6 Go-to-Market Lessons from Mobot’s Journey to Transform Mobile App Testing

When your solution seems counterintuitive to potential customers, how do you build trust and drive adoption? In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Eden Full Goh, founder and CEO of Mobot, shared insights from scaling a robotics platform for mobile app testing from initial pilot customers to over 60 clients including BeReal and Citizen.

Here are six key go-to-market lessons from Mobot’s journey:

1. Turn Personal Pain Points into Credibility Before founding Mobot, Eden experienced firsthand the challenges of mobile app testing as a product manager. “I had to do a ton of manual testing. We’re talking literal iPads, iPhones, android devices sprawled all over my desk,” she shares. This experience became a powerful tool in early customer conversations because “I knew how to relate to them because I had personally experienced this pain working as a product manager very adjacent and very close to engineers myself.”
2. Build Trust Through Structured Pilots Rather than pushing for immediate full deployments, Mobot focused on building trust through pilot programs. “Building trust is something that is an ongoing process. You don’t just get trust from day one and then that’s it,” Eden explains. Their approach centered on defining clear success metrics upfront and demonstrating value through structured pilot engagements.
3. Address Market Skepticism Head-On When pursuing an unconventional approach, acknowledge and address skepticism directly. “Sometimes some of the pushback that we get is people are like, why are you using a physical mechanical robot, a hardware solution, to solve a software problem? That seems weird and unintuitive and overkill,” Eden reveals. Rather than avoiding these objections, Mobot reframes them by highlighting evolving market complexity: “Really the reason why Mobot exists is because the world is becoming more complex.”
4. Maintain Continuous Product-Market Fit Eden emphasizes that finding product-market fit isn’t a one-time achievement: “You have to as a company continue to find Product market Fit every day. I don’t think it’s like a one and done, that’s it, you checked it off the box and you’re good to go.” This mindset helps companies stay responsive to changing market conditions and customer needs.
5. Be Transparent About Market Alternatives While many startups avoid discussing competition, Mobot takes a different approach. Eden acknowledges that “even though we at Mobot don’t think we have direct competitors… there are companies that are building robots, there are companies that are building mobile app emulation solutions.” This transparency helps build credibility with sophisticated buyers who appreciate a realistic market assessment.
6. Focus on Behavior Change Through Education When introducing novel solutions, focus on driving behavior change through education. “I think the biggest challenge that we have is trying to encourage this behavior change and this mindset shift that needs to happen as our world becomes more complex,” Eden explains. This approach helps potential customers understand not just what your solution does, but why traditional approaches may no longer be sufficient.

These lessons culminate in Mobot’s vision for the future: “We’d really like to make it as accessible as possible that anyone around the world can just log into the mobot.io platform and be able to connect to a robot live and be able to control that robot and automate testing for exactly their needs.”

For founders building category-creating companies, Mobot’s experience demonstrates the importance of grounding go-to-market strategy in authentic customer understanding while methodically addressing market skepticism. Success comes not from avoiding difficult conversations about your approach, but from building trust through structured proof points and maintaining a clear vision for the future.

The key is to recognize, as Eden puts it, that “you have to use the right tool for the right job. And if the world is getting more complex, then the toolkit that you are building as a company needs to also get more complex in order to address those challenges in the world.”