CLIENT SPOTLIGHT
MuukTest
We talked to founder Ivan Vargas to learn more about MuukTest in March 2020…
Tell us about your company. What problem are you trying to solve?
Every software we use needs to be tested thoroughly before getting to our hands or it will fail when we need it the most; in my 15 years of experience I’ve worked on teams that spent up to 50% of their time doing software testing! that is ridiculous, because software testing defines the pace that a company can ship their software to the market—it is the bottleneck of innovation.
How did your company get started?
My cofounder Renan and I had been testing different startups for a couple of years before realizing that we should focus on what we knew the most: software engineering. We have over a decade of expertise on Software Quality and Software Engineering, and we have lived the pains of Software Testing—we decided to fix them.
Why is your team well positioned to solve the problem you’re tackling?
We have 15 years working on Software Engineering, we have seen it all from different positions: development, testing, project management, product management, people management, outsourced testing, on premise testing, etc. In addition to have lived the pains and how software engineering teams work, Renan is a super smart guy that has MSc in Computer Science from Tec Monterrey (a.k.a MIT of Mexico) and I’ve been working/consulting with startups for over 5 years since I completed an MBA with a concentration in entrepreneurship from UNC Kenan-Flagler.
What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned along the way?
Focus is key, and you can not build everything for everyone. Focus is an art as well; you want to use metrics to decide what to focus on (e.g. type of customer, features), but many times you don’t have enough data points so you have to learn to analyze the little information you have deep enough looking to understand what problems are the customers really facing, who are really the customers, and what will really solve the customers problems—and then go to build it…learn more…repeat.
What resources do you rely on to help your company grow?
We have been bootstrapping so far, we have 2 great software developers working with us, we just got a grant from NC IDEA, and we rely a lot on efficiency platforms like Shoobx that makes us get the most value of our startup resources.
