Today I want to talk about KickBeta. Don't worry, this is not self-promotion as KickBeta died many years ago. Also, yes, it's related to my life at Apple, so keep reading.

The Origin 

It was 2013 and I was working as a dev in Italy. I had done mobile development in the past and I had this idea to help mobile devs tests their app. Testing an app wasn't easy and still isn't. With many device types, screen sizes, different OS, and different demographic, you just cannot cover it all. That was when I thought about KickBeta: a crowdtesting platform for mobile applications. At the time TestFlight existed and wasn't owned by Apple yet, and anyway I was trying to solve a different problem: find people to test your app, not just distributing to people you already knew. In return, you could gift testers with the app for free at the end of the test, or gift cards, or money.

The $33000 Seed 

I applied for a seed grant from the main Italian TELCO (Telecom Italia) and to my surprise, after a presentation and a phone interview I got it. The story on how I found out involves me breaking an ankle (I can share more if you are curious). Then I quit my job (my gf was maaaaad) and I jumped on working on KickBeta full time.

The Startup School 

After winning the $33K grant and building an MVP I flew to San Francisco for Mind the Bridge Startup School. Turns out when I found out I was accepted I broke a tooth (this is becoming a recurring theme, good news comes with a price in my life). Fate wanted that our startup school next door neighbors were working on the same thing, with $1M dollars in funding already. I came back to Italy 3 months later demotivated and that plus choosing a bad team to work with, led to KickBeta dying.

The Apple Interview 

During the last round of Apple interview I had, few months later, with my future Director at Apple, we chatted about his startups experience and mine. He was very interested about KickBeta and since I initially joined the Siri QA (testing) team I do believe that they counted KickBeta as meaningful experience and it gave me that extra push over other candidates.

If you are interested the KickBeta video is still on YT: https://youtube.com/watch?v=BTT13v78dBI. That was 10 years ago, OMG.

That’s it for this week!

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Luca