Testin Cloud Testing: A Typical Industrial Internet Startup Case Study | Gaorong Ventures Sharing

Born and raised in the mobile internet era, Testin Cloud Testing has provided testing services for 2.9 million apps in China and become a platform-level company in the mobile developer services space — and now it's embarking on a new journey.

By delivering best-in-class experiences, Testin has built an enterprise client roster that includes China Merchants Bank, Mercedes-Benz, McDonald's, and State Grid Corporation of China, and is growing into an enterprise application service platform integrating cloud testing, security, promotion, and AI big data.

Gaorong Ventures led Testin Cloud Testing's Series B round in 2015, witnessing the team's formidable execution and deep exploration of business models over the past few years. We believe Testin has even broader room for growth in the enterprise application services sector.

We're sharing GeekPark's feature on Testin Cloud Testing as a representative entrepreneurial case study in industrial internet.

A company that started with application testing made one of its testing services free.

As a top player in its industry, Testin Cloud Testing officially announced that starting November 1, 2018, it would make the standard version of its A/B testing tool free. Testin had launched the paid A/B testing tool in early 2017 — barely a year later, the standard version went free.

Only then did people's stereotypical perception of this "fairly well-known cloud testing company" begin to shift. Some puzzled over whether "free," a traffic acquisition model from the consumer market, could actually work efficiently and meaningfully in the B2B space. More people gradually came to understand the company's actual role.

As the slogan on Testin Cloud Testing's website — "Make Applications More Valuable" — sits in the most prominent position, signaling its mission: the company no longer defines itself as "the testing expert by your side" as it did at founding. With millions of developers, enterprises, and government agencies now using its various application services, this B2B company born from testing is quietly expanding its territory. In its long-distance run alongside enterprise clients, it is building "confidence" — a competitive advantage for the companies it serves, and for itself.

1

Growing Up in Industrial Internet

In 2011, Testin Cloud Testing founder Xiaohai Jiang identified a pain point for mobile internet startups: to ensure app user experience, building an in-house testing team meant prohibitively high personnel and procurement costs — enormous financial pressure for startups. Jiang seized this opportunity, and Testin Cloud Testing was born.

From its inception, Testin grew alongside mobile internet, but it didn't emerge from consumer internet. It was rooted in industrial internet from day one — providing third-party testing services to internet companies.

As mobile connectivity exploded and matured, Testin's business rapidly evolved from simple app testing into an enterprise application service platform spanning cloud testing, security, promotion, and AI big data, covering multi-form applications (web, mobile web, native mobile apps, H5, official accounts, mini programs), mobile games, VR/AR, wearables, artificial intelligence, smart home, intelligent driving, and IoT. China Merchants Bank, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, McDonald's, Haier, Hainan Airlines, and State Grid Corporation of China all became partners.

Years later, Jiang believes Testin's greatest success lies in fully respecting and practicing the "internet rules" of the B2B market — focusing on a single enterprise service to create exceptional experiences and absolute advantage, building a sizable enterprise client base, then promoting other application services to this expanding audience. Large companies with abundant resources can afford to explore everything at once, but whether in consumer or industrial internet, startups must focus on one point to achieve "twice the result with half the effort." Testin's approach clearly validates this.

"But the 'twice the result with half the effort' rule in B2B markets isn't like consumer internet, where you could rapidly gain users through bundled cross-selling on PC," says Jiang. "In B2B, what matters most is that the product must be good, the service must be good, and the customer must be satisfied. Cloud testing as a service model — Testin pioneered this globally. This model innovation gave us first-mover advantage. Focusing on this point won us millions of enterprise, developer, and government agency clients. Because we innovated the cloud testing model from the start and adopted a focused strategy early on, we could build the enterprise application service platform we have today, offering full-lifecycle enterprise application services."

2

Saying No to Giant Worship

By "full lifecycle," Jiang means all application-related services beyond design/development and app distribution.

Design and development are highly personalized segments of application services. When a company conducts business online, its design and development team must deeply engage with the company's operations and express business requirements through the app. As the internet becomes increasingly important to business operations, design and development teams increasingly tend to be built in-house. App distribution, meanwhile, faces tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of individual consumers — a business typically handled by internet giants like Tencent and Baidu.

Testin's choice was to avoid design/development and app distribution. Building on its existing platform modules, it focused on productization — delivering services as products to enterprise clients throughout their journey: testing, security, promotion, data marketing, AI big data collection and annotation, and other application-related services.

According to Testin staff, the platform modules comprise an automated SaaS tool platform and a scaled crowdsourcing ecosystem platform. The vast majority of Testin's B2B business operates on these two platforms. On such platforms, Testin can continuously create services, stack services, and combine them into full-lifecycle enterprise application services.

Jiang offers examples: Today Testin's automated SaaS tool platform works like a toolbox, with tools constantly being added to complete more tasks. It not only helps enterprise clients complete automated application testing, but is also developing automated data annotation tools that could dramatically reduce the labor intensity of data annotation. Meanwhile, Testin's scaled crowdsourcing ecosystem platform was originally built to help enterprises complete testing tasks that required human effort, such as online stress testing for game products. But as the platform's ecosystem has grown richer, it can fulfill increasingly diverse services — with enterprise demand growing stronger from application promotion and data collection.

This "running partner" nature of its services also means Testin hasn't panicked about internet giants' collective pivot to B2B this year. When Tencent announced its organizational restructuring in late September with a strategic upgrade goal of "rooting in consumer internet, embracing industrial internet," many nervously asked: Will the B2B market become another winner-take-all arena like consumer internet?

Jiang firmly believes the answer is no — because purchasing behavior in B2B markets is rational, and when enterprises buy services, multiple approval procedures are required; the users and purchasing decision-makers are often not the same people. B2B markets won't see explosive growth. Enterprises and clients typically form long-term cooperative relationships, generating sustained revenue through repeated purchases.

"Enterprise service advantages in B2B markets don't emerge overnight. They require years of accumulation. It's absolutely not the case that a single internet giant entering B2B can overturn the market landscape," Jiang says. "Moreover, B2B markets must innovate. If we had stayed with cloud testing alone, we would have had no future. So in our early stages we focused on cloud testing, developed the SaaS automation tool platform and scaled crowdsourcing ecosystem platform, and on that foundation expanded to full-lifecycle application services — testing, security, promotion, and AI big data. Precisely because of these years of effort and experimentation, we can say with confidence: 'Cloud Testing — Making Applications More Valuable.'"

3

The New Law: From Base Area to Long March

Regarding the free A/B testing tool, Jiang spoke at length about "helping entrepreneurs reduce costs," but he didn't deny that "free is the best customer acquisition method." Testin views free offerings as a way for enterprise service providers to reach large numbers of potential clients — cloud testing is Testin's revolutionary base area, but every enterprise ultimately needs to undertake a Long March. From that perspective, cloud testing is a starting point, a door that converts large numbers of testing service clients into clients for security, promotion, and AI big data services.

Jiang knows the traffic business intimately. Back in 2008, he developed PICA instant messenger, enabling phone-to-phone and phone-to-PC communication with text, images, voice, video, and email.

At the time, the first-generation iPhone had only been out for a year. Not only was China's mobile communications industry chain still immature, but the iPhone itself was far from perfect, revealing various flaws — the industry was still questioning whether the iPhone would be a flash in the pan.

PICA had 7 versions to test across 50+ device models, all to be completed within a 12-hour window from 9:30 PM to 9:00 AM. The actual testing work was compressed to seven or eight hours. The testing team never slept through a full night. This grueling testing method made Jiang realize that testing needed a completely different solution — which became his next entrepreneurial opportunity.

Today, Testin Cloud Testing has continuously served over 1 million developers, conducting over 200 million tests for more than 2.6 million applications. As of May 2017, according to Android market Top 10 and App Store statistics, over 2.9 million apps in China have used or are using Testin's testing services — clients spanning internet companies, financial institutions, smart hardware, online education, fast-moving consumer goods, power and energy, and traditional industries.

But for Jiang, conquering the testing landscape was hard-won — and merely a revolutionary base area. The Long March he leads Testin on continues. If building full-lifecycle enterprise application services is Yan'an, the destination, Testin has already crossed the snow-capped mountains. Though still arduous, victory is in sight.

Of course, enterprise application services may themselves be a base area, because the law of industrial internet is data operations.

The law established in the mobile internet era was "traffic faith" — platforms monopolized traffic, and commercial organizations beyond the giants had to attach themselves to platform traffic distribution, even "charity." Every company aspiring to be a "citizen" ultimately became a "tenant" under the iron curtain of traffic.

Now, as the digital economy enters its second half, the law shifts to "data faith" — and this is precisely where companies like Testin Cloud Testing derive value closer to the core: eliminating information asymmetry, improving efficiency and rights for commercial organizations.

As the concept of "application" breaks free from the single form of apps, pursuing data efficiency and data reliability becomes essential for commercial organizations. The application becomes the path; the endpoint is giving every enterprise a direct connection with users, richer data, and then higher commercial efficiency through data interpretation. Reform and innovation based on "data faith" is the most important trend of the next decade — and establishing connections through applications in various forms is the standard action all enterprises must take.

And within this lies Testin Cloud Testing's muscle and armor.

Source: GeekPark

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Xiaohai Jiang: How Testin Cloud Testing Makes Applications More Valuable

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