Bootstrapped founder here. I've got a bit of a story for you.
We started desplega.ai to build a sophisticated AI platform that could automate E2E testing. We spent the last few months talking to dozens of QA leaders, and trying to learn what are their actual challenges. We've got one consistent feedback from large teams: their daily reality is a living hell of slow, clunky tools.
We're talking about teams at major companies still managing tests on spreadsheets. Or they're stuck in a Jira instance so customized and slow you can “make a full pot of coffee” while a page loads (and that’s why they acquired arc! t3.gg said it first). On top of that, they're paying 2k/mo+!? for these tools that feel like they were designed in ‘05.
Soon, it became obvious that our AI tool was way too advanced for them, and why it was much easier for younger startups to start using us. But we didn't want to give up on them just yet so...
Because I grew up when the internet was still free, and I actually miss that a lot, we decided to create a free test management tool.
Our vision is still AI, but we learned AI is not the silver bullet large teams are wishing for. (We wrote something about it at https://harlequinetcie.substack.com/). Our hypothesis right now is that we can be that team building the right tools for each QA team, leveraging AI.
We would love to hear your thoughts on
(a) Should we make the project open-source? Any key features? (b) Would you ever trust an entity to do your QA first pass?
Cheers,