A Conversation With Harvard Business School’s Social Enterprise Institute

(In March 2024, TestParty was named one of 4 finalists for the Social Enterprise Track of Harvard’s New Venture Competition. There were over 100+ entries in the competition from across all Harvard schools to be named. The below is an excerpt about TestParty from the competition team’s interview with the company… Read the full article at Harvard’s Impactful Insights Blog)

TestParty
Comprehensive platform to help companies get and stay ADA or EAA compliant based on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
Michael Bervell, MBA 2024
Jason Tan

Answer: The founders of TestParty are Michael Bervell and Jason Tan. Bervell first experienced products being non-accessible in sixth grade when his Xbox Kinect, a Christmas gift, did not recognize his darker black skin under dim lighting conditions. He later consulted for Google and for the United Nations working on their accessibility strategies. Tan worked at Twitch (an Amazon company) and experienced a digital accessibility lawsuit. He fixed tickets, communicated with legal, and realized how little tooling existed. Like Twitch, thousands of companies get sued for digital ADA compliance annually, and engineers have no idea how to fix issues. In the last 5 years alone, over $370 million has been paid out in digital ADA settlements and ADA damages. They came up with the idea while discussing how AI was changing software engineering and software testing while in the midst of Twitch's accessibility lawsuit.

A: There are tons of good ideas, but the "aha" moment for this startup came when Bervell sent out 1,000 emails to different accessibility leaders based on their LinkedIn bios and job titles. Within 24 hours, they had meetings on the calendar with Starbucks, McDonalds, Delta, and Schneider Electric. Less than 6 months after that, and all from his personal Gmail account, Bervell closed nearly $100k in revenue. In addition to this natural pull from the market, the team realized that starting in June 2025 as a result of the European Accessibility Act, compliance will be mandatory for any company servicing EU citizens, no matter where in the world they are.

A: TestParty is a uniquely HBS startup. It was born in HBS dorms, incubated during the Rock summer fellowship (with HBS funding), our first mentors were HBS alumni, and even our investors came through the iLab network. It's only fitting to capstone this social impact project by sharing the business plan and it's progress through the HBS New Venture Competition. The team is dedicated to working on TestParty full-time and the HBS NVC will catalyze both this and the future of making the Internet more accessible.

A: Betterment.