QA Isn’t Optional — It’s Mission Critical
How three high-profile startups collapsed under the weight of unreliable software—and what your team can learn from them.
When QA Was an Afterthought - Three Startups. Three QA Failures.
These aren’t just cautionary tales — they’re real-world examples of how skipping QA can break trust, destroy momentum, and even sink companies.
🔹 Medly Pharmacy: The QA Blind Spot That Helped Sink a $100M Startup
Medly Pharmacy, once a rising healthtech star, raised over $100 million with a promise of same-day prescription delivery through a tech-first platform. But by late 2023, the company shut down abruptly—leaving patients, employees, and investors blindsided.
Internal reports pointed to a fragile tech stack. Systems meant to automate prescription tracking, order fulfillment, and delivery were constantly failing. Sync issues, outages, and manual overrides became daily headaches. In a regulated space like healthcare, that wasn’t just inconvenient—it was dangerous.
Medly lacked automated testing, clear QA ownership, and end-to-end test coverage. As the company expanded to new markets, those cracks widened—until the entire platform collapsed under its own weight.
“QA wasn’t prioritized — and patients paid the price.”
🔹 Bolt: When Checkout Reliability Broke the Brand
Bolt wanted to beat Stripe and Shopify with its one-click checkout solution. It raised over $1 billion and reached an $11 billion valuation. But merchants complained that Bolt’s integrations were flaky—especially with Shopify, Magento, and WooCommerce.
Customers faced failed payments, unnecessary account creation, and slow load times. Key payment flows weren’t tested end-to-end. Sandbox environments were unreliable. Bugs reached live sites. Retailers churned. Trust eroded.
Bolt moved fast—but without platform validation and regression coverage, speed became its Achilles’ heel.
“When your product lives inside someone else’s platform, bugs become visible — fast.”
🔹 Airplane.dev: When Developer Tools Lose Developer Trust
Airplane.dev aimed to simplify internal tooling for engineers. It saw strong early traction—but by late 2023, the company shut down.
Users complained about a buggy experience: slow dashboard UIs, broken CLI commands, job scheduling failures, and error messages that were nearly impossible to debug.
Their QA gaps were clear—no automated end-to-end tests, flaky CI/CD pipelines, and limited environment simulation. For a product aimed at developers, these failures were fatal.
“If your tool breaks, it needs to break clearly — not silently.”
Medly Pharmacy: The Hidden Cost of Fragile Systems
- 🚨 Brittle, error-prone internal systems
- ❌ No end-to-end test coverage
- 📉 QA failed to scale with operations
“It wasn’t just a tech issue. In healthcare, unreliable software becomes a trust issue.”
✅ Invest early in QA—it’s not overhead, it’s insurance.
Bolt: Checkout That Didn’t Always Check Out
- 🔄 Buggy integrations with platforms
- 😠 Merchant churn from checkout failures
- 📉 Drop in conversions—the core metric
“Speed is meaningless without stability. QA defines your reputation.”
✅ QA is your public-facing trust mechanism.
Airplane.dev: When Developer Tools Fail Developers
- 🧪 No real-world simulation
- 🧩 Bugs in CLI, job scheduler, and UI
- 🤯 Poor error messages and lack of docs
“If devs don’t trust your tool, they won’t use it. QA is the foundation of developer experience.”
✅ Dev tools must be rock-solid, tested, and clear.
Lessons for Startup Founders
- Build QA early—don’t retrofit it.
- Real users = real test cases.
- Compliance needs coverage, not just speed.
- Treat QA like product infrastructure, not a side process.
Scale with Confidence, Not Chaos
Kratorsoft helps startups build reliable software through robust QA systems.