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I've been looking out for a side hustle to supplement my monthly stock and shares investment contribution - trying to make up for lost time in the years I did not invest. As it was my first foray into the world of side hustling, I wanted to ease myself into things. So it was important for it to be flexible enough to work around office/personal hours and not require too much time.

During the COVID-era, I kept note of some side hustles I was planning to try out but never got around to doing so. Forgetfulness also has a part to play in matters and was only reminded when coming across one of my notes from July 2021 stored in Evernote.

Now was a good time as any to try out one of them: Usertesting.com.

What Is UserTesting?

Usertesting.com provides a platform for businesses to get feedback on their products and services. Anyone can apply to be a contributor and provide feedback that consists of:

• Accessibility
• Usability
• Live conversations with businesses
• Pre-release platform feature review
• Competitor benchmarking tests
• A/B testing to compare different versions of a product or feature

Before becoming an active contributor, a UserTesting will require some basic information as part of the registration process and a practice test to be completed.

Acing The Practice Test

UserTesting will provide a test scenario to prove you're a legitimate person and have the capability to demonstrate good communication and analytical thinking. It provides a good standard that is expected when carrying out real tests.

The test itself is not complicated but you should be prepared to clearly think out loud so there is an understanding of your thought process as you're undertaking various tasks. It's always a good idea before performing a task to read the question out loud so your interpretation of what is being asked is clear. Most importantly, be honest in what you're reviewing.

At the end of the test, provide a conclusion and thank them for their time in this opportunity.

The fact that UserTesting.com forces users to take an assessment beforehand demonstrates the credibility of the service and sets the standard for the type of businesses they work with.

UserTesting will respond to your practice test within 2-3 days, provide feedback and let you know if you will be accepted as a contributor.

What To Expect From The Real Test?

After completing the practice test, I didn't get real tests immediately. It took a good couple of weeks for them to start trickling in. Even then, I didn't qualify to take part in some tests as I didn't have experience in the area of expertise.

Tests are performed on Windows, Mac, Android or iOS devices. There might be a requirement to provide feedback using a specific device. Access to a microphone and sharing your screen is a strict prerequisite. Some do ask for a face recording as well, but I decided to refuse tests that requested this.

Test vary in length and payout:

1. Short tests - $4
2. 10-20 minute tests - $10
3. 30-minute test - $30
4. 60-minute test - $60

The 60-minute tests will always be live a conversation directly with the business and scheduled in advance.

The Type of Tests I've Contributed To

I have been quite lucky as to the tests offered to me as they seem to relate to the tech industry. Providing feedback for businesses such as Microsoft, SalesForce, Github, GitLab and Amazon has been insightful.

Other tests have evolved around the sectors of AI, website accessibility, pre-release platform updates and cloud-hosting.

Payout

This is the part you have all been waiting for. How much money have I made since starting at the beginning of June?

I completed twenty tests consisting majority of $10 tests, one $60 test and a handful of $4 tests. Totalling to $232. Each test is paid out within two weeks to your linked PayPal account. Not so bad for an ad-hoc side hustle.

Twenty tests over the span of three months is not a lot when my contribution could have been higher. But when taking into consideration that this side hustle is only pursued outside of working hours and some tests do not apply to my expertise, it's not so bad.

The majority of tests offered will be worth $10. Some may question whether they're even worth doing, to which I say: Yes! A $10 test can take anywhere between 5-15 minutes to complete on average. When you take the hourly UK National Minimum wage of £11.44, it's not bad. $10 converted to GBP equates to around £7.60. Easy money!

The more you contribute the higher chance there is in getting more tests offered to you, providing your feedback rating is good. There are some damn interesting ones as well.

Conclusion

Don't apply to UserTesting with the expectation of mass riches as you will sorely be disappointed. Think of it as petty cash to count towards a little "fun money".

Apart from the monetisation aspect of using UserTesting, I feel I am getting an early insight into where certain industry sectors are going, including my own, which is almost as valuable as the payout itself.

There will be some days or even weeks when there will be no applicable tests. Just stick with it as all it takes is a handful of 30 or 60-minute tests (which can be hard to come by) to get a nice chunk of change for the month.

I spoke to one of my developer friends a while back and as conversations go with someone tech-minded, it's a mixture of talking about code, frameworks, and platforms entwined with the more life-centric catch-up.

Both having been in the tech industry for over 15 years, we discussed the "old ways" and what we did back then that we don't do now, which led to Kentico - a platform that we used to talk about all the time, where we'd try and push the boundaries to create awesome websites in the hopes of winning the coveted site of the month or year award. It occurred to us that it's not something we talk much about anymore. Almost as if overnight it vanished from our consciousness.

Looking through the archive of postings, it's evident I haven't published anything Kentico-related in a long time, with my most recent being in September 2020. Despite the lack of Kentico content on my site, it remains a key player in the list of CMS platforms that I work with. The only difference is the share of Kentico projects are smaller when compared to the pre-2020 era.

In this post, I discuss my thoughts as to the reason behind my lack of Kentico-related output.

NOTE: This post consists of my view points alone.

Licensing Cause and Effect

A contributing factor was the substantial shift in their licensing model sometime in 2020. Moving to an annual subscription at an increased cost and ditching the base license created somewhat of a barrier to entry for small to mid-sized clients who just needed a reliable CMS platform with customisability. So for someone like myself who could provide Kentico solutions in a freelance capacity was instantly priced out.

I understand why Kentico needed to reassess its price structure. They offer one of the best .NET CMSs and to stay at the top, an increase in revenue is required to drive the business forward. In all honesty, I believe we had a good run on the old licensing model for over ten years, and it was only a matter of time until a pricing review was required.

It's just a hard sell when trying to sell a CMS with a £10,000 price tag before any development has even started.

In light of this, it's only natural to look for alternatives that align with your own business strategy and development needs. The time originally spent developing Kentico has now been reallocated to alternative CMS platforms.

A Stable Well-Rounded Platform

Kentico is a mature product with many out-of-the-box capabilities (that get better with every release), which indirectly contributed to my lack of blogging on the subject. I usually only blog about a platform when I find useful workarounds or discover an issue that I was able to resolve.

This is truly a compliment and testament to Kentico's build quality. There is no need to write about something that is already well-documented and written by active users of the community.

Reassessing The Kentico Offering

Kentico is still offered whenever possible. Both clients and developers alike have confidence in the platform. Clients enjoy the interface and security. Developers appreciate the customisability, clear architecture, quick hot fixing, and consistency between editions.

The only question we now have to ask ourselves is whether Kentico is the right platform for the client's requirements. Prior to the change in licensing, you would be scoffed at for asking such a question. Kentico would be the front-runner before considering anything else.

Nowadays, Kentico would only be put forward to a client if they had large-scale requirements where cheaper CMS offerings fall short for the licensing costs to be justified.

I was recently involved in an e-commerce project that ticked all the boxes in line with the client's priorities, which made for an ideal use-case to carry out the build in Kentico, such as:

• Enterprise-level security
• Industry-standard compliance
• All in one solution consisting of content management, e-commerce, and marketing automation
• Scalability
• Ability to handle large sets of data
• Advanced customisability

In my view, if a client is not too concerned about the above, then alternatives will be used and additional development will be carried out to fill in any gaps.

The Alternatives

The CMS sphere is ripe with offerings where we are spoilt for choice. I have whittled these down to:

1. Umbraco
2. Kentico
3. Prismic
4. Dato
5. HubSpot

In my view, those variety of CMSs covers all pricing points, technologies and customisability.

Conclusion

I would always jump at the chance in developing in Kentico as I know a large complex website can be developed with almost infinite customisation. But we can't help but notice there is a lot of competition out there, each providing a range of features across different architectures and price ranges.

Based on my own experience, the demand for fully featured CMS platforms that have a large hosting footprint are reducing in popularity in the advent of more API driven (also known as headless) content delivery that works alongside other microservices.

Investing in the Kentico eco-system (including its headless variant, Kontent) is always worth considering. It may just not be something I will be writing about consistently here as it requires a more corporate-level type of clientele.