mei 2019

Last week was a wild kayak ride for TestingSaaS:

1. Writing an article on common logging challenges in the cloud for the DevOps content engine Sweetcode.
   
2. Attending Infosecurity.nl in Utrecht at Thursday (meeting a lot of nice people!)
   
3. Start preparing a Mac Forensics course for eForensics Magazine in december
   
4. Helping Dutch startups like TicTag and CoVince with their contentmarketing for CES2019.
   
5. Content writing for the B2B platform where businesses are connected automatically based on mutual interests: BPConnect.
   

And you know what? I love it!
All these activities lead to new ideas and activities, it never stops.
It’s busy, it’s been like a rough kayak ride, but I help companies grow through my content and marketing.

And that’s what counts!

With my curiosity in SaaS, DevOps, Security and data science I write articles, case studies, blog posts, courses and much more.
And as a bonus, I even test the software I describe, so you have Quality Assurance and contentmarketing in 1 deal!
Even better, I do this as a Service with a monthly subscription.

Do you want to know more about the TestingSaaS Testing&Content deal?

Call me:  +31 (0) 6 12 18 52 62

Let’s launch your IT-company or -product with TestingSaaS , have a great week!

who dares wins!

In the beginning of October, I was drawn to a Tweet on Twitter about families across the UK being locked out of their homes, after a system failure at smart security company Yale causing issues with the Yale Smart Living Home App.

Two days before Yale had warned customers “unplanned maintenance” was going to be done, which could cause some “connection issues”. However, on Thursday Yale updated on this, saying the Smart Living Home App is temporarily unavailable due to an “unforeseen issue” during the maintenance work.

This glitch appears to have prevented customers from being able to get in and out of their homes, and from being able to arm and disarm their alarms.

Although Yale claimed via social media nobody was locked in or out of their homes, damage was already done, and social media was flooded with complaints by angry Yale customers.

Why am I so intrigued by this story?

In May this year I went to the Startup Delta in Arnhem to meet and learn about the Dutch startup ecosystem.

Here I met Peter Heersink, founder and CEO of TigTag, a Dutch startup, revolutionizing the smart lock industry with its SmartTag, a smart sticker.

Imagine you have an office with an electronic door lock.

You do not want to use a smartcard or a PIN-code for entering or leaving your office.

What’s the best alternative? 

TicTag’s SmartTag embeds a unique 5-point identifier which gives the object you tag it on a unique ID.

TicTag’s plug&play software you can integrate in your existing app or website.

Open your app/website on your smartphone and select the tag with your smartphone. TicTag’s plug&play software will recognize the ID.

The TicTag API will send this ID to your server/database where it is verified with the object ID, saved at the server/database. If verification is successful, you can lock/unlock your office door. 

You only need your smartphone, the TigTag’s plug&play software on your app/website and the TicTag SmartTag to lock/unlock your office electronic door. 

Now let’s get back to Yale and its Smart Living Home App.

The main issue with the app was its temporarily inavailability leading to alarms going off all the time and people who apparently couldn’t enter or leave their homes.

With TicTag’s SmartTag you do not need a vendor-locked smart lock like you need with the Yale products. TicTag’s SmartTag can work on electronic doors from different vendors.

If your app/website can integrate TicTag’s plug&play you are ready to go.

You also do not need a smartcard and a PIN code anymore to authorize your entrance to your office.

No risk anymore of not getting into your office, because you lost your smartcard or forgot your PIN-code.

Your office, easy to enter with just your smartphone.

And secure, only people authorized and with the app on their smartphone have access to it.

Like I said, TicTag is revolutionizing the smart lock industry, with a sticker!!

I like to travel.

I like books, especially adventure novels like Robinson Crusoe and Marco Polo.

I want to see the world, on- and offline.

I like to write about my experiences.

It was no surprise for my parents that I wanted to study biology.

Unfortunately, I am not a lab rat and, although I tried, I did not become a member of an expedition group to study wildlife in remote places. 

But I am a curious, stubborn biologist, so I started to study the online world.

I found out this is a jungle too, with the same economics and biology as in the real world. Here too, money is made and here too, it’s survival of the fittest. 

I decided to start a career in software testing.

Great stuff, I was allowed to break things and I became good at it.

Gradually I found out I like to work at IT startups, although I made heaps of mistakes, and still do!

Software testing is my passion, but I wanted to combine it with another passion: writing.

The blog TestingSaaS was born, eventually becoming the network TestingSaaS,

engaging with SaaS marketing and copywriting peers globally.

Meanwhwile I was still an employee, but my entrepreneurs blood was boiling, so this year I decided to fulfill my dream: combine testing and writing for SaaS companies with my own marketing startup TestingSaaS.

There is a time you have to dive into the deep and until now I have no regrets. 

Oh, it’s tough, with low monthly revenue, but hey, I’m Cordny, I am going the distance and succeed. Against all odds.

And revenue is going up!!

The last six months I learned a lot about entrepreneurship, marketing, SaaS, blockchain, security, chatbots, virtual reality, communities and a lot of other awesome stuff. And you now what, I love to write blogs, landing pages, one-pagers, case studies etc. So you have time do do your business and make money.

In my whole career I met wonderful people who want to help me succeed with my business. And I want to help them in return. That’s what business is all about.

Mind you, I will make mistakes, just like Marco Polo did,  but I will learn too and help companies not make the same mistakes twice.
I’m now, like Marco Polo, on a mountain overseeing surrounding mountains and valleys, ready for my next adventures.  

I can’t wait to start another week, do you want to join me?

Exploring new territories

When I started my company TestingSaaS in the beginning of this year I knew I was going to explore new territories.
One of these is Virtual Reality, in short VR.
During my search for Dutch VR companies I met Richard van Tilburg and Melanie van Halteren from the innovative startup CoVince.
Their mission? To make learning an adventure again.
How? To experience a personal learning journey by using mobile and VR technology.
You only need an app and a VR headset.

Together with the Utrecht University of Applied Sciences CoVince created a
personal learning journey where students can practice their presentation skills.
Interesting stuff, so I volunteered as a beta tester.

Beta testing the VR app CoVince

Great, what did I get myself into again? 🙂

Since a few weeks I test the app together with a VR headset CoVince very kindly shared with me.
I never tried VR and I experienced I have to do this alone.
Otherwise my girlfriend and our dog think I’m getting nuts. 
Being in a virtual space does not mean you do not have to mind the real physical space, ouch!!
However, it is quite an experience, with people in a virtual space talking and looking at you and even know when you do not look at them. 
Awesome!

It is not only a personal learning journey regarding presentations, but you also learn to behave in a virtual world.
As I already said, I am beta testing, so now and then I find bugs which I can register in a shared Asana board, and these are picked up very quickly.
Kudos Richard!
Like every mobile app test you have to be aware your phone has its unique features which are not always compatible with the software at hand. This makes mobile development difficult.

VR Software Development kits

As a software enthusiast I’m also interested in the tech behind VR, so I learn every day about the VR Software Development Kits (SDKs) like Google VR or the Augmented Reality SDK Vuforia for mobile devices.
For the coders, ff you have some C++ knowledge you can really try this out and you will see quick results, but beware, working with the SDKs is still a skill to be learned.

The journey continues

This VR journey with CoVince increased my appetite.
So, if you are an IT company with a VR/AR app to be tested, let me know.
I am happy to test.

See you in the Virtual World.

Where am I going and what will I see?

Since I launched TestingSaaS as a company in April 2018 every day I receive the same question:

“Why is your company called TestingSaaS?”

And every time I will give them this answer: 

TestingSaaS was created because every time I worked with a startup/scale-up as a test engineer I saw testing was underprioritized compared to development, leading to buggy products and clients walking away. I also saw many startups doing a lot of development, but less marketing, leading to insufficient traction and startups got broke. A shame, because their product was awesome, only poorly marketed.

As a test engineer, avid IT-blogger and community-builder I knew I could help these companies by delivering them parallel services in software testing and (content)marketing.

It’s a recurring pattern in my life, I never was a specialist, but always in between: bioinformatics, test automation, ..
That’s where for me the adventure is, like being on a rough coast between land and sea. That’s why I added this picture to the blog 😉 .

But the name TestingSaaS has nothing to do with marketing.

Oh yes it does! Every marketeer knows it has to test its copy / marketing material before sending it out to prospects. If you do not test you do not know if the prospect likes it, which is a lot of marketing money spend the wrong way.

As a software tester, testing is my daily job.

I can help startups and other IT-companies with testing their marketing efforts and help them choose the correct marketing strategy. This can be done in combination with principles and tools from data science. 

Now you know why I called my company TestingSaaS. 

It’s where software testing meets marketing!

Starting a company, how did it happen?

When I was a kid I loved to experiment and observe what happened.

Attracting birds in the yard with different food, putting the hamster in a maze and see if he could escape,…

I quickly figured out I had to document these observations to compare them with future ones. 

This could be text, but drawings were sometimes even better. 

It was no surprise for my parents I wanted to study biology.

At Uni I did just the same as what I did in my childhood, creating experiments in the wild and documenting my results. Oh, and a whole lot of statistics and informatics 

So, when I graduated I was ready to explore the natural world, but now as a professional. Sadly, at that time no one was waiting for a biologist with a degree in bio-informatics (yeah, really!)

Pragmatic as I was, I started to think: How can I put my scientific knowledge to use in society?

Where to start?

Where to start? Why not the internet?

I searched for jobs with the same skills as I learned as a biologist.

To become a labrat was not my dream, I just was not the right person for it.

Hm, computer programming, why not?

But after a few months I figured out I was only making bugs and had to re-test all the time. 

And then it hit me, why not become a software tester?

A lot of software testing companies were advertising, but I wanted to be part of the best there was in that time: Polteq!

I wrote a letter and blimey, they invited me for an interview, which I am still grateful for.

The rest is history, after my probie years at Polteq I started to work for different IT service companies and had an awesome time at Immune-IT, like Polteq a software testing company.

It all started with Software Testing

At Immune-IT we were all very innovative, but also pragmatic.

Testing web applications was on the rise.

Frontend, webservices, backend, the lot.

Awesome, just like in my biology days I was experimenting again.

And documenting was necessary for test reports etc.

But I wanted more, I wanted to document new testing techniques and new web applications.

Software as a Service was as new field and I wanted to document this.

Especially the identity management area.

The blog TestingSaaS was born.

This blog created a platform where I could document my adventures in testing.
Immune-IT even let me guestblog on their site.

This was just the beginning.

Through Twitter and LinkedIn I could promote my blog leading to guestblogs on Security Affairs and content writing for eForensics Magazine. 

Cordny meets branding and the brand TestingSaaS was born.

Then Content Marketing came around the Corner

Around 2010 I met a lovely woman, Eve Maler, on one of the identity conferences I visited.

She told me she needed a tester to verify the documentation of a new identity protocol, User Managed Access (UMA) she was creating together with other identity wizards at Kantara Initiative.

Awesome, now I could test a web protocol and work in an international setting.

I was UMAnized (I still am!) and I wanted to UMAnize the whole world through my blogs and articles.

Cordny meets product marketing! 

Mind you, I was still working as a software tester during the day and did all these things at night. I loved to write content and engage with my peers.

Starting a Company: TestingSaaS 

Successful years followed for the brand TestingSaaS, but not for the software tester Cordny.

Almost every year I had a different software testing job and I was getting restless and cynical. When in March 2018 my contract at iWelcome was not extended I knew I had to do something,

die of boredom or holster up my guns!

So, starting a company it was! I went to the Dutch Chamber of Commerce and registered the SaaS software testing and content marketing firm TestingSaaS.

Its mission: help SaaS startups and scale-ups improve their software testing and content marketing.

As a software tester I knew a lot of the product under test and I could also document and write about it. Why not combine this?

Now it’s 4 months ago since I started TestingSaaS and I already helped 5 companies successfully and the Brand TestingSaaS is growing.

Starting a Company is never easy

TestingSaaS is determined to 

help more SaaS entrepreneurs improve the quality of their product 

AND positioning themselves in this crowded market. 

Are you a SaaS entrepreneur and you need help? Starting a company is never easy.

Contact me now and let’s talk, WHO DARES WINS!!

A few weeks ago Kinga Odziemek from Linkhouse asked me to help here with a blog explaining tips and tricks for content and social media marketing.
So I did, together with 30+ other marketers from all over the world.

Here’s the link to the blog:

Content marketing in the eyes of 30+ marketers from all over the world.

and here are the tips and tricks about content and social media marketing I gave in this post:

Content marketing is a crowded space. You need authentic content to stand out. But this is not enough, you may have good content, but without a good headline your content won’t get noticed and won’t get visited, resulting in bad marketing results. Next to the headline you have to research what content type your prospect wants to see: a text, a video or maybe an infographic? Videos are hot these days, but a prospect wants details, which can be explained in a text. If they are interested, they will read it. Content distribution is very important for reaching your prospects. For me, LinkedIn is the distribution channel to reach out to business contacts. Here I can post different content types to inform my network of what I am doing.

Kinga and Linkhouse, thank you for asking me to participate in this questionnaire.
It was fun to do and it’s also very nice to see the views of my peers worldwide on content and social media marketing.

Bob is an online marketer for the B2B SaaS company BestofSaaS.
He is in charge of the company’s blog and content marketing.
With software like Google Analytics he noticed there are not a lot of readers
following his posts. It seems visitors read a post, but do not come back for the following posts.
Should Bob be concerned about this?
No!

Bob’s blog is facing the ‘double jeopardy’-concept, a term coined in the 1960’s by a social scientist named William McPhee. In the marketing world the concept got popular thanks to Andrew Ehrenberg.

What is the ‘double jeopardy’-concept exactly?

Double jeopardy

‘Double jeopardy is an empirical law where brands with lower markets shares suffer both from low purchases and low brand loyalty. Simply said, “less popular” brands not only have fewer buyers, but also have fewer loyal customers compared to popular brands.’



It seems the small brand / less popular brand is ‘punished’ twice:
it has fewer buyers, but also fewer loyal customers compared to the more popular brands.

Examples of double jeopardy in the consumer business (B2C) are described in the paper Discovering how brands grow by David Reay Corkindale (2011). A famous one is the washing powder example, also discussed in Byron Sharp’s book ‘How brands grow’.

Double jeopardy and SaaS online marketing

Great! Now we have examples of double jeopardy in the consumer business.
But does this also apply in B2B online marketing?

Yes, only the measurement is different. You do not analyze buyers, but visitors.

A less known blog does have less visitors than a popular blog and market share is therefore also low.
You can’t blame a blogger like Bob for this, the blog does not have yet the market share, so it has lower visitors. This is a natural phase, and you should not be worried about this.

How can Bob improve the market share?
By making a great post or rank higher in SEO rankings.
Bob has to improve his site by testing which content is read, which design for his blog is preferred and what SEO strategy to be used.
If Bob follows these steps, the chance of visitors going to follow his blog are increased and the blog’s loyalty base is increased too.

Conclusion

Don’t wonder about why the visitors of your blog are not coming back.
Accept this as a part of your blog’s evolution.
Start testing different content types and strategize your SEO.

If done properly, the blog’s loyalty base will grow and
you don’t have to worry anymore about the ‘double jeopardy’.

A few months ago Mike Kawula, serial entrepreneur and host of the EntrepreneursGSD Podcast asked me to share my method of LinkedIn lead generation to our fellow entrepreneurs.
I was honored Mike asked me for his podcast.
And I had an awesome time doing it.

Here is the podcast:

https://entrepreneursgsd.com/015-how-to-use-linkedin-for-lead-generation/

And here are the actions I advised for lead generation with LinkedIn:

Spend a minimum of 20 minutes per day on LinkedIn Publisher and in the main feed leaving meaningful comments on posts.
I prefer 15-20 minutes in the morning, in the afternoon and in the evening. This way you can properly engage with the people from all over the world who post during these times.

Also, test sharing different content types (text, video, picture, combination of these etc.) to see the level of engagement you receive. LinkedIn gives metadata about your post: Likes, Reader info (demographics, title, etc.), Shares etc.
This metadata is very important if you want to write for a specific prospect, say a Founder in the USA. By looking at the User demographics you can see which posts are read by these prospects.

Mind you, Likes are nice, but don’t say anything about the reader, so for lead generation worthless.
Shares on the other hand are worthy because you can immediately see which user shared it. Could be a prospect?

Mike and I recommend that for seven days, you make a goal of creating a specific number of posts (with different content types) around a topic relevant to your industry. Then, based on how people have responded, tweak your approach and spend another seven days posting. After a month of doing this, you should see your engagement start to skyrocket.

As already said, doing the podcast was fun and I thank Mike Kawula for giving me the opportunity of sharing my ideas on LinkedIn Lead Generation.

New week, new adventures..

Since April 2018 I enjoy life as a SaaS content writer, marketer and tester.

Bootstrapping all the way.

I knew what I was going to get myself into

…it’s tough…it’s mean…it’s a long way to the top!

but yeah, I’m kicking’ A$$ and doing what I love to do.

It can be hustling, just like Gary Vaynerchuk says and it certainly is not for the faint hearted ones.

HARD WORK pays off !!!

Sometimes you lose, sometimes you win..but I was used to that, and nobody beat me down.

It was not the question IF I would become a SaaS content man, it was WHEN!

I have a lot of help from my peers Cedric Debono, Drayton Bird, Linwood Austin, Cory Warfield, Jake Tital, Gary Yau Chan, Maite Ortega, and many more.

THANK YOU!

I could not serve my clients without you, my LinkedIn network.

So, here I am, ready for another week.

Dear SaaS company,

tell me,

HOW CAN I HELP YOU

reach the top in your market?

You know,

it’s a long way to the top if you want to play rock ’n Roll !!!