，因为他们每个人都因不同的原因而失败，我们花了一些时间弄清楚我们的第一批销售人员的模样。

The last one we hired is amazing and eventually became our VP of Sales.

我们聘用的最后一位非常了不起，最终成为了我们的销售副总裁。

Something similar happened with regards to marketing. We hired 2 VPs of Marketing and ended up firing both of them. Marketing in the dev tools space is initially a founders job. Developers are trying to minimize the risks they take with their tech choices, and are intensely interested in brand legitimacy. They need to know who you are and why you wouldn’t fail them, and they need to respect you technically and ethically to try out your product. I don’t think you can hire a person to do that very early on in the life of your company.

在营销方面也发生了类似的情况。 我们聘请了2个营销副总裁，最终解雇了他们两个。 开发工具领域的营销最初是创始人的工作。 开发人员正试图将他们选择技术时所承担的风险降至最低，并对品牌合法性非常感兴趣。 他们需要知道您是谁以及为什么您不会让他们失望，并且他们需要在技术上和道德上尊重您才能试用您的产品。 我认为您不能在公司成立之初就雇用一个人来做。

We made a great hire when we were 11 people: our office manager. If I were to start again today, I would hire her as a 2nd or 3rd person in the company. It’s amazing how much she and her team do to keep the company running. She takes care of finance, ops, hiring, etc. You need to find a great person for that role, and really early. Somebody who knows how to deal with the chaos and uncertainty of startups. Then, you must give them ownership of the tasks and allow them to run their team.

当我们只有11个人时，我们担任了重要的职务：我们的办公室经理。 如果我今天要重新开始，我会雇用她担任公司的第二或第三名。 她和她的团队为保持公司运转所做的巨大努力令人惊讶。 她负责财务，运营，雇用等事务。您需要在这个职位上找到一个出色的人，而且要尽早。 知道如何应对初创公司的混乱和不确定性的人。 然后，您必须授予他们任务的所有权，并允许他们运行团队。

您的筹款情况如何？ (What was fundraising like for you?)

Fundraising is painful. Especially when you do your first company there’s a lot of chicken and egg conversations. Initially, we raised largely because of the YC brand. We were lucky to have a few of the YC partners that believed in us and the idea, and that got our first rounds started.

筹款是痛苦的。 尤其是当您创办自己的第一家公司时，会发生很多鸡与蛋的对话。 最初，我们筹集资金主要是因为YC品牌。 我们很幸运，有一些YC合作伙伴相信我们和这个想法，并开始了我们的第一轮工作。

At later stages metrics start to count more, and it becomes harder and harder to fit into the mold that 10x VCs are looking for. One thing I do want to say clearly: fundraising is hard. Always. People that say ‘oh with this current seed froth it’s so easy to raise money’ have not raised money. It’s always hard.

在以后的阶段，指标开始变得越来越重要，并且越来越难以适应10倍VC寻找的模型。 我想明确地说一件事：筹款很难 。 总是。 人们说“哦，用目前的种子泡沫，很容易筹集资金”，还没有筹集资金。 总是很难。

As a founder, you feel that you control your world. You own your destiny. But fundraising is one of the few areas where you have very little control.

作为创始人，您觉得自己控制着世界。 您拥有自己的命运。 但是筹款是您几乎无法控制的少数领域之一。

Compare it with doing sales — which is also out of your control. At least after you close a decent amount of customers, your process becomes more repeatable and you know your conversion rates. With fundraising, the biggest problem is that nobody says yes or no- it’s always a maybe, and that’s frustrating. But you need to keep going, keep pushing until it gets done. That’s your job as a founder. To keep the company capitalized.

将其与销售进行比较-这也是您无法控制的。 至少在关闭大量客户之后，您的流程变得更具可重复性，并且您知道转化率。 进行筹款时，最大的问题是没有人说是或否-总是可能的，这令人沮丧。 但是您需要继续前进，继续努力直到完成。 那是您作为创始人的工作。 为了保持公司资本金。

您会给其他建立开发工具公司的创始人什么建议？ (What advice would you give to other founders building dev tool companies?)

1) Use NPS as the driver for the company from day zero.

1)从第0天起，将NPS用作公司的驱动程序。

When we started Rainforest, we were very opinionated. We had an opinion on what the future would look like and we wanted to ask our customers to follow our views. Obviously, that doesn’t always work.

当我们开始制作Rainforest时，我们很自以为是。 我们对未来的前景有看法，我们想请客户遵循我们的观点。 显然，这并不总是可行的。

We should have been more customer-centric from the beginning. It would have made everything a lot easier, and created less friction along the way. NPS is the tool for that, and we started measuring it late.

从一开始，我们应该以客户为中心。 这将使一切变得容易得多，并在此过程中减少了摩擦。 NPS是实现此目的的工具，我们开始对其进行后期评估。

Today, if I were to start again, the 2nd feature we would ship would be an NPS survey.

今天，如果我要重新开始，我们将发布的第二个功能将是NPS调查。

2) Founder-centric marketing.

2)以创始人为中心的营销。

As mentioned before, do NOT outsource that task to somebody else in your early days. The developers who are taking the risk of using your tool want to know you, want to trust you.

如前所述，不要在早期将这项工作外包给其他人。 冒险使用您的工具的开发人员想要了解您，想要信任您。

3) Move to SF.

3)移至SF。

That’s where your customers are. Here the critical mass exists for the referrals to happen. And the amount of executive talent is just incomparable. Finding great VPs that can bring your company to the next level is extremely hard, but at least in the Valley you have a pool of candidates to choose from.

那就是您的客户所在的地方。 在这里，存在转介的临界质量。 高管人才的数量是无与伦比的。 寻找出色的VP可以使您的公司迈上一个新台阶是非常困难的，但是至少在Valley地区，您有大量的候选人可供选择。

What are you most proud of?

您最引以为豪的是什么？

After a few early mis-hires, we sat down as a team and took a look at what we valued, and what was important to us. We looked at the people on our team and we tried to summarize what we had in common, what worked for us and what didn’t work for us with the people we let go. We narrowed it down to the following 3 values, which are now our cultural foundation: No BS, Be Weirdly Passionate, and Always Be Caring.

在经历了几次早期的误聘之后，我们作为一个团队坐下来，看了看我们的价值以及对我们而言重要的东西。 我们查看了团队中的人员，并试图总结与我们放手的人员之间的共同点，对我们有用的方面以及对我们无效的方面。 我们将其范围缩小到以下三个值，这些值现在是我们的文化基础：无BS，古怪热情和始终关怀。

Defining your values enables you to build a cohesive culture through hiring the right people. The only tool you have to edit culture is hiring and firing. By ensuring that everyone you hire embodies a common set of values you can build a diverse company where everyone gets on brilliantly. I believe we’ve managed this at Rainforest and that’s easily what I’m most proud of.

定义价值观可以使您通过雇用合适的人来建立凝聚力的文化。 您必须编辑文化的唯一工具是雇用和解雇。 通过确保您雇用的每个人都体现一套共同的价值观，您可以建立一家多元化的公司，使每个人都能精益求精。 我相信我们已经在Rainforest做到了这一点，而这正是我最引以为傲的事情。

Are you building a dev tools company? I would love to meet and discuss!

您正在建立开发工具公司吗？ 我很想见面和讨论！

Please reach out to me at @DecodingVC.

请通过@DecodingVC与我联系 。

翻译自: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/early-days-of-rainforestqa-f575252de144/