A Practical Guide to Testing MicroSaaS Products Post-launch

Software testing is considered the enemy when building Micro-SaaS products. In fact, Marc Lou, a highly successful entrepreneur in the Micro-SaaS community with over $1M in revenue, stated that he doesn’t do any testing when building his products.

While that might make sense when validating your idea, how about post-launch when you’ve gained traction? What do you do?

How can you continue adding features quickly without breaking your product and impacting customer satisfaction?

Start with User Stories

The likelihood that you created a user story before you built your product is very low. And if you did, you’re one in a million. To get started with testing your product though, I’d recommend that you create one. For two reasons:

1. User stories help you see your product through your customers’ eyes, revealing what truly matters to them.
2. They simplify conducting risk assessments, making it easier to prioritise tests since you’re building with limited resources.

And it’s super easy to create, especially with the plethora of AI tools available today. You can prompt any AI chat tool with your product description, chatGPT, Claude, Gemini, whichever you prefer. Prompt it to generate a user story.

Here’s the prompt we use at my startup, Edubaloo, to generate user stories for our features.

Of course, you shouldn’t blindly accept everything AI generates. You know your products and users better. Make sure to review its suggested story and use the parts that truly reflect your users’ needs.

Now that you have your user story, it’s time to conduct a risk assessment.

Conducting a Risk Assessment

I know! It sounds like a bureaucratic decision that requires several levels of managerial approvals before it can be implemented. Don't worry; it's not that deep.

When building a MicroSaaS, speed is of the essence, so here’s how to keep things simple:

1. Create a basic risk matrix. A risk matrix is a table that helps you prioritize your testing based on the likelihood of happening or the severity of the consequences.
2. Use AI to brainstorm on potential risks Don’t worry, I’ll give you a prompt for that.
3. Again, use AI to evaluate the risks and plot the risk matrix.

Again, don't take AI-generated content at face value. You are the experts here. Evaluate the AI’s reasons for its assessment and decide whether they are valid. Then, based on that, create the final version of your risk assessment.

We’re done with assessing potential risks and prioritizing. Next is automation.

Automate Automate Automate

Your user’s satisfaction is your top priority. That’s what keeps money coming in. So, while you want to stay competitive and add as many features as possible, you don’t want to break existing features that would make your product completely unusable. And that’s where automation and regression tests come in.

Now that we know what to prioritize from our risk assessment, we can keep things simple. Here’s how.

1. Start small. Focus on the most critical tasks which you already know from your risk assessment.
2. Use AI to generate test cases. It reduces the likelihood of overlooking a critical test case and saves you the mental rigor that comes with it.
3. Do only Unit and Integration tests. They require less time to implement and can be easily generated by AI coding assistants.

You can use whatever automation platform you’re familiar with. I use GitHub Actions, it’s easy to set up, and they have great community support.

Monitor Smartly and Listen to Your Users

No, you don’t have to setup comprehensive monitoring infrastructure like prometheus or even data dog. You can use a free monitoring tool like Uptime Kuma. It has a user friendly dashboard to configure your API monitoring and notifications and alerts that supports a wide range of messaging platforms.

For user behaviour monitoring, Microsoft Clarity is a terrific choice. You can monitor user activities with heatmaps, giving you insight into what’s most important to your users and allowing you to improve your products and maintain high customer satisfaction. Just remember to update your terms and agreements to cover the data you're collecting. You want to be transparent with your users.

Finally, make it easy for users to reach you. Whether it’s through email or social media, utilize a channel that you can respond promptly to. You can also send occasional surveys to get feedback on how to improve your product.

Keep Track of Issues

Writing code and handling operations simultaneously can be challenging, so issue tracking can take a back seat. But to keep your users satisfied, you have to ensure you’re on top of the bugs and features they request.

To keep track of bug reports or feature requests, use:

1. Notion
2. Google Forms
3. Zapier

Create a database to track your issues with Notion Then create a Google Form that your users can submit issues to or request features with, then use Zapier to integrate Notion with Google Forms. When users submit a bug or request a feature through your Google Forms, it gets automatically added to Notion.

No need for manual management!

Godspeed to You

A large part of the micro saas community frowns at software testing, encouraging speed of development instead.

While that could be true when you're still trying to find product market fit, you should invest more into reliability when you’ve gotten more traction. We’ve demonstrated in this guide that software testing doesn’t have to be time-consuming.

By using AI in creating your user stories, conducting risk assessment, and automating your tests, you can build reliable micro saas products without sacrificing development velocity.

And to that, I say Godspeed to you!

Reference

How to Automate Your Regression Testing
AI vs Human: Test Case Generation
A Guide to Conducting Risk Assessment
I Launched a SaaS in 3 Days with 3 Shortcuts