The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Kiwi TCMS – Alex Todorov, CEO & Project Lead Interview At Collision Conference 2022

Episode Date: June 22, 2022

Kiwi TCMS - Alex Todorov, CEO & Project Lead Interview At Collision Conference 2022 Kiwitcms.org

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Hey, we're doing some quick podcasts here for Collision Conference 2022. If you're watching these years from now, we're going to be covering some of the different booths that are at the Collision Conference. And so this will be pretty exciting. If you're there, you'll know some of the places you want to take a look at. Today, we have Kiwi TCMS's Alex Todorov. He is the CEO and project lead of Kiwi TCMS. Welcome to the show, Alex. How are you? There you go. And give me a little tired there. Give me as much audio as you can though, because we've got a lot of background noise, if you would. You can probably yell at me if you want. what's the what's the dot com or dot org that is for your website it's still the org it's okay it's so it's kiwi

k-i-w-i-t-c-m-s dot org yes correct there you go and going to want to give me as much audio as you can when it comes to loudness. Just project right. Right. Yeah. So give us an overview of your company and what you guys do. So what we do is I'll take a step back. So we are at VisionPulse, and there are a number of startups who are building products for applications, mobile, web, blockchain, etc. And all of these are in nature technical products.

So it comes a point in time where all these startups, they do need to actually verify that the products work as they are supposed to before it goes out to customers. So what KVDCMS is, it is a specialized software which is meant to be used by other test engineers, where these test engineers, they can document the way that they work, they can document their workflow, they can document the results of their actions every day on every build of the product that they're testing. And then the test engineer can go up to their boss or product author and say, listen, you know, that's what we've done. We feel confident about the product.

We've covered a lot of scenarios. We've covered a lot of environments, a lot of devices where our product is supposed to. There is some quality built into the product, and it is safe to release to customers. And it's a leading open source test management system for manual and automated testing. What created the need for this in your guys' mind as to why this needed to come to market? Yeah, well, it's a very interesting story. So the open source, it started as a project a long time ago. And it was actually started by a very big open source vendor way, way back before 2009.

We aren't sure, you know, of the original story, why it came to be. It's just distinct. Later down the line, the actual source code of the product was released on the internet. It was open for everybody to take, to modify, and to build up on it. And I do have a career in quality engineering for very many years. And there was a time where I worked for a customer. We did need a similar system for that particular customer. I knew that it existed, so I just took it down from the internet,

uploaded it to the customer, and just did the job. Then very quickly after that, we realized there's quite a lot of problems within the previous software that existed. So because it's open source, everybody's free to modify. And we started to do exactly that. Modifying, changing the software, making it better. And over time it went through several different transformations until it became DCRS.

And then I decided, well, it's been a phony open source project until now, but you know, it's not fun doing it alone. So let me build a team and let me build a community around this and see if it makes sense. And lo and behold, it actually did. So much so that we are almost to the 2 million download milestone, maybe in a couple of months. That's awesome. Yeah. Awesome.

Yeah. And it took off from there. We did continue a few more years working as an open source team. And we did see a lot of traction. That's awesome. We took off. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. And it took off from there. We did continue a few more years just working as an open source team. And we did see a lot of traction. So we decided, let's see what will happen if we start offering subscription services. Just put a button on the website where people said, actually, we're paying money.

And people started actually paying money and requesting services. So that's how we started. Then we came to Coit, what we realized that we need to transform from being an open source project to actually being a startup company and do business. So, and here are we today. There you go. Doing business is always good.

So anything special you're showing at Collision Conference or just pretty much promoting the company? Yeah, we are promoting the company and it's, you know, it's our first time here. So the focus is on talking to as many startups as we can, just, you know, gather to spread the word out there to showcase the product. We did have a couple of successful connections already today because everybody needs testing. So we say, in the industry, we say, if it's not in the DCMS system, then you don't test it.

If it's not documented, it doesn't exist because you need your ultimate source of work. It's a good source of truth. We just give it to CMS. So showcasing the product, talking to other technical people, because we speak the same language, we can relate very quickly. Talking to potential partners, you know, see what we can do together. There's a lot of promising leads.

We do need to put a lot of effort to actually build a simple generality. But this is, you know, this is up to us, of course. And the interesting human optic for, kind of for the attendees maybe, that we bring is what we call hardware black boxes. You know, so in the world of software testing, we have this concept of Blackbox testing versus white-labs testing. And so Blackbox is when you have a product and you don't know how it works exactly, you don't know the internals, you feed input, like clicking with the

mouse, or changing screens in the application, and then you have output, which is you observe what's happening in the product, and you try to figure out, well, is this the correct thing that I should be observing? That's what we call Black Box Test. So we took this idea. We partnered up with a hacker in Serbia. So they did their own original research and talked about the idea. And we came up with hardware devices, which are built on top of Arduino.

And they are of course black and polar. So they are small, that big boxes. Where you have buttons, you have LEDs, you have switches and knobs, and you can try to figure out how exactly do they work. Some of the buttons, for example, are semi-important, but they don't actually do anything. And this is up for the person just playing around with those boxes to try to figure out, and not only that, but these are actually devices which are meant to

showcase a certain bias in the human brain. to figure out, and not only that, but these are actually devices which are meant to showcase a certain bias in the human brain. So all of them have different psychological reasons behind them. There is some theory. And those biases, when you are a technical person, when you are an engineer, they are actually bad for you because they prevent you to do your job well, or you look only one-sidedly at your job. We are supposed to be very skilled at our jobs and we're supposed

to recognize those biases and try to get away from them, us. So that's why we have this. And of course they are open source Blackboard since we have the full designs and apping for them, it's on the internet. Everybody can just download the information, build their own boxes, 3D print cases. Henry Suryawirawan, That's awesome, man. And it sounds like this really helps developers out with everything they're doing.

And you offer, it looks like a lot of different solutions here. You've got a, you've got an enterprise subscription, private tenant subscription, and just self support, managed hosting as well. Yeah, yeah. We do have several different layers of subscription or what we could offer to customers. Yeah. Because there is very big difference between the size of teams and the kind of the type of organization that may use KVDCMS, a lot of them are narrow-kidness.

They don't have the time and a lot of cases, they don't even have the resources and the knowledge to actually deploy the system and host it themselves. So for them, it's easy to just assume something that's provided software as a service. Point and click and it's ready, ready to go. And on the other spectrum, you have the big enterprises who need extra features, who are like they have a thousand engineers in the system, they need access control. They operate in much more, you know, technically confined environment. So they have all sorts of environments around you.

So we need to be able to service those as well. David Pérez- Well, this is pretty interesting. Anything more we need to touch on before we go out? We got it all in the can? Well, we can talk a little bit about community. Of course. That's our biggest strength. And?

So like I say, you know, we started this one. We've had contributions from pretty much everywhere in the world. The Basque, which are most valuable today, we've got contributions from Nigeria, Kenya, and Africa. And we didn't even think, you know, we didn't even know that it could be high on IT market or demand for systems like ours. We've seen contributors from Nepal, which you would think, you know, Nepal is a small business country. What is an IT the system doing being used in Nepal?

But it's also a very big country. They have a very big e-commerce market locally. We've seen fund contributions in countries like Italy, Georgia, the US. Wow. We invest heavily into community outreach. We did mentorship programs for community. We did work with students in the past as well. That's been an awesome experience.

Starting with somebody who's not very experienced in the IT industry and just driving them through their contributions, helping them learn, mentor them in order to boost their own careers, and so we've done a lot of things on the community side. David Pérez- That's pretty awesome. I mean, community is really important and if you're helping people learn, educate, and come up through the ranks and figure stuff out and make the world a better place, that's awesome, man. The most awesome thing about community is you get to go to an event

as somebody that you haven't seen before. I am such and such person. I did this and this for your project board. We exchange emails. We talk about this topic. And then you realize, oh, okay, yeah, I've done this person. That's awesome. And you get to meet these people live.

That is awesome, man. That is awesome. Well, it sounds awesome that you built this thing. Anything more we want to touch on before we go? Oh, I think that's about it. That is awesome. Well, it sounds awesome that you've built this thing. Anything more we want to touch on before we go? Oh, I think that's about it. There you go. Well, it sounds good. It's been wonderful to have you. Give us your website one more time so that people can find

out the interwebs. Yeah, our website is kivitcms.org so k-i-v-i-t-c-s dot r-o-v-g. There you go. And thank you very much for being on the show. We really appreciate it, man. Yep.

Thank you for having me. There you go. And thanks, Simon, for tuning in. Be sure to check everyone out. If you're at the Collision Conference, go see by their booth. Do you know your booth number off the top of your head? Yeah. 8-3-2-8-1.

There you go. Or go to their website, check them out at kiwitcms.org. Thanks a lot for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time.