Interviewee
Eden Full Goh , Founder & CEO at Mobot, the startup, changing the way engineering teams test & develop their products. Mobot's black box testing approach combines the best of automated and manual QA, addressing scenarios and bugs that often slip through the cracks of emulators and testing frameworks.
Transcript
Eden Full Goh: Yeah, so I'm Eden. I'm the founder and CEO at Mobot. We are a company based in New York. We're a series A stage startup. We are about 40 people and basically what we are doing is we are trying to build mechanical robots to actually automate software testing on hardware devices. And so this is useful particularly in iOS and Android applications right now because what's actually happening is a lot of engineering teams are having to build a set of test cases for their mobile app. And then a lot of test cases actually can't be handled with software automation. Things like Bluetooth push notifications, location services, backgrounding an app or even syncing to a hardware peripheral like an IOT device or a smartwatch. Those kinds of things are actually very hard to test. And so over the last few years there's become an accumulation of a lot of test cases that require manual labor. And so in doing so historically there has actually been no solution to automate these kinds of tests. But with mobile we are building infrastructure as a service which will allow any engineering team anywhere around the world to be able to connect to a robot, run a set of real tests on real iOS and Android phones and then be able to get test reports in a web interface that details screenshot by screenshot replays of everything that was actually tested by the robot.
And so we actually think that this will make it easier for engineering teams to be able to ship and use test cases like with real hardware without actually needing to have a robot in their office themselves. And so I guess to put it succinctly, what we are building is actually robots in the cloud and this will enable iOS, Android, Apple Watch, smartwatch I O T medical device engineers to be able to improve their test coverage without having so much manual labor involved.
Elisa Muñoz: Wow, a robot in the cloud, this is new stuff. I know that you were inspired to start a company because of your experiences as Product Manager. So can you talk a little bit about it?
Eden Full Goh: Yeah, so I started out my career building a lot of different web apps at a company called Palantir. So they had this complex data backend and essentially we would go to different customers almost like consulting agreements and we would actually build customized web front ends for all these customers. And so that it was at that company that I got a lot of exposure to different types of web development, different ways to actually build and automate tests for web and engineers would be able to build the app, then write their own tests and then run in the cloud as a part of their C I C D pipeline. And so what was really interesting was then when I transitioned into a product management role at a company that was building a medical device, I realized it was a completely different process. All of a sudden you have a medical device where you have hardware and you have to make sure you have the right version of hardware, you have to make sure you have the right version of firmware that's installed on the hardware. And then if that hardware and that product is interacting with a mobile app, you wanna make sure you have the right mobile app installed on the device. And then also that when the mobile app is uploading data to the cloud, that the a p I is the right version.
And so now you have like six different versions of different things that you have to juggle. So as a product manager, I ended up having to do a lot of herding cats. I had to check that the hardware team gave me the right thing, the software team gave me the right thing, the mobile app team gave me the right thing, the firmware team gave me the right thing and then I'd have to put all of that together. And I literally had to test with physical test physical devices and there wasn't really an alternative. I couldn't simulate this with software. I had to use my real hands, real fingers interacting with devices.
And so the broader trend that I really kind of concluded from this experience is that as software becomes more unmarked, more complex, there are physical real world manifestations of how you use products. And so that is how humans are going to be interacting with software. Whether it's an airport check-in kiosk when you're checking in for your flight or it's your car dashboard automotive interface where you're changing your air conditioner or the radio or you have your traditional mobile app. But instead of just iOS and Android, you remember, you know, five, 10 years ago we had blackberries, there was Windows Mobile. Five, 10 years from now there's going to be more devices, there's smart watches, there's IOT devices.
And so I think the broader trend behind all of this is that the way that humans use software is going to continue to evolve. And if we limit the way that we test to kind of these like perfect scenarios in software that don't exist in the real world, we are not gonna be able to catch the kinds of bugs that humans are encountering. And so what we're doing on mobile is making it easier to interact with a product the way that a human would actually use it. And so with more test coverage, we hope that this will make engineering teams more robust in the way that they're developing products. They'll be able to catch defects and bugs earlier so that those don't actually reach real customers in the public. And this will make it easier for them to get feedback faster so that they can fix those errors earlier.
We can have five robots running all the same tests in one day. So instead of taking five days to do your QA, you can now have Mobot do all of your QA in a single day.
Elisa Muñoz: You were mentioning testing, right? So how much faster is it than other forms of testing?
Eden Full Goh: Yeah, so it's ultimately not about speed, but it's actually about scale because okay, normally what happens is you have one person who can test on one phone at a time, right? And the power behind parallelization is that we actually think it'll be easier for you to have multiple devices, multiple robots testing simultaneously. And so you get speed by being able to do more work at the same time as opposed to like, oh let me granularly optimize for, for milliseconds between different test steps. And so realistically using a robot for testing is going to be faster than if you were to do it yourself. But most of the leverage actually comes from instead of having one person testing five phones, one at a time over five days, we can have five robots running all the same tests on one day. So instead of taking five days to do your QA, you can now have mobile, do your, all of your QA in a single day.
Elisa Muñoz: Talking about the engineers, how close are you with these teams?
Eden Full Goh: Yeah, so working closely with our customers and getting feedback from our customers who are engineers, who are QA professionals, who are product managers is actually extremely important. It also really helps that I started my career in an engineering-facing role where as a product manager I really got to know and work very closely with engineers. And even internally at mobile, you know, I do try to spend as much time as possible with our engineering team giving feedback. I'm very involved with product strategy and product decisions. And so I do think especially because we're building a tool that's being used for engineers, it's extremely important that we understand the technical perspective of how these engineering teams are going to be using the tool. It means a lot of meeting with customers, interviewing them, gathering product feedback, watching them use the tools, watching them interact with our dashboards, ask, and answering their questions. We also provide a very tight feedback loop by encouraging customers to give real time feedback on the testing results using tools like Slack. And so we actually can use that data and insights to be able to train the robot, update the test plan, update the screenshots, update the instructions for the next time we run the test. And so working very closely with engineering teams is important in making sure that mobile plays a good role and is a good partner in that software development life cycle. With all these teams we're trying to integrate with them, we're trying to support them with the tools that they use. And so they use Slack, they use Jira, some customers use linear or shortcut for bug tracking, some customers use test case management tools. It's important that Mobile uses this as an opportunity to define what kinds of software tools and APIs that we want to integrate with because we want our tool to play a role in that ecosystem. And the more that you make it easy to integrate your tool, your solution into existing tools and into existing workflows, you're reducing the friction that these engineers have when they're actually interfacing with your solution.
Elisa Muñoz: About Mobot , what are the next steps talking about expanding, or are you planning to release any new projects soon?
Eden Full Goh: Yeah, so our focus right now is growing from the 60 customers that we have today to hopefully over a hundred customers. We'd like to be able to continue to validate that we are building the right solution for the right engineering teams. We'd like to be able to explore what other kinds of use cases are possible with mobile solutions in the market. We'd also like to start to build out partnerships. So if there's anyone in the audience that is building a mobile app or is working in a field that has mobile apps involved with it, we'd love to continue that conversation and get to know each other. We're always looking to learn and really just understand the opportunity of how we can be leveraging robots as a service, as an infrastructure platform to enable engineers to be able to focus on writing code rather than manually testing on all these different devices. And so I think that's a lot of what we're focused on this year is really just making sure that we hone a playbook for making a good customer experience, making sure that we also invest in shipping features around logging and reporting, making sure that testing is happening efficiently and so improving the customer onboarding experience as well. And I think all of those things are built into the growth that we'd like to have this year and just increasing our customer count.
Elisa Muñoz: Perfect. I'm pretty sure that you will hit day 100 really soon. What advice would you give to future founders and CEOs starting on this path?
Eden Full Goh: Yeah, I think more than ever before in 2023, so it's even gotten easier than when I started mobile, you know, four or five years ago. There are so many resources out there, so many opportunities. Even if you are non-technical, you can take a coding bootcamp, you can take a class, there's online courses, there's chat G P T that will write code for you. And so I think in the early days when I was starting mobile, I actually had gone to a programming bootcamp and I had learned to build web apps and that was how I was able to build the first prototype for mobile myself. And so I didn't need to go find a technical co-founder. I was able to also do sales myself. I interviewed customers. So I was in the early days as a solo founder. I was the first engineer, I was the product manager, I was the first salesperson, I was the first customer success person. And so you as a founder have to be open to and willing to learn whatever skills it takes. If you need to learn about marketing, you gotta read a marketing book. If you need to learn about entrepreneurship, you have to be willing to do that as well. Like not kind of having this mindset of like, oh, I need to find someone else who knows how to do it and work with me. I think in 2023, there's a lot that you can actually do by yourself.
And the reason it's important to do that is because it develops your skills, which can then be used in your career later on, even if you're not starting a company. And then it's also, it allows you to build conviction in the idea because the more you work on the idea, you're gonna realize, do you actually wanna work on this idea? Is this actually something you're passionate about? Does it actually have product market fit? And so the more that you can do yourself without relying on other people, I think in those early days, you need to be the one that's the most confident in your idea. If you can't convince yourself, you're not gonna be able to convince investors, co-founders, employees to join your company's customers because you need a pitch to them. And so I think it's super important to do whatever you can in those early days to build conviction. And I especially think in 2023 where there's all these YouTube tutorials and chat G p t and books and online courses and in-person boot camps and everything out there, it'll become easier than ever before. No matter your educational background, no matter, you know, your socioeconomic background or what country you live in, there is a business opportunity that can be found anywhere. And I think it's important to kind of build your own knowledge and also just like doing it in a way where, yeah, even if you don't, like I was saying earlier, if you don't end up starting the company, the skills you learn during this journey is gonna be so important.
Like doing it on nights and weekends while you still have a full-time job and exploring the idea is also really important and really helpful. And so that by the time you have the courage or the context or the financial means to be able to quit your job and start a company, you've already kind of done the work, right? You shouldn't be like starting work the first day you quit your job to start a company. The work happens beforehand. It does kind of have to be your side hustle, your part-time, you know, your hobby, things like that. There are so many ways to kind of de-risk starting a company now, but it does take a lot of motivation and willpower and discipline to be able to do so. But I do think that more than ever the resources are there for you if you're willing to kind of take that first step.
Elisa Muñoz: Wow, that was one of the best pieces of advice that I've heard in this podcast. Thank you so much for sharing Eden. And for being here today!
Eden Full Goh: Thanks.
