u/ContactCold1075

For anyone who followed the first two posts, the $60k was stolen, she was arrested, I shared everything I did in order. A lot of you bookmarked that post.

This one's for the people who asked "then what."

She took a plea deal. I don't know how I expected to feel, I had this idea that when it was "over" I'd feel something decisive. Closure is the word people use. What I actually felt was tired. And then a little angry that I felt tired instead of something better.

The money situation is what it is, We're in civil recovery now which is slower, less certain, and significantly less satisfying than a courtroom scene from TV. The criminal case is separate from getting your money back. You assume the arrest is the finish line. It isn't. It's the beginning of a completely different process with different lawyers and a different timeline.

The first thing I did was map every single access point in our finances. Not just bank accounts, Payment processors, Payroll system, Vendor portals, QuickBooks login, Expense platforms. I had given one person access to all of it because it was convenient. Convenience is how these things happen.

We now have a rule no single person has both the ability to create a vendor and the ability to approve a payment to that vendor. That's it. That one control would have caught this earlier. The forensic accountant told me this is the single most common failure pattern she sees.

We also switched bookkeeping tools. Partly practical, partly I just couldn't look at the old system anymore. We went with something that surfaces anomalies automatically and flags anything that doesn't match prior period patterns for that vendor, I wish I'd had it two years ago.

I had been protecting them from the details because I thought that's what a founder is supposed to do, They knew something was wrong for weeks before I told them. They always do. The honest conversation I finally had with everyone was better than the silence had been. One of my engineers said "we figured. we're still here." That sentence hit harder than I expected.

What I'd add to the last post, if you're early in this situation, the forensic accountant's report doesn't just help criminally, It helped us with our insurance claim, it helped when we went to civil court, and it helped me understand exactly how it happened so I could explain it to a future CFO without sounding like I had no idea what was going on in my own company. Which, honestly, I didn't.

Still rebuilding. The business is functional. The team is intact. I know more about our finances than I ever did, which is a strange silver lining.

Thank you again to everyone who reached out after the first two posts. You don't realize how much it helps to have strangers on the internet tell you to keep moving.

Junior devs aren't struggling because the market is bad, they're struggling because the work that used to justify hiring a junior dev is just gone. It is quietly camouflaged into what a senior dev can do in an afternoon with Copilot.

The junior role always did the boring stuff, the small bugs, the simple features, the stuff nobody wants to touch, and in return you get proximity to a real codebase and people who've seen things go wrong, that proximity was the actual education.

that boring stuff is what AI does now.

So nobody cancelled the junior role, the economics just shifted and the role kind of dissolved on its own.

Bootcamps are still running, cs programs are still graduating people, everyone's still saying build projects, do leetcode, contribute to open source as if the path is the same as it was five years ago

Senior devs still have jobs because you need actual judgment to work with AI output, you need to have seen enough things break badly to know when the generated code is confidently wrong, but that judgment comes from years of doing the work that doesn't exist for juniors anymore

so how do you get the experience if the entry point is gone

I had posted here a few weeks ago completely frozen, $60k was stolen, accountant had vanished, team depending on me, investors to call. a lot of you reached out and I want to give a proper update because this community genuinely helped me get through the first 48 hours.

she was arrested last week. I'm not going to pretend that made me feel as good as I thought it would, the money isn't back, but here's everything I did in order in case anyone ever finds themselves reading this at 2am in the same situation I was in.

the first thing I did was stop touching anything

I know that sounds counterintuitive when you're panicking and want to fix everything immediately, but the moment I suspected fraud I stopped moving money, stopped cancelling anything, stopped confronting anyone digitally, your instinct is to act, the right move is to document first and act second, everything is evidence.

I got a lawyer before I did almost anything else

This was the single best decision I made, not a general business lawyer, a lawyer who specifically handles financial fraud and white collar crime, they told me exactly what to say to the bank, what not to say, how to file the police report in a way that actually helps the investigation, and how to communicate with investors without creating liability for myself. worth every dollar but very expensive.

Forensic accountant is not optional. it is mandatory.

I cannot stress this enough, I thought I could reconstruct everything myself by going through bank statements, the forensic accountant found transfers that never would have been caught. Fake vendor accounts set up months before the obvious ones, small recurring amounts designed to stay under the threshold that triggers alerts, she had been doing this for a long time, the early amounts were tiny, that's how these things work apparently. They test you first.

The forensic accountant also produced a report that the police and our lawyer could actually use, your bank statements alone are not enough, you need someone who can build a documented trail that holds up.

The bank was more helpful than I expected

Once I had a police report number and came in with my lawyer, the bank took it seriously. They flagged the accounts the transfers went to and escalated internally. I don't know exactly what that triggered on their end but it contributed to how fast things moved.

I told my investors before I had the full picture

I went back and forth on this for days, ultimately I told them early, before everything was confirmed, because I decided I would rather they hear it from me incomplete than hear it from someone else later and wonder why I waited. every single one of them responded with support, one of them had been through something similar. I was dreading those calls more than almost anything and they ended up being the most human conversations I've had in months.

On the arrest

I don't know all the details I'm allowed to share while it's ongoing, what I can say is that the paper trail the forensic accountant built was a significant part of what moved things forward.

Ff you're in this situation right now, document everything, get a lawyer, get a forensic accountant, and don't assume the police have the bandwidth to reconstruct the financial side themselves. help them.

Finally, what i've learnt

you're going to feel stupid, I felt stupid for trusting her, for not reviewing statements myself, for letting one person have that much unsupervised access, that feeling is not useful right now, deal with it later. right now just move in the right order.

we're still fighting to recover the money. I don't know how much we'll actually see. but the business is still standing, the team is still here, and I know a lot more about our finances than I ever did.

thank you to everyone who responded to the first post. it helped more than you know.

before anyone comes at me, i have been in QA for 11 years. i respect the craft. this is not a hit piece.

but i have watched companies post automation engineer roles with senior level salaries, hire brilliant people, and then have those people spend the majority of their time doing glorified test maintenance. clicking through pipelines. fixing selectors. updating locators after every sprint because a developer renamed a class somewhere.

the promise was that automation engineers would free teams from manual work. in a lot of organizations what actually happened is we created a new category of manual work that just looks more technical. you are still a human babysitting repetitive processes. the scripts just have more lines than a spreadsheet did.

the real problem is we designed automation around the tools that existed 10 years ago and then built entire career tracks on top of those tools without questioning whether the foundation was still solid. and now we have thousands of engineers whose primary skill is maintaining infrastructure that was arguably never the right approach to begin with.

i think the role needs to evolve significantly or a lot of people are going to find themselves in a difficult spot in the next few years. curious if others are seeing this or if i am just jaded.

He started about 4 months ago. The review comments got longer and more polished. Then formulaic. Every single one follows the same structure: acknowledge the change, end with a suggestion wrapped in encouragement.

"Great approach here! Consider using a guard clause for the null check to improve readability. Overall solid work!"

He writes this on every PR. A 3-line typo fix gets the same treatment as a 500-line refactor. Same tone. Same hollow enthusiasm.

The problem isn't that the feedback is technically wrong. It's usually fine. The problem is that nobody trusts it anymore. When everything gets the same cheerful review, the reviews become noise. A real concern gets the same wrapper as a rubber stamp.

Last week he approved a PR that introduced a race condition. His AI-generated comment said "clean implementation, nicely done." Three seniors caught it in the next round.

Nobody confronts him because the company line is "AI makes us more productive." Calling out AI-assisted reviews means admitting the productivity story has a quality problem.

He ships more reviews per week than anyone on the team. He catches fewer actual issues than anyone on the team. Management only sees the first number.

I'm a startup founder wwo years in. We're not a big company, not a flashy one either. Just a small team trying to build something real, Every dollar in our account has a story behind it a late night, a hard conversation with an investor, a month where I didn't pay myself so the team could get paid on time.

now $60,000 of that is gone.

Our accountant had been with us for 18 months. She wasn't just an accountant, I genuinely considered her part of the team. She knew our numbers better than anyone. I trusted her completely, maybe too completely, because I was deep in the product and the sales and the hundred other things that needed my attention every single day. She had full access to our accounts.

Two weeks ago I sat down to review our runway before a fundraising conversation and something seemed off. I started digging into the bank statements myself, something I'm embarrassed to admit I hadn't done in a while. And there it was. Transfers to accounts I didn't recognize, vendor invoices that looked slightly too round a number. A contractor being paid monthly that I had never heard of.

I called her immediately, No answer, Called again. Nothing. Went to her rental apartment and she had moved out a month ago.

I filed a police report. I've flagged the transactions with the bank. I've started pulling every statement I can find. But beyond that I am completely frozen. I have a team depending on me, investors I'm going to have to call soon, and a business that I am desperately trying to hold together while also dealing with the fact that someone I trusted looked me in the eye every day and was robbing us the whole time.

I think I'm still in shock.

For those of you who've been through something like this, or work in law, fraud, or finance, I really need some guidance right now:

• Do I need a forensic accountant? How do I even find one I can trust at this point?
• Is there any realistic shot at recovering the money?
• Should I be speaking to a lawyer before I do anything else?
• When do I tell my investors? Do I tell them now or wait until I have a clearer picture?
• How do I make sure the rest of our accounts and assets are protected right now?

I'm trying to stay calm for my team. But behind everything I am genuinely terrified. Any help, advice, or even just knowing what order to tackle this in would mean the world right now.

Thank you for reading this far.

Starting with the thing everyone mentions first, the driver management, if you've maintained a Selenium setup for any length of time you know the specific frustration of a chromedriver version mismatch breaking your entire suite in a way that has nothing to do with your tests or your code. it's pure infrastructure noise. Playwright handles browser management internally so that whole category of problem just doesn't exist anymore

but that's honestly the least interesting improvement

the auto waiting behaviour is what changed my day to day the most. Selenium fails immediately when an element isn't present and then you add explicit waits, then you add implicit waits, then you add time.sleep calls as a last resort and by the end your test has more waiting logic than testing logic. Playwright waits intelligently and retries in a way that actually reflects how browsers load things in the real world. the flakiness that was coming from timing issues on CI basically disappeared after we switched

error messages are genuinely useful now. with Selenium I often spent more time figuring out what the error was telling me than I did fixing the actual problem. Playwright tells you what happened, where, and usually why, in plain language

setup was surprisingly easy. I was expecting the migration to be a weekend project. it wasn't. things just worked without the profile configuration and environment setup that Selenium required

the import situation is also cleaner. Selenium required importing a lot of things constantly. Playwright feels like it was built by people who actually write tests every day rather than people who built an API and handed it over

the honest answer on whether Selenium is better at anything for modern web testing is that I haven't found a case yet. it has years of Stack Overflow answers behind it which is genuinely useful when you hit edge cases, but that gap is closing fast

if you've been putting off the switch the way I was, just do it

We built an AI mobile testing tool, I was 24 when we started we raised $650k as pre seed, built a team, had customers who genuinely liked what we were making. I definitely thought we were going to make it big.

last week I shut it down

I did a post mortem and this is the report.

We never fully cracked product market fit

We had customersbut looking back I think we had people who liked us more than they needed us, nobody was losing sleep without our product, we'd get good feedback in demos and then the follow through would be softer than expected, we pivoted twice trying to find the version of the product that people couldn't live without and never quite got there

I kept telling myself we were one feature away.

We burned runway on the wrong things

When you're a young founder with $650k in the bank it feels like a lot of money until it doesn't, we hired too early, spent on infrastructure we didn't need yet, ran campaigns before we understood who we were selling to, looking back so much of that spend was just anxiety dressed up as strategy. we were doing things because it felt like we should be doing things

We were stolen from.

My accounts team was lying to me about how much money we had

Money was being misreported, expenses I never approved were buried in places I wasn't looking, and the numbers being handed to me every month weren't the real numbers by the time I understood what was actually in the bank we had weeks left not months

I had been making decisions about hiring, about whether to push for a bridge round, about how long we could keep going, all based on numbers that weren't true and the worst part is there were moments where something felt slightly off and I told myself I was just being paranoid.

I wasn't paranoid. I just had no independent way to verify what I was being told

I'm 27, three years of my life and $650k. a team I had to look in the eye and say it was over

I keep thinking about what I could have done differently, better validation before we scaled. tighter spend in the early days, some system where someone with no loyalty to anyone just looked at the real numbers and told me the truth every month

I think all three would have changed how this ended

if you're a young founder please learn from this, know your real numbers, not the ones you're handed. find out if people actually need what you're building before you scale and spend like every dollar has to earn its place because it does

I'm still here. still figuring out what's next. but man this was painful af

I started this company at 24. raised $650k pre-seed, built a team, had real customers, genuinely believed we were going to make it

last week I closed it down

I've spent the past few days doing an honest post mortem because I think other founders need to hear the real version

we never fully cracked product market fit

we had customers but looking back I think we had people who liked us more than they needed us. nobody was losing sleep without our product. demos went well, feedback was warm, follow through was always softer than expected. we pivoted twice trying to find the version people couldn't live without and never quite got there

I kept telling myself we were one feature away

we burned runway on the wrong things

$650k feels like a lot of money when you're 24. it isn't. we hired before we were ready, built infrastructure we didn't need, ran campaigns before we understood who we were selling to. so much of that spend was anxiety dressed up as strategy. doing things because it felt like we should be doing things rather than because we had a clear reason

we had serious financial oversight failures

this is the one that keeps me up at night

the numbers I was receiving every month were not accurate. expenses were being recorded incorrectly, figures weren't reconciling with what was actually in the bank, and by the time I had a clear picture of our real financial position we had weeks of runway left not months

I had been making decisions about hiring, about whether to push for a bridge round, about how long we could keep going, all based on information that didn't reflect reality

there were moments where something felt slightly off and I dismissed it because I had no independent way to verify what I was being told

after everything fell apart I found Finlens. it monitors your accounting automatically, flags reconciliation issues, catches the kind of drift that a monthly report would never surface. something that just watches the real numbers independently with no loyalty to anyone. that's exactly what I needed and didn't have

I should have had that from day one. every founder should

what I'd do differently

validate that people actually need what you're building before you scale anything. spend like every dollar has to justify itself because it does. and have something watching your real numbers every single month, not a report, the actual numbers, so you always know exactly where you stand

I'm 27. three years of my life. a team I had to look in the eye and tell it was over. that conversation is something I'll carry for a long time

still here. still figuring out what comes next

if you're building something right now please learn from this before you have to live it

We built an AI mobile testing tool, I was 24 when we started we raised $650k as pre seed, built a team, had customers who genuinely liked what we were making. I definitely thought we were going to make it big.

last week I shut it down

I did a post mortem and this is the report.

We never fully cracked product market fit

We had customersbut looking back I think we had people who liked us more than they needed us, nobody was losing sleep without our product, we'd get good feedback in demos and then the follow through would be softer than expected, we pivoted twice trying to find the version of the product that people couldn't live without and never quite got there

I kept telling myself we were one feature away.

We burned runway on the wrong things

When you're a young founder with $650k in the bank it feels like a lot of money until it doesn't, we hired too early, spent on infrastructure we didn't need yet, ran campaigns before we understood who we were selling to, looking back so much of that spend was just anxiety dressed up as strategy. we were doing things because it felt like we should be doing things

We were stolen from.

My accounts team was lying to me about how much money we had

Money was being misreported, expenses I never approved were buried in places I wasn't looking, and the numbers being handed to me every month weren't the real numbers by the time I understood what was actually in the bank we had weeks left not months

I had been making decisions about hiring, about whether to push for a bridge round, about how long we could keep going, all based on numbers that weren't true and the worst part is there were moments where something felt slightly off and I told myself I was just being paranoid.

I wasn't paranoid. I just had no independent way to verify what I was being told

I'm 27, three years of my life and $650k. a team I had to look in the eye and say it was over

I keep thinking about what I could have done differently, better validation before we scaled. tighter spend in the early days, some system where someone with no loyalty to anyone just looked at the real numbers and told me the truth every month

I think all three would have changed how this ended

if you're a young founder please learn from this, know your real numbers, not the ones you're handed. find out if people actually need what you're building before you scale and spend like every dollar has to earn its place because it does

I'm still here. still figuring out what's next. but man this was painful af

I was scrolling LinkedIn and someone in my space had posted about a problem my buyers deal with constantly, the post had blown up, hundreds of comments, tons of likes, people sharing their own versions of the same frustration in the replies

these people are literally telling me they have this problem right now publicly

I started reaching out to a few of them, just acknowledged what they'd engaged with and asked if it was something they were actively dealing with

the replies came back differently, because I wasn't interrupting their day with something random, I was showing up in a conversation they'd already started

that's basically what traxy.ai systematized for me, it watches LinkedIn engagement and surfaces the people interacting with relevant content who actually match who I'm trying to talk to, so instead of me manually stalking comment sections it just tells me when someone is worth talking to.

today I messaged someone within an hour of them commenting on a post about outbound inefficiency, she replied in fifteen minutes, we have a call tomorrow

I spent years trying to make cold outreach work harder, turns out I just needed to pay attention to what was already happening in my feed

I'm the only QA engineer at my startup and I've been asked to put together a research doc comparing Browserstack against alternatives before we commit to anything

we're running 6 projects simultaneously all at different stages of development, the platform coverage we need is web, iOS, Android and eventually smart TV but TV is lower priority for now, budget hasn't been locked in yet which is why they want me to evaluate options before just defaulting to Browserstack

I've used Browserstack before and it's solid but I want to make sure we're not overpaying for something when a better fit exists for our specific setup

I'm after real device coverage vs emulators and how much that actually matters in practice, pricing at scale across multiple projects, how well it handles parallel testing when you're juggling different codebases, ease of integration with CI/CD, and whether the smart TV support is real or just a gimmick on their website

any leads appreciated, trying to put together something useful rather than just copying the Browserstack pricing page.

I joined as an intern at what looked like a legitimate AI startup here in Bangalore, seed funded, nice office, founders who could sell a vision like the wolf of wallst. I was genuinely excited to learn

The CTO and co-founder cannot write production code. The entire product is being built through Claude Code. he prompts his way through features and presents it to the team like he designed the architecture himself. every engineer in that room knows. nobody says a word. He even has to use claude to write resignation letter replies.

The product itself is barely disguised, anyone who's spent time in the space would recognise it. they took an open source competitor's codebase, put a new interface on top of it and called it their own IP, three years since the fundraise, revenue is essentially zero, the money is just slowly running out and nobody talks about it openly. They aren't even SOC 2 compliant anymore.

The co-founders operate like slightly senior employees. they show up late, avoid hard decisions and disappear when things get difficult. The actual work lands on whoever is junior enough to not push back

Interns get the worst of it, senior level work, near zero pay, kept dangling on promises of a full time offer that never comes, the script is always the same. "we're about to take off, the ones who stayed early are going to be set." it works because people are young and they want to believe it

Ask for a raise and you won't get fired. you'll just quietly find yourself with double the work until leaving feels like your own decision

The hiring process filtered out female engineers almost entirely, the reasoning that got passed around internally was about "cultural fit." candidates who asked about work life balance were screened out, make of that what you will

the male engineers work until 3 or 4am regularly, nothing meaningful happens during the day. the founders are either absent or in circular meetings, the real pressure comes at night

part of my job as an intern was handling their content and social presence, the posts were getting impressions, tens of thousands of views on LinkedIn, engagement on every post, follower count going up

and they would absolutely flame me when none of it turned into leads

like genuinely, in front of the team sometimes. "why are we getting views and no pipeline." "what's the point of impressions if nobody's converting." I was an intern with no real tools and no guidance trying to figure out how to turn content engagement into actual qualified conversations.

It wasn't my job as an intern to figure out the pipeline right?
and somehow that was my fault

I was an intern getting shouted at for impressions not converting while the CTO was copy pasting prompts into Claude and calling it a product, the co-founders were disappearing before lunch, the engineers were falling asleep at their desks at 4am, and the product was essentially a rebranded open source repo with a fresh coat of cream

three years, outside funding, zero revenue, zero returning customers, a team that's been promised equity and promotions and life changing wealth for long enough that some of them have stopped asking

but their LinkedIn posts are doing numbers so I guess everything is fine

I want to be transparent about what the journey looked like before I get into anything useful

Thousands of cold messages that went nowhere.
Campaigns I was convinced would work that absolutely did nothing.
Offers I thought were compelling that nobody cared about at all

it looked nothing like the Twitter threads that make growth seem like a series of clean decisions that compound neatly into success

Most of the time it felt like i was doing hit or miss executions.

I was spending most of my time talking to people who were never going to buy anything

not because I was bad at finding people. because I was confusing activity with intent. there's a massive difference between someone who is vaguely aware of a problem and someone who is actively feeling it right now and looking for a way out

a founder posting "just launched something new" is not intent. Someone posting "does anyone know an alternative to X, the pricing just changed and we can't afford it anymore" is intent.
someone in a subreddit saying "how are other people solving this, our current process is breaking down" is intent.
those people are already in pain, you don't have to convince them the problem exists

once I started spending more time finding those conversations and less time broadcasting into the void everything got more efficient

the other thing that sounds obvious but took me way too long to actually do

Talk to people constantly and talk to them before you build things not after, the market will tell you exactly what to build, what to remove, what they'll pay for, and how to describe it in a way that resonates, but only if you stay close to real conversations instead of making assumptions from a distance

I built features in isolation for months early on that nobody asked for and nobody used. the conversations I had later would have told me not to bother

distribution is uncomfortable to admit but it matters more than most founders want to believe

a mediocre product with strong distribution usually beats a great product that nobody sees. I've watched this play out enough times now that I've stopped being surprised by it. showing up consistently, posting, replying, being visible in the places your customers actually spend time, it compounds in a way.

follow ups are so underrated

I have generated more revenue from a simple "hey just checking if you saw this" than from any clever outbound framework I've ever tried, people are busy, they're not ignoring you personally. One gentle follow up has saved deals I thought were completely dead

and finally, pay attention to what people complain about repeatedly

the best ideas, the best positioning, the best content, the most accurate picture of who your customer actually is, it's all hiding inside frustration. One Reddit thread read carefully can give you more signal than a month of market research done the formal way

none of this feels like it's working at first, zero replies, two upvotes, no demos, no momentum. and then one customer converts, one post gets traction, one referral turns into three more and suddenly the thing that felt like it was going nowhere starts compounding

that's genuinely how it happens most of the time

just stay close to intent every single day until it starts to click

We shut down yesterday. $500k pre-seed, three pivots. $60k in total revenue across the entire life of the company

$500k raised. $60k back. not a single returning customer, every sale we ever made was a one time transaction and we kept telling retention would improve once the product got better, the product got better and nobody came back

the fundraising side is its own story, after the pre-seed we spent the better part of a year trying to raise again, took meetings, built decks, had conversations that felt promising and then went quiet, investors would ask about retention and we'd explain it away, they'd ask about revenue and we'd talk about the trajectory, when you only have $60k in revenue across four years there's only so long you can keep reframing it

so I had to make the call because we had no more runway. I gathered everyone and told them we were letting them go. that conversation still hurts when i think about it.

Then I asked if anyone would be willing to stay on at a reduced salary to help us wind things down properly and take care of the customers we had, a few said yes and honestly that hurt more than the ones who said no, the ones who said no I completely understood, the ones who said yes just made it heavier

I also never had a clean picture of what was actually happening financially, part time bookkeeper kept up with the work monthly, I assumed that meant the numbers were right. they weren't at all, burn rate was consistently slightly off in a direction that made things look marginally better than they were, revenue recognition on some contracts was wrong. there was a tax reconciliation gap sitting quietly for nearly two years that I only found out about when we were already out of options

I was making decisions about pivots and runway and whether to keep pushing for the raise based on numbers that weren't fully accurate. I didn't know that until it was too late to do anything about it

We didn't have product market fit, no customer came back. $60k in four years is a pretty clear answer even if we were slow to accept it

but I would have known sooner, made harder calls earlier maybe stopped burning through runway on a third pivot and made the difficult decision a year before I actually did

We're still trying by the way, we're still in it, talking to people, exploring what's next, figuring out what we actually learned from four years of this

some days that feels hopeful. some days it just feels like the only thing left to do

if you're building on outside capital please get someone to look at your books properly at least once a year. someone independent with no attachment to how things have been done. not because it'll save you if the fundamentals aren't there but because you deserve to make decisions based on what's actually true

I didn't have that and I wish I had more time and clarity.

When I got laid off I couldn't find anyone being honest about what a solo service business actually looks like after taxes and expenses. So heres what i figured out.

Seven startups pay me a monthly retainer, before they push an app update I run their critical user flows through automated tests and send back a report showing exactly what passed and what broke with screenshots for every failure. They fix it before it hits the store.

I was a senior product designer at a Series A startup, got let go in a restructure along with about a third of the company and spent the better part of three months applying to roles, getting deep into interview processes and then hearing nothing. I needed income so I started reaching out to people I knew, just honest messages saying I was available and asking if they knew anyone who needed design or product help

Most people said they'd keep me in mind. they didn't, but a handful actually came back with something real A couple of short product projects, one longer engagement helping a founder with their go to market. I was pulling in maybe $5,000-6,000/month stitched together from whatever I could find but every single engagement had an end date. nothing was recurring. every month felt like i was starting from scratch again.

About six months in one of those conversations turned into a launch prep project for a small seed stage startup. Qcommerce app, team of four, around $800k raised. The founder needed someone to own the product side of the launch, store listing, part of that naturally involved me walking through the app myself before submission to make sure everything actually worked

3 days before they were supposed to submit I found it. the entire login flow was breaking on android running the accessibility text size at large or above. The lead dev had tested on his own phone with default settings and worked perfectly. I caught it because I was using my personal phone which I'd set up with larger text a while back and never changed.

My founder asked if there was a way to catch that kind of thing systematically. I told him I'd figure it out and spent the next week trying to do exactly that

first I looked at Appium because that's what every article recommends. I am not a developer. three days in I still hadn't gotten a single test to run. The setup requires android SDK configuration, specific Java versions, environment variables, a chain of dependencies that all have to match exactly or nothing works. every tutorial assumed you already knew what you were doing. I didn't hahah

then I tried a few no-code testing tools. most of them still needed me to identify UI elements by their technical IDs from the codebase which I don't have access to. I'm not on the engineering team. I nearly gave up and just told the founder I'd do manual walkthroughs before every release which was basically what I was already doing for free

then I found a tool where you just describe what should happen in plain language and it figures out the rest by looking at the screen. no code, no element IDs, nothing technical. I wrote 30 test scenarios for their app in one afternoon. Ran them against the broken build and 6 failed with screenshots showing exactly where and why

I charged him $1,400/month to maintain those tests and run them before every release. He had been about to hire a part time QA contractor for $4,000/month to do the same thing manually.

that first retainer changed everything about how I thought about my work. I was still taking the occasional product gig on the side but the testing retainer was the only income that showed up the same amount every single month without me having to pitch anyone. The founder mentioned it to other founders he knew and two of them reached out directly.

my first four clients all came through word of mouth. I never sent a cold message

it wasn't all smooth. month three I missed a real bug on an ecommerce client because my tests only covered the straight path through checkout. Didn't account for what happens when someone adds items, removes one, goes back, and then tries to complete the purchase.

A user found it before my tests did and that was an uncomfortable call. I rebuilt the entire suite that weekend to cover the non-linear paths. Now most of my test suites have more edge case flows than straight line ones because that's genuinely where bugs live

Month 7 one client's engineering lead pushed to replace me with an internal engineer writing coded scripts. I pulled up a list of 17 bugs caught over four months and asked how long it would take to rebuild that coverage from scratch in Appium. he said two months minimum full time. they kept me

Current state is 7 clients between $900 and $1,800/month. total $9,200. a few of the newer ones came through Twitter where I post about specific ways mobile apps break in the real world. Not generic testing advice. things like how most test suites run on a clean fresh install but real users are upgrading from an older version with months of cached data and permission states already set, and nobody tests that upgrade path. founders read that stuff and DM me. I offer to run their 5 most critical flows for free. every single trial has caught at least one real issue. after that the pricing conversation takes about ten minutes

Costs. the testing platform is around $180/month covering devices and test runs across all clients. Real device farms on top of that is about $110. everything else is maybe $60 in miscellaneous tools, normal month comes to around $350, maybe $420 during a heavy launch week

revenue $9,200. costs roughly $400. profit $8,800. I put 30% aside for quarterly taxes and pay $420/month for health insurance which I didn't have for the first few months because I kept telling myself I'd sort it out next month, actual take home after taxes and insurance is around $5,600. for about 28 hours a week. My old consulting work paid similarly but with twice the hours and zero idea what next month looked like

all my clients are funded startups between seed and series B. I price based on complexity and platform coverage, $900 for a straightforward productivity app with around 20 flows on a single platform. $1,800 for a fintech app with 60+ flows across iOS and Android where I need to test biometric fallbacks, permission states, and session handling edge cases. the sweet spot is teams with 5 to 20 engineers, complex enough app that testing actually matters, small enough that nobody owns quality full time. that's where I fit

zero churn in 11 months, once the tests are catching bugs before releases ship nobody asks whether they still need me. the question just stops coming up

if you're thinking about this you need to understand mobile apps well enough to know which flows actually matter and where things tend to break, you need to be comfortable having direct conversations with founders about their product and you need to accept that writing test instructions that run reliably takes a couple of months of getting it wrong first

happy to answer whatever, pricing, the specific tool I use, how I structure the reports, how I handle a client whose dev thinks they don't need me.

When I got laid off I couldn't find anyone being honest about what a solo service business actually looks like after taxes and expenses. So heres what i figured out.

Seven startups pay me a monthly retainer, before they push an app update I run their critical user flows through automated tests and send back a report showing exactly what passed and what broke with screenshots for every failure. They fix it before it hits the store.

I was a senior product designer at a Series A startup, got let go in a restructure along with about a third of the company and spent the better part of three months applying to roles, getting deep into interview processes and then hearing nothing. I needed income so I started reaching out to people I knew, just honest messages saying I was available and asking if they knew anyone who needed design or product help

Most people said they'd keep me in mind. they didn't, but a handful actually came back with something real A couple of short product projects, one longer engagement helping a founder with their go to market. I was pulling in maybe $5,000-6,000/month stitched together from whatever I could find but every single engagement had an end date. nothing was recurring. every month felt like i was starting from scratch again.

About six months in one of those conversations turned into a launch prep project for a small seed stage startup. Qcommerce app, team of four, around $800k raised. The founder needed someone to own the product side of the launch, store listing, part of that naturally involved me walking through the app myself before submission to make sure everything actually worked

3 days before they were supposed to submit I found it. the entire login flow was breaking on android running the accessibility text size at large or above. The lead dev had tested on his own phone with default settings and worked perfectly. I caught it because I was using my personal phone which I'd set up with larger text a while back and never changed.

My founder asked if there was a way to catch that kind of thing systematically. I told him I'd figure it out and spent the next week trying to do exactly that

first I looked at Appium because that's what every article recommends. I am not a developer. three days in I still hadn't gotten a single test to run. The setup requires android SDK configuration, specific Java versions, environment variables, a chain of dependencies that all have to match exactly or nothing works. every tutorial assumed you already knew what you were doing. I didn't hahah

then I tried a few no-code testing tools. most of them still needed me to identify UI elements by their technical IDs from the codebase which I don't have access to. I'm not on the engineering team. I nearly gave up and just told the founder I'd do manual walkthroughs before every release which was basically what I was already doing for free

then I found a tool where you just describe what should happen in plain language and it figures out the rest by looking at the screen. no code, no element IDs, nothing technical. I wrote 30 test scenarios for their app in one afternoon. Ran them against the broken build and 6 failed with screenshots showing exactly where and why

I charged him $1,400/month to maintain those tests and run them before every release. He had been about to hire a part time QA contractor for $4,000/month to do the same thing manually.

that first retainer changed everything about how I thought about my work. I was still taking the occasional product gig on the side but the testing retainer was the only income that showed up the same amount every single month without me having to pitch anyone. The founder mentioned it to other founders he knew and two of them reached out directly.

my first four clients all came through word of mouth. I never sent a cold message

it wasn't all smooth. month three I missed a real bug on an ecommerce client because my tests only covered the straight path through checkout. Didn't account for what happens when someone adds items, removes one, goes back, and then tries to complete the purchase.

A user found it before my tests did and that was an uncomfortable call. I rebuilt the entire suite that weekend to cover the non-linear paths. Now most of my test suites have more edge case flows than straight line ones because that's genuinely where bugs live

Month 7 one client's engineering lead pushed to replace me with an internal engineer writing coded scripts. I pulled up a list of 17 bugs caught over four months and asked how long it would take to rebuild that coverage from scratch in Appium. he said two months minimum full time. they kept me

Current state is 7 clients between $900 and $1,800/month. total $9,200. a few of the newer ones came through Twitter where I post about specific ways mobile apps break in the real world. Not generic testing advice. things like how most test suites run on a clean fresh install but real users are upgrading from an older version with months of cached data and permission states already set, and nobody tests that upgrade path. founders read that stuff and DM me. I offer to run their 5 most critical flows for free. every single trial has caught at least one real issue. after that the pricing conversation takes about ten minutes

Costs. the testing platform is around $180/month covering devices and test runs across all clients. Real device farms on top of that is about $110. everything else is maybe $60 in miscellaneous tools, normal month comes to around $350, maybe $420 during a heavy launch week

revenue $9,200. costs roughly $400. profit $8,800. I put 30% aside for quarterly taxes and pay $420/month for health insurance which I didn't have for the first few months because I kept telling myself I'd sort it out next month, actual take home after taxes and insurance is around $5,600. for about 28 hours a week. My old consulting work paid similarly but with twice the hours and zero idea what next month looked like

all my clients are funded startups between seed and series B. I price based on complexity and platform coverage, $900 for a straightforward productivity app with around 20 flows on a single platform. $1,800 for a fintech app with 60+ flows across iOS and Android where I need to test biometric fallbacks, permission states, and session handling edge cases. the sweet spot is teams with 5 to 20 engineers, complex enough app that testing actually matters, small enough that nobody owns quality full time. that's where I fit

zero churn in 11 months, once the tests are catching bugs before releases ship nobody asks whether they still need me. the question just stops coming up

if you're thinking about this you need to understand mobile apps well enough to know which flows actually matter and where things tend to break, you need to be comfortable having direct conversations with founders about their product and you need to accept that writing test instructions that run reliably takes a couple of months of getting it wrong first

happy to answer whatever, pricing, the specific tool I use, how I structure the reports, how I handle a client whose dev thinks they don't need me.