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From Manual Testing to Mechanical Innovation: How Mobot is Reshaping Mobile App Testing

Most founders build companies to solve problems they’ve observed. Eden Full Goh built Mobot to solve a problem she’d personally experienced: the tedious, time-consuming process of manual mobile app testing.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Eden, founder and CEO of Mobot, shared how her experience as a product manager shaped her company’s go-to-market approach. “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 explains. “I had to do a ton of manual testing. We’re talking literal iPads, iPhones, android devices sprawled all over my desk.”

This firsthand experience proved invaluable when approaching early customers. Rather than leading with technology, Eden focused on relating to the daily challenges faced by product managers and QA teams. “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. “I was speaking their language. I was able to refer to technology and processes as they were doing it as well.”

This authentic approach helped Mobot secure prominent clients like Citizen and BeReal. But landing these logos required more than just understanding the problem – it required building trust through a methodical process. “Building trust is something that is an ongoing process. You don’t just get trust from day one and then that’s it,” Eden notes. The company implemented pilot engagements focused on specific success metrics, allowing potential customers to validate the solution’s effectiveness.

While many startups avoid discussing competition, Mobot took a different approach. Eden acknowledges that while no one else is building robotics infrastructure for mobile testing, there are adjacent solutions customers might consider. This transparency helps establish credibility with sophisticated buyers who appreciate a realistic market assessment.

The company’s biggest go-to-market challenge has been changing industry perceptions about hardware solutions for software problems. “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 this objection, Mobot addresses it head-on by highlighting how mobile applications have evolved beyond simple web-browser functionality. “Really the reason why Mobot exists is because the world is becoming more complex,” Eden explains. “You do have to deal with the real world scenarios, like what cell phones are people using? Do they have cellular access or is it WiFi access? Are they offline in airplane mode?”

This complexity has helped make the case for Mobot’s approach. As Eden puts it, “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.”

The company’s vision extends beyond just providing a testing solution. “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.

Mobot’s journey illustrates how deeply understanding customer pain points, combined with transparency about market alternatives and a clear vision for the future, can help overcome initial skepticism about novel technical approaches. For founders building category-creating companies, Eden’s experience suggests that success comes not from avoiding difficult conversations about your approach, but from grounding them in authentic customer understanding and clear market insights.