From Problem to Product-Market Fit: How Mobot Turned Manual Testing Pain into a 60+ Customer Business

The best startups often emerge from the founder’s personal frustrations. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Eden Full Goh shared how her experience as a product manager, surrounded by devices sprawled across her desk, led to building Mobot, a company that’s revolutionizing mobile app testing through robotics.

The Original Pain Point

“There was just no readily available solution that would solve the problem exactly the way that I needed it as a product manager at the time,” Eden recalls. “I had to do a ton of manual testing. We’re talking literal iPads, iPhones, android devices sprawled all over my desk. And I would have to manually use my fingers and just tap through all of these different screens.”

This wasn’t just an occasional inconvenience. “It was just such a high friction, laborious and kind of repetitive task. And I had to do it every week in order to make sure that there were no changes, no bugs that would slip through the cracks,” Eden explains. This frustration ultimately drove her to start Mobot.

Identifying the Market Shift

What made the timing right wasn’t just the pain point – it was a fundamental shift in how mobile apps were evolving. “Our long term vision around Mobot is that we believe that software is becoming increasingly physical the way that humans are actually using products in the real world,” Eden notes. “It requires push notifications, interacting with other applications, interacting with wearables and IoT devices and hardware.”

This complexity meant that traditional software testing approaches were becoming insufficient. As Eden puts it, “It’s not just this cute little beautiful web browser where you can automate some tests with your UI selector in your Dom and in a web app and then call it a day.”

Building Initial Credibility

Early market validation came from Eden’s ability to relate directly to potential customers’ challenges. “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,” she shares. This authentic understanding transformed sales conversations from pitches into collaborative problem-solving sessions.

Structuring for Scale

Rather than pushing for rapid adoption, Mobot focused on building trust through structured pilot programs. “During that pilot we’re asking them about their metrics for success. What are they hoping for, what are the time savings, the opportunities that they’re hoping to unlock, the device coverage, the test case coverage that they’re looking to unlock,” Eden explains.

This methodical approach helped overcome initial skepticism about using robotics for mobile testing. “Building trust is something that is an ongoing process. You don’t just get trust from day one and then that’s it,” she emphasizes.

Evolving with the Market

A key insight that drove Mobot’s growth was understanding that product-market fit isn’t static. “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,” Eden shares.

This mindset helped them stay responsive to changing customer needs while scaling their platform. As Eden explains, “I think 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.”

Looking to the Future

Now with over 60 customers, including major platforms like BeReal and Citizen, Mobot continues to evolve their approach. Their vision extends beyond current capabilities: “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,” Eden shares.