The concept behind startup is very simple. You tell them the domain name and pricing plan you want, and they’ll give you a quote. Once you found that perfect, you can begin a trial period, where you can check out their service without committing to anything.
This could be a powerful option for online businesses that want to try a new product or service and don’t have the time to build their own testing platform or have the money to spend on a premium solution.
In this article, I’ll give you a full overview of what startup is and how you can benefit from it. I’ll also discuss some of the pitfalls that you may encounter and how you can avoid them.
Features
One of the first things you’ll notice about startup is that it doesn’t have all the typical feature you’d find on a regular web testing platform. To start with, there’s no feature that enables you to perform A/B testing. This feature is probably the most popular one among web testing platforms and can be the key to monetizing a new product or service. With A/B testing, you can compare two versions of a product or service and determine which one is preferred. This feature is highly useful for e-commerce websites, as you can experiment with different pricing structures and see which one generates the most revenue. You can also use it to compare the effectiveness of different marketing campaigns or find out what’s working and what needs to be changed to maximize your results.
Another thing that sets startup apart from other web testing platforms is the feature that allows you to create multiple users with different roles. For example, you can have a regular user (often called a tester), a super user, and a merchant. With the regular user, all you have is standard functionality–the tester can’t access the backend and won’t have any administrative privileges. However, the merchant can access everything, including the database and can create additional users with special privileges. This can be a helpful feature for those who want to test the functionality of their websites with different users and roles to find any bugs before releasing the product to the public.
Last but not least, startup offers powerful segmentation and reporting features. You can use these to examine the behavior of users on your site and create customized reports to follow up on specific trends and determine which parts of your site are working and which aren’t.
Usability Testing
Another key difference between startup and other web testing platforms is that you get a dedicated usability tester who will only be working on testing your product or service. For the same amount you’d pay for a standard plan with other vendors, you get complete access to a team of specialists who will thoroughly test it out for you and provide feedback on any issues they encounter.
The usability testing feature is one of the most popular ones on startup, and it makes a lot of sense. After all, when you’re launching a new product or conducting a major overhaul of an existing one, you can’t predict how users will interact with it and whether it will be easy to use or not. You can hire an external company to help you out with user testing, but that can cost you an arm and a leg, especially if they’re not familiar with your product or service.
With usability testing, you get the invaluable opportunity to find out how users react to your product, no matter how well designed it is. You can run A/B tests and compare two different designs to determine whether one is more preferable than the other. You can also use it to find out what’s confusing users and making them unsure of how to navigate your website. This testing can be extremely useful, especially if you want to implement a “hidden feature’ because you think most of your users won’t be aware of it.
Reporting
Finally, another important differentiator between startup and other web testing platforms is the reporting capability. Like I mentioned before, you have a lot of powerful segmentation and reporting features that you can use to follow up on specific trends and determine what’s working and what needs to be changed. The only downside is that you need to log in to your Dashboard to see these reports. It’d be much more convenient if these reports were accessible from a tab within your account’s homepage.
The good thing about this setup is that you can create multiple reports and follow the same trends across different segments. For example, you can have one report that shows the profitability of certain products based on gender or age. Or you can have another report that shows the average order value of products based on gender or location. This way, you can follow up on the same trends without having to create separate accounts for different segments or locations.
The important thing here is to find a vendor that provides a good mix of features and that is scalable enough to handle your growing business. With startups, you get the best of both worlds because they’re flexible enough to provide you with the raw functionality you need at a price point that won’t break the bank.