AppQuality, Italian crowdtesting platform founded in 2015 in Cremona, continues along its path towards and closes a round of investments of 3.5 million euros. CEO Luca Manara tells how they have worked to achieve this result and how they will work in the coming months by investing the new capital available.

What do you think were the factors that led you to this success?

An awful lot of much resilience, perseverance, discipline, confidence in the future and hard work. Every valuable result requires a lot of commitment, an agile, lean approach and a lot, a lot great deal of execution: there are no shortcuts. It was hard, but it was hard from the beginning, when we still didn’t even know if there was a market for what we were proposing, when the experiments we were doing didn’t give results, when the first prospects were slamming the door in our faces. But every closed door was something new that we were learning. And at the next door we would change our positioning, study the value proposition better and refine the compelling reason for buying.
Without doubt, metrics are also important: you have to go on the market, collect indicators and customers, you are not doing something of value if someone is not willing to pay for it, there are no free lunches.

How will you use the money you raise?

The entry of P101 will allow us to invest in the technology of our platform and therefore to offer companies quantitative and qualitative tools to develop the best apps and digital solutions. This will allow us to further increase the high quality and level of service we guarantee to our customers and to start working towards international expansion.
Today the User Experience drives the digital economy: companies compete in terms of UX innovation and quality in the development of digital products becomes a critical success factor. We’re entering this very field that will be increasingly central in the years to come.

Will your team change too?

The team will evolve a lot. We need to double it in a few months. Surely the figures that we will insert are both on the commercial side, to push the rate of acquisition of new customers, and also on the product development side, to further improve the services offered, the effectiveness, efficiency and quality of our solution.

Taking into consideration The Coronavirus, and the consequent push towards digital in Italy, what kind of impact are they having and what kind will they have on your business?

It’s Hard to give a precise answer: it’s a stormy sea, but I like to say that a flat sea is not for experienced seamen. In any case we are mainly experiencing positive effects. Many verticals are investing in digitization and in particular the fintech world. Many large banks are accelerating the development of their digital solutions because, if it was not clear enough before, these will be the main channel for customer acquisition and management. It is sufficient it to say that, according to some research done, 75% of the users of these solutions in the last month are new

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