In this talk, we will share our personal experiences from doing academic research on software testing to founding a business to scale up the prototype that was born during research. The speakers grew up in India and attended graduate school in the United States at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. In the last decade, while the open source community was shaping innovative tools like Appium, our team was doing academic research to build complementary tools for test automation. Based on our customer discovery and market research, we realized that there is a significant need for making test automation simpler, faster, and more reliable, particularly for those who are just getting started on automating their app testing, and so we founded MoQuality to build smarter tools for that purpose. We launched Barista, which started as a tool for generating (or brewing!) Espresso scripts for Android, but we soon realized the importance of collaborating with the open source community and re-architected Barista to support Appium. We will also offer a sneak peek into how Barista works with Appium at AppiumConf 2019.