Page Canary Pitch
Reference: https://stripe.com/guides/atlas/pitching (opens in a new tab)
Intro
- Evan Marsland
- Living in Palo Alto
- From Toronto, Canada
- Currently software engineer working at Google
Elevator pitch
Page Canary is a autonomous QA tester for your website. It can be setup in a single step in under a minute. We aim to help our users be aware of any issues as soon as they occur. We use the latest in web browser automation, quality assurance and artificial intelligence techniques to:
- Detect and prioritize issues (Broken links, console errors, broken resources)
- Create detailed steps to reproduce the issue and determine issue impact
- Send to the appropriate channel to be triaged
Page Canary is designed to be easy to use, adaptive and scalable. It can be setup by non-technical users without any configuration required.
Why
- One in three customers will stop interacting with a specific website if they encounter a bad user experience.
- 57% of users do not recommend a business without a good mobile website design.
- 88% of online customers said they are less likely to return to a website if they’ve had a negative experience in the first place.
- Outages can cost companies millions
- Nobody likes writing software tests, slows down your developer velocity
From: https://www.browserstack.com/guide/how-to-perform-website-qa-testing (opens in a new tab)
Target customers
- SMB
- Low budget for QA
- Low amount of time to spend on QA (focused on growing their business)
- Less stable product which means it will be constantly changing (good for adaptive QA)
Story
I've witnessed first-hand how software QA issues can cost companies millions.
- On-call time
- Customer trust
- Downtime
Here is an example of a time I was on-call at Google. An engineer introduced an incompatibility between the FE and BE. It was released to production and immedietly took down the app. A simple canary bot would have detected this issue in the environments.
Our team had very high testing bar including integration tests, unit tets, e2e tests which cost millions to maintain per year which did not catch the issue. Google hires multiple full time QA testers. Nobody caught this issue for multiple reasons:
- The QA testers aren't always working
- Certain errors are transient and easy to miss
All of these issues are covered by Page Canary
Key accomplishments
- Top rated SEO search query "Page Canary", "Website QA bot"
- High converting search ads
Journey so far
Had the idea while working at weebly.com a website builder company that makes it super easy for people to make a website or online store. Weebly would frequently have QA problems managing their massive internal documentation site and multiple other product offerings where things would be broken for months. So I had the idea for a robot vacuum cleaner for your website that would crawl it and find all of these issues that users would catch.
Fast-forward I'm working Working for Google on on one of the biggest internal web applications. We would frequently have large outages.
Started working on the project on nights/weekends. Started running ads on Google and talking to customers.
Example testimonial:
I love Page Canary and I want to make use it to monitor the websites of all my company’s brands. Blake (Chief Revenue Officer)
- Strong interest on platforms
- Good SEO rankins for keywords:
V1 Launch
- Ability to run the software scalably
- Dedicated machines running the QA software
- Intuitive issue manager
Vs competitors
Traditional QA testing software is targetted for large enterprises or technical users that have dedicated employees working on QA. These become very costly to maintain.
Vision
I picture a world where every business website on the internet is running some version of automated QA testing software.
https://siteefy.com/how-many-websites-are-there/ (opens in a new tab) Over a billion websites on the internet now. Potentially a billion dollar market for QA testing. Larget total addressable market and still growing.
Techniques can be adapted for other forms of software.
Metrics
- CaC
- MRR
- Active customers
- Number of pages created
- Number of issues detected
External press
https://www.toolify.ai/tool/page-canary (opens in a new tab)
About the founders
Evan Marsland - Founder
- 5 YoE at Google:
Extensive experience working with browser automation, and ensuring high quality for one of Google's largest web applications.
- 3+ YoE at other companies
Square, Weebly etc.