The First Customer - How to Build a QA Army Without Drowning in Bugs with Founder Ben Fellows

In this episode, I was lucky enough to interview Ben Fellows, CEO and founder of Loop QA.

Ben shares how his company addresses the growing need for highly skilled, mid-to-senior QA professionals in a market lacking structured training and clear entry paths. Loop QA focuses on embedding experienced testers directly into teams at startups and enterprises, filling a critical talent gap with candidates who bring technical expertise, product understanding, and emotional intelligence. Ben explains how many successful QA professionals arrive from unconventional paths—often self-taught or transitioning from roles in development or customer success—and highlights the industry's broader need to recognize QA as a strategic, trust-building function rather than a final checkpoint.

Ben also opens up about his personal journey into entrepreneurship, shaped by watching his mother run her own business and a brief stint in politics that led him to the fast-paced world of startups. He describes the early days of Loop QA, including the unconventional strategy of offering free QA services to build a client base, and how that experience shaped the company’s sales and growth philosophy. He reflects on the evolving nature of QA’s role within organizations, the emotional toll of being seen as the “last line of defense,” and the importance of creating a healthy quality culture.

Whether you're trying to hire QA talent, break into the field, or simply want to better understand the mindset behind it, this episode of The First Customer delivers clarity, context, and plenty of relatable moments!

Guest Info:
Loop QA
http://www.workwithloop.com

Ben Fellows' LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-f-44778426/

Connect with Jay on LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayaigner/
The First Customer Youtube Channel
https://www.youtube.com/@thefirstcustomerpodcast
The First Customer podcast website
https://www.firstcustomerpodcast.com
Follow The First Customer on LinkedIn
http://www.linkedin.com/company/the-first-customer-podcast/

Transcript

[00:00:28] Jay: Hi everyone. Welcome to the First Customer Podcast. My name's Jay Aigner. Today I am lucky enough to be joined by a fellow QA brother in arms. His name is Ben Fellows, CEO, and founder at Loop qa.

Ben, how are you buddy?

[00:00:39] Ben: Happy to be here, man. Looking forward to it.

Not as happy as I'm to have you. I've had a couple, do you know the abstracted guys? actually off the top of my head.

[00:00:47] Jay: They're, another qa, firm down in Uruguay, and it was one of the coolest conversations I ever had, just being able to kind of talk shop with another QA agency owner. So tell me a little bit about Loop QA before we get started.

What do you guys do?

[00:01:01] Ben: Yeah, man. Well, first off, I love the podcast voice 'cause I also have a podcast, voice of respect. anytime someone has a

[00:01:07] Jay: You gotta turn it on. You gotta turn it on, man.

[00:01:09] Ben: all right. So Loop QA is a pure play onshore QA shop. We specialize in kind of mid to senior embedded qa. basically the gap that we're trying to fill is really the lack of overall training and staffing when it comes to the QA space.

As you very well know, it's a position that every technology company in the country, if not world has yet, particularly in the States, you basically have almost no feeder system other than a couple, like 10 week. Bootcamps that I just don't think are really prepping people to be successful. And so we try to find people with, you know, four or five years of experience that are really top notch in their field, passionate about what they do.

We go through a couple of thousand, applicants every single time to do that, and then we staff them either in halftime or full-time engagements and we work with startups enterprise. it's been a journey, but we really loving every second of it.

[00:01:52] Jay: Beautiful. I have the same, you know, we get the same questions a lot, I'm sure, and my number one question that I get from everybody, and I would love to hear your answer. How do you get into qa? Right? How, like, that's the question and you answered it kind of, but like, there's no real way.

But like if somebody came to you off the street today and said, Hey man, how do we, how do I start in qa? How does my kids start in qa? How does my friend start in Loop QA, who has interest? Like, what is their first step with what is out there today other than, you know, loop qa.

[00:02:23] Ben: Yeah, so there's really, it's challenging is the short answer. you know, today there's no 12-year-old who says, I want to be a qa. Like, I wanna be a firefighter. I wanna be an astronaut. What's really fascinating about QA as an industry is it sits really between this fascinating nexus of like product and dev, right?

Where the best QA in my experience, understand code. They understand architecture, they understand best practice. They also oftentimes don't want to just be put in a box where they have to write code all day. They wanna understand product, they wanna understand business, and they also have this emotional intelligence side that, allows them to really think outside of the traditional lens of what a dev might be.

How do you get into that? you kind of more than anything have to either be lucky enough to join a team that's really got their stuff together and they're able to bring you up to speed and train you or, I've met just a lot of really bright self-taught people who kind of get this bug.

They're either in customer success or they're in product, or maybe they're a dev and they do a lot of time and energy research on their own and they basically can. Teach themselves. the reality is if you go to a computer science degree or something like that, maybe you get a course on testing, but the vast majority don't.

and so really it's this hidden industry that's remarkably lucrative if you do it well, that just people don't realize like how close they can be to being really successful at it. So, luck, I guess, and sort of opportunities is the reality of where we stand as an industry.

[00:03:47] Jay: Yeah, and I think, I mean, I got into it by trying to be a developer, but then not really to be a developer. Right? It's like I love writing code and I love, I. Projects, and I love doing stuff, but as I was going through that degree in the back of the head, my head the whole time, I'm thinking, I don't want somebody sitting over my shoulder like watching me do this because I don't think I'm good enough at it to like do it as a profession.

And I kind of got bailed out by doing QA and it's almost like this interesting thought of like, is there some. point where you could tell developers like, Hey, it could not be shitty all the time and you could not hate your job if you really enjoy the code side of things and you really enjoy, you know, being part of software development, but you don't want this giant monkey on your back of like having to build it yourself.

So like it, it is an interesting kind of like, I always tell people like. Well, I was just a bad developer. That's how I ended up in qa. So, let's ask the real questions though, 'cause I have a million about QA and everything obviously we could get into. But tell me where did you grow up and how did that impact you being an entrepreneur?

[00:04:50] Ben: So kind of a stereotype story. I think in many ways. I grew up with a mom who ran her own company for 30 years and kind of got to watch that experience. Never wanted to get into business. I always wanted to get into politics. I always, you know, like West Wing kid, I don't know if you ever watched that TV show, but.

The goal was always Capitol Hill or the White House was lucky enough after college to get a job on the Capitol Hill and then found it, just quite hierarchical in nature, where you're gonna do the same job for two years. Very similar to corporate, probably in many ways. was just like, okay, this is not the pace that I'm really going for.

and then had the opportunity to join a startup, which. What? What was really cool is you learn all these lessons, right? Growing up in a family when you have an entrepreneur for a parent that you don't realize that you're learning and absorbing, and then you have the opportunity to join a startup, and a lot of those things sort of come back into your life in a way that you probably don't appreciate until you look back on them.

And that was very much my experience where I never really was passionate about business. But then I got to join a startup, sort of build a plane and learn how to play it at the same time experience. And suddenly all these things, all these observations, all these areas that I really got to see, my parents do was kind of suddenly top of mind and very much something I appreciate.

[00:06:02] Jay: What kind of business did your mom run?

[00:06:04] Ben: Regional magazine media company. So it was, she, you know, she did a fantastic job of, and one of the things I most respect of, you know, watching her was how much innovation, right? So, eighties, nineties, it's a magazine. Internet comes around, it's a like a digital media product. And the website and people were still well, this can never really touch the magazine.

Late 2000 tens comes around and now the website is kind of like. Peer-to-peer with the magazine and just watching her innovate her way through really world changing things in the media landscape, particularly being in print, was just such a amazing inspiration that like, yeah, like as a 12-year-old, they're like, okay, that's really cool and you're hearing and you just don't process.

And then like you look back and there's so many parallels to, you know. Print facing the internet, where now we're in computer science facing AI and these other tools, right? And trying to figure out like, okay, those same levels of innovation and disruption that happens every 10 years. It's just different industries, and we happen to be in one right now that's facing that.

And so you can pull a lot of inspiration from it.

[00:07:07] Jay: I think we might be brothers. I think we didn't know this until like my mom ran the regional phone directory and she ran the newspaper in town and then she moved to doing websites and she started doing a bunch of other things,

anyway, no, but I think we maybe lived a lot of the same lessons in life. I had a big printing press in my dining room, like the size of a boss

[00:07:28] Ben: I never got quite there, but yeah, no, definitely.

[00:07:31] Jay: Yeah, it was, a very interesting time to grow up. So tell me how got to you, but how did you get into qa?

[00:07:39] Ben: Yeah, so it, I think like so many people, it's like, look, you're either, you know, a dev who sort of gets into it, or you're a customer success person who kind of gets pushed into it. Or you're someone who was part of a startup, kind of get to witness firsthand the challenges of kind of death by a thousand cuts.

The sort of emotional component that took, like high flowing emotional team all the way down to just like shell shocked. And, I just got fascinated by two aspects of it. One, it was super, super hard to fill. Now this was pre a lot of remote jobs and stuff like that, so it wasn't. You know, in Traverse City, Michigan, a huge waiver pool of people who had ever really done QI before, but you just get all kinds of resumes.

And then the second was when we outsourced it, I felt like I worked with a lot of people who knew buzzwords and, but the critical thinking, analytical ability and that sort of product oriented component, like they had struggled to really understand our product. And so. To me it was like, you know, four years of doing that.

Then starting to say, okay, I wanna start my own company. what are some of the challenges that I've seen at this company? This one just being such a recurring thing because it's cheesy, but it's like, you know, we provide, you know, technical solutions for an emotional problem, like QA at its root, just like software development.

But QA so much more is about trust more than anything. It's about the trust between a client and their customer. And it working. Like they say you're gonna work in these mission critical situations. We are in events and, you know, just feeling like, okay, if I've spent four years trying to find people who are good at this and can't, there has to be a market there.

and so dove in head first.

[00:09:15] Jay: Yeah, I mean, we are the last line of defense. You know, before people's very hard work goes into the hands of their customer. So,

[00:09:22] Ben: Yeah. Well, and it's funny, I have a lot of opinions about the last line of defense as a metaphor, but we can talk about that maybe at some point

[00:09:28] Jay: Well, tell me what is your, I mean, how different is that from your viewpoint?

[00:09:32] Ben: So there's a lot of arguments on the internet about sort of this relationship between testing and quality. And I think there's a lot of people on the internet who get a little bit too theological about it, where they're just trying to like make high theory arguments, but like. One of the fascinating things that I find that burns a lot of people out from being in QA is the emotional stress of feeling like you're the last line of defense.

And this concept of ownership of bugs and it feeling like, oh, if there's bugs in production, that's because QA failed in some capacity. And I always try to balance the pragmatic reality of trying to, you know, say that's a lot of how org structures are. Created like, it's this weird concept of like the dev breaks something or there's bad acceptance criteria or something.

And then like the last line of defense is also like when you turn right around the first line that gets the arrows from the customer and the blame from the business side and stuff like that. And, it's just exhausting for people, like on the front lines doing QA to have that level of like ownership.

And so I think that there's. The balancing act of like have pride in your work, which is great. You should care. You should have pride in your work. You should view yourself as the last line of defense. But when you turn around and kind of face the oncoming arrows, I feel like everyone should equally take those and be self-reflective.

It shouldn't just be, oh, I was the last line of defense, therefore I'm the sort of first person to take an arrow. Which maybe is not what you're saying, but I've just seen those sort of concepts so intertwined in sort of an unhealthy way in some capacity.

[00:11:05] Jay: I totally agree. I agree. I agree that it's a statement in my head that's evolved over the years because there was certainly, and I'm sure when you were coming up, it was much more of a us versus them mentality between dev and qa. And I will definitely say in my 20 years.

Ish in the industry. it's gotten a lot better. I mean, it was literally us versus them when we first like, it was like, oh my God, these QA guys are the worst. They're finding all these bugs and all my stuff. And then, you know, heaven forbid. So not only were you getting bitching at bitched out for finding bugs pre-production, but then you were getting bitched at for bugs post-production as well.

So it was just this very much like you're saying, like there were, it is a built-in blame mechanism basically, and a lot of older. Minded companies, I think still work on in that capacity. but I think it's gotten a lot better. I think it's a much more collaborative environment. I mean, at the end of the day, I do think it's still like, Hey, these are the last guys to check it.

Why did they not find it before it went out? And you know, just personally, I think there is a little bit of, I. There's a little bit of truth to why that is and why it should stay that way, and it gives you a little bit of power as kind of the gate of stuff to production, right? And it's if you have the power to stop it, and you have the power to hold a release for a couple days, and they give you that power, with that comes a little bit of responsibility

[00:12:20] Ben: Well, and I think you're touching on a key point, right? Like the more you can enable the ownership of what quality is for someone, the more that they should take responsibility for that, right? So it's like if you put that person in a position where they're signing off on white BOXX testing, they're able to hold releases, they're able to create change in the org, they're able to do these things, then they should absolutely be held responsible in that sense.

On the other hand, an organization who maybe doesn't quite have that healthy of a quality culture, but then turns around and says to their sort of. Tester who was previously a customer success person, who they're really not putting in a position to be successful. Hey, why when you ran these 500 manual tests, did you miss this one?

A case that like probably should have been part of maybe every three regressions or some other version of that, right? Like that's kind of that balancing act, and I think you nailed it on the head there.

[00:13:05] Jay: I totally, I think that's fair. I mean, so how do you view. Personal brand that you've built up versus Loop QA itself? Are they one and the same? Are you the Loop QA guy? Are you kind of consciously putting content out, you know, for your playwright ambassador stuff to kind of push that? Does it all go back to the company?

Like what, how, what do you view your job as the CEO and your personal branding, to the company and to yourself? How do you view it?

[00:13:33] Ben: Yeah. with a lot of anxiety, is kind of the main thing. No, I think that my journey. Particularly when it comes to marketing, branding has been kinda an interesting one. I built the company off of what I would call brute force, right? Just basically like if you want a customer, email a thousand people and you'll find a customer, right?

some people might call that spamming, but at the same point, like I just think that we live in a world with a tremendous amount of noise, and unless you can create world-class content that stands out, you alternatively just need to use brute force. And if you do it with good intentions and good value, and you're not selling a scam, then.

That's the world of sales that we live in, right? what I will say is having then tried to build my own personal brand and figure that out, I would hope that they're slightly different in the sense that, you know, I think no one's personal brand should be entirely tied to their company because companies are finite resources.

While we also have these kind of long careers at the same point, it's already paid dividends, which has been really interesting. It's just not predictable. and so what's fascinating about building a personal brand versus like sales systems is. We've had some amazing opportunities, but you can't predict are they gonna walk in the door tomorrow or are three gonna walk in the door next week or so forth.

And so, you're kind of touching on, I think a really big open-ended question for us in 2025 is like, okay, so what does personal brands mean? Like one of the thought processes I've had is like, well, I have this great team of amazing QA people, none of them are posting. Content, should they all have their brands, right?

Like should everyone at a company have their own personal brand? and that would probably help the company, but at the same point, you can't really tell people what to do with their personal brand. And so, kind of a long-winded answer in many ways, but best I got for you on that one.

[00:15:12] Jay: Nah. No, I think that's fair. I mean, there is, I don't think there's a clear cut answer and it's, yeah, I think personal branding inbound is similar to referrals, right? Like you don't, you just, you can do your best and you can make really good impressions, and sometimes the timing works up where you get clients from it, and sometimes it just.

It doesn't, and there's periods where it happens, somewhere it doesn't. who was your first customer man? Who was the first customer at Loop QA?

[00:15:36] Ben: a company called Vista Suite Company, me my first ever check. So I was super naive when I started my company. So basically the very short answer was, I was dating a girl and we were very much like, had a first world problem where we both owned houses. And so I was like, Hey, I'm gonna start a company, sell my house and just move in with you.

now luckily the girl became my wife, but it was kind of one of those situations where that seed money, which was not much, it was like $20,000 became the sort of seed of this company. So then I went and hired a guy that I knew from high school and was like, Hey, I'm starting this company and. Knowing really nothing about sales at that point, I was like, well, we have no brand.

We can't sell anything. We have to just build a brand. So I emailed a bunch of startups and basically said, Hey, I'll work for free for you for three months as a beta program I'm doing to start a QA company. And I got 10 ish startups that all signed up for free after three months. And then I converted after three months, about five out of the 10 to paying customers.

And that's what became the seed of it. And so, realistically didn't have to do that. Like I really don't think that like a company needs that day one. I think there's enough people will have your problem that you can just find paying customers, but I. that was kind of my lesson and it's just funny, right?

It's not till you basically run outta money that then you learn how to make money. Like I probably in some ways regret having the 20,000 to start the company because it wasn't until I had like $500 left that I was like, oh, now I need to like, figure out how this all pays for itself. Right? And, very stereotype in that sense.

But yeah, day one got a thousand dollars check from a company called Vista Suite. remember just. Being like, this makes no sense, but it worked. And here we are five, six years later.

[00:17:21] Jay: So who is your customer today? And kind of how has that changed over time?

[00:17:25] Ben: it's wildly changed. So we serve kind of two core customers today. one is, I would say startups that have just raised their series A or series B. Oftentimes those people are being told they have to hire and grow very fast. QA is a remarkably headache positioned to hire for, at scale and done well.

and so in those situations we're either their first QA hire that's full time. We are brought in to help create some kind of like team around the QA and scaling out their team. The second is what I would say like enterprise or legacy customers. Those are existing QA teams oftentimes, but they need to be, had to modernize and they bring us in to basically either, either work on a specific project, oftentimes automation related.

It might be transitioning a selenium suite to playwright or some version of that. Or it might just be, Hey, we have an amazing team, but we just need a couple people to kind of help beachhead how they rethink about qa. And so. Those are the kind of two core personas that we go after. I'd say the biggest change from day one was, you know, size and stability of the company.

Where I came from was sort of unstable seed based startups that were amazing, but unfortunately not the most stable of companies. They flame out and stuff like that. alternatively now we're really focused on like world-class startups that are doing some amazing things and then some amazing enterprise companies that have just been super successful and just looking to modernize.

[00:18:46] Jay: What would you do if you had to start over tomorrow? Same company, same line of business, same everything. You'll come into the office tomorrow, start this new business

[00:18:56] Ben: Yeah. I'd probably go back to tried and true of cold D on LinkedIn automation, which is not the most like sexy of things to say. that's the world that I just knew how to do well. basically I have a couple lines of thoughts. I think it's fairly straightforward to get to like a million dollars in revenue.

It's remarkably challenging to you. It's like five to 10, and I say that not to sound like confident or cocky or whatever, but like. If you're in an industry that has a, people's houses are on fire, you can use brute force to get enough people's houses are on fire to at least have a somewhat. Stable company, you're never gonna become, you know, a 40, 50 person company in that world.

And so I think that in many ways, like I just probably roll back that playbook. Like, Hey, go find enough people who are, you know, they need water, right? And just sell 'em water. IE like bunch of bugs in production. They're actively trying to figure out how QA works and it's just. Luck on timing, and then from there, niche down, build out relationships and get back to where we are today.

[00:20:00] Jay: Man, we say a lot of the same stuff. I have the same line, about a million. I think it's, I, yeah, and I've always had that caveat that like, obviously it's not easy, but there is, a lot of truth to like, you know, being able to sell a. Water in the desert, like you're gonna find enough people that need it.

I love that.

[00:20:17] Ben: Yeah, there's a quote from a guy, and this is gonna be super, you know, cliche guy Alex or Moie, who's like kind of one of those get rich fast guys. But he basically, he has a fun analogy, which is like, what's the most important thing for a hot dog? Stand to be successful. And he basically says like, most people are like the quality of the hotdog or whatever, right?

And what it comes down to is a starving audience. He is like, you could have the world's worst hotdogs, world's worst branding. If you put yourself outside of a Phillies game or an Eagles game at the end of the game and people are walking out, you will sell out your hotdog stand who a bunch of drum people want.

Doesn't matter. The quality doesn't matter brand, it matters about the starving audience. That's always stuck in my brain. 'cause I think that what's really fascinating about QA is. People don't proactively think about QA in a starving audience kind of way, right? it's one of those things that you and I could talk about quality as an investment till our cheeks turn blue.

Unfortunately, QA is an investment retroactively to solve problems oftentimes, and that's where you do find your sort of starving audience versus people saying, Hey, in six months this is gonna be a thing, so we should really be investing in it today. sort of a tangent, but just fun analogy.

[00:21:21] Jay: totally agree and I love that analogy. I usually, I think I stole that and modified it and said, I don't wanna be selling hot dogs. At a cafeteria, you know, I wanna be selling 'em outside of a coal mine at lunchtime. Like, I want the hungriest dirtiest, you know, I want 'em in and I want 'em needing what I have to sell immediately.

So I love that. All right. I have one more question for you. This is just Ben, being Ben, nothing but QA and quality and all the boring things that we do on a day to day basis. if you could do anything on earth and you knew you wouldn't fail, what would it be?

[00:21:52] Ben: That's a big question. that's a fascinating question.

[00:21:58] Jay: I wish I got paid for the silence after that question because it's just the best.

[00:22:02] Ben: No, I know. it's,

[00:22:04] Jay: Everybody has the same moment. They go, wait a minute, what would I.

[00:22:09] Ben: I mean, it goes back to like I am. The moments I'm happiest are the moments I feel fulfilled. Right? And so when I think about the question, I think less so explicitly about like, oh, this dream or that dream. 'cause in many ways, like when you start a business, you're achieving like what you sort of dreamed of.

'cause otherwise, why would you start a business? I just think I would. Lean into the elements that make me feel fulfilled, which are oftentimes like creative ideation, stuff like that. I definitely start a business, you know, I have a love hate relationship with QA as an industry. Like I, it's an amazing industry to be in, but it's also a frustrating industry to be in 'cause there's so many other players involved and you have to find joy in that journey.

I might have to save the answer for a part two other than just like something that, that, that's fulfilling.

[00:22:59] Jay: Okay. All right. Fair enough. We will do a part two because, I think we found out that we hit it off and we're like, you're the, you know, Midwestern version of Main and I'm the, you know, northeast

[00:23:10] Ben: If you could send some luck to the Detroit Lions that you have in Philadelphia, that'd be great.

[00:23:14] Jay: don't know if I could do that. I could send you some cheese sticks though.

Maybe we could meet halfway with that. And you could send me what do you guys have out there? Cheese curds. Is

[00:23:20] Ben: No, that's Wisconsin. We got cherries up in Traverse City. That's kinda

[00:23:24] Jay: Cherries. Oh, I'm such a dude. I'm a cherry freak dude. I lo I just by the bag full. I love them.

[00:23:30] Ben: we'll send you some Ries

Alright. Cherry.

[00:23:32] Jay: please send me all you got, dude. And I will eat them all. All right. Well, Ben,I really do like genuinely appreciate all the time we have together. If you wanna find out more about anything they heard today, how do they reach you directly?

[00:23:44] Ben: Yeah, so check out my LinkedIn, just Ben Fellows, work with loop.com as the website. Work with loop.com/blog is where we try to put a lot of, content, YouTube channels, Ben Fellows, would love any feedback on the content. it's a journey every day. A lot of anxiety, so I appreciate all the people who follow, like, subscribe, stuff like that.

And, yeah, would love to chat QA with anyone who wants to.

[00:24:04] Jay: Beautiful. Well, hopefully everybody reaches out and, you're awesome and I really appreciate the fact that we've connected and. Forged a friendship over, you know, probably the most boring industry in or vertical in software being qa. But, you know, look man, somebody's gotta do it right. And, it's gotta be us.

So thank you for hopping on. Good luck with everything and we'll talk again soon. All right.

[00:24:24] Ben: Yeah, happy testing.

[00:24:26] Jay: Thanks man. Happy testing brother. See you. 

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