First, thank you. You raised some very interesting points here.
You are right about investors. They never ask about testing, but honestly, they don’t ask about programming languages neither. Or if your backend is using sql or nosql. They want things done. They are usually non-technical and they don’t want to get into these kind of details.
Or product is not just testing for bugs. Or main focus is to create a mindset inside the young organization, that keeps testing on the table. We try to ensure that each stage of software development aligns with the quality standards. We push for Agile and DevOps. We try to be the end user advocate and raise potential business issues. We try to find defects earlier in development because it’s much cheaper than finding them in production.
And no, all of the above is not taking more time. QA doesn’t mean loooong development time, loooong processes and loooong time to market.
You’re also right about the numbers. Those statistics are not all about bad product.
One in particular that comes to my mind is: Jawbone One other personal favorite is Karhoo: The problem was that app codes never seemed to expire and people would use £100 worth in free rides.
There’s also Quibi. Here it wasn’t only product, I admit, it was more of a multiple reasons to fail, but bad product is one of them.
There is a very big list of startups that fail due to bad product or judgement. I joined my company in order to help others avoid this. It’s not my intention to actively not release fast in production. It’s more of: release fast in production quality work.