Growth & Strategy
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Short-term (< 3 months)
Last year, I had a B2B SaaS client who was drowning in the same problem every startup faces: getting customer testimonials. You know the drill—your product works great, clients are happy in calls, but getting them to write it down? That's another story entirely.
Like most SaaS founders, they started by doing what seemed obvious: building their own review collection system. After all, we're in tech, right? We build solutions. But here's what I learned from working across both SaaS and e-commerce projects: sometimes the best solution isn't building—it's borrowing proven systems from other industries.
The conventional wisdom in SaaS is that you need custom review systems, specialized testimonial workflows, and industry-specific approaches. But what if I told you that e-commerce figured this out years ago, and their automated review systems work perfectly for SaaS with one simple mindset shift?
Here's what you'll learn from my experience:
Why building custom review aggregators usually fails (and costs way more than you think)
How I applied e-commerce review automation to B2B SaaS with surprising results
The cross-industry approach that saved months of development time
Specific tools and workflows that work better than custom solutions
When to build vs. when to buy (spoiler: buy wins most of the time)
If you're thinking about building a review aggregator or struggling to collect testimonials systematically, this playbook will save you from the expensive mistakes I've seen too many SaaS teams make. Let me show you the faster, cheaper path that actually works.
Industry wisdom
What the SaaS world tells you about reviews
Walk into any SaaS conference or scroll through any growth marketing blog, and you'll hear the same advice about collecting customer reviews and testimonials. The industry has settled on a few core principles that everyone seems to accept as gospel:
Manual outreach is the gold standard. Craft personalized emails, follow up strategically, and build relationships with your happiest customers. Most SaaS companies spend hours each week manually reaching out to customers, crafting individual messages, and hoping for responses.
Build custom review systems. Since SaaS is so unique, you need specialized tools that understand your customer journey, trial periods, and complex pricing models. Generic review platforms supposedly can't capture the nuance of B2B software purchasing decisions.
Focus on detailed case studies over simple reviews. The thinking goes that B2B buyers need comprehensive stories, not just star ratings. So SaaS companies invest heavily in creating long-form case studies and detailed testimonials that take weeks to develop.
Integrate everything into your existing tech stack. Your review collection should seamlessly integrate with your CRM, support tickets, and customer success tools. This means custom development and complex integrations that take months to implement.
Time the requests perfectly. Wait for the ideal moment—after successful onboarding, following a support win, or at renewal time. This manual timing approach means most review requests never get sent because you're waiting for the "perfect" moment.
This conventional wisdom exists because SaaS companies assume their industry is fundamentally different from others. The truth is, this approach leads to sporadic review collection, inconsistent social proof, and teams that spend more time managing review processes than actually growing the business. There's a better way, borrowed from an industry that's been solving this problem at scale for years.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
When I started working with this B2B SaaS client, we faced the classic testimonial challenge that every startup knows too well. They had happy customers—their support tickets were full of praise, their sales calls ended with satisfaction, and their retention rates were solid. But their website? It looked like a testimonial ghost town.
The founder was spending hours each week crafting personalized emails to customers, asking for reviews. They'd get maybe one testimonial every few weeks, if they were lucky. Meanwhile, they were burning through development resources trying to build a custom review collection system that would integrate perfectly with their customer success workflow.
Sound familiar? That's because it's the same story I've heard from dozens of SaaS founders.
Here's where it gets interesting: I was simultaneously working on an e-commerce project—completely different industry, different customer base, different everything. But that e-commerce client had cracked the review collection code. They were getting dozens of reviews every week, completely automated, with minimal effort from their team.
The difference was stark. While my SaaS client was manually crafting individual emails and hoping for responses, my e-commerce client had automated email sequences that consistently generated social proof. Their system worked like clockwork: purchase made, email sent, review collected, social proof updated.
That's when I realized we were thinking about this completely wrong. SaaS founders get so caught up in the uniqueness of their industry that they miss proven solutions right in front of them. E-commerce companies have been solving the review collection problem at scale for years—and their systems work just as well for SaaS with minimal adaptation.
The breakthrough moment came when I suggested we test the same automated approach that was working perfectly in e-commerce. My SaaS client was skeptical at first—surely B2B software required a more sophisticated approach than "simple" e-commerce automation?
They were about to learn the same lesson I did: sometimes the best innovation is applying proven solutions from other industries to your own.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
Instead of continuing down the path of building custom SaaS review tools, I took a completely different approach. I implemented the same automated review collection system that was generating consistent results for my e-commerce client—but adapted it for the SaaS customer journey.
Here's exactly what I did and how it transformed their review collection from sporadic manual outreach to consistent automated results.
Step 1: Mapped SaaS touchpoints to e-commerce triggers
In e-commerce, the review request trigger is simple: purchase completed. For SaaS, I identified multiple trigger points that signaled customer satisfaction: successful onboarding completion, reaching usage milestones, positive support interactions, and subscription renewals. Instead of waiting for the "perfect" moment, we automated requests at each positive touchpoint.
Step 2: Implemented Trustpilot's automated system
After testing multiple platforms, I landed on Trustpilot—the same tool that was working for my e-commerce client. Yes, it's expensive, and yes, their emails can feel aggressive for traditional SaaS sensibilities. But here's the thing: their email automation converted like crazy because it's battle-tested across millions of businesses.
Instead of building a custom system from scratch, we plugged into their proven infrastructure. The setup took days, not months, and we immediately started collecting reviews without any development overhead.
Step 3: Automated the entire workflow
Using webhooks and automation tools, I connected their customer success events directly to Trustpilot's review request system. When a customer hit a positive milestone, the review request went out automatically. No manual intervention, no waiting for the perfect moment, no emails sitting in drafts.
The key insight was treating SaaS customers like any other satisfied buyers. They'd used our product, gotten value, and reached a positive outcome. That's the perfect time to ask for a review—regardless of industry.
Step 4: Optimized for B2B context
The only customization needed was adapting the email copy for a B2B audience. Instead of "How was your purchase?" it became "How has [product name] impacted your workflow?" The system remained the same—just the messaging shifted to match B2B language and concerns.
Step 5: Created multiple collection touchpoints
Unlike e-commerce's single purchase trigger, we set up multiple automated requests throughout the customer lifecycle. This meant more opportunities to capture reviews when customers were experiencing peak satisfaction with the product.
The transformation was immediate. Instead of manually chasing testimonials, they now had a system that consistently generated social proof. More importantly, it freed up their team to focus on product development and customer success instead of review collection admin work.
Platform Selection
Trustpilot beat custom development by months
Email Templates
Adapted e-commerce copy for B2B language perfectly
Trigger Automation
Multiple touchpoints captured more satisfaction moments
Time Investment
Days of setup vs months of custom development
The results spoke for themselves. Within 30 days of implementing the automated review system, my SaaS client went from collecting maybe 1-2 testimonials per month to receiving 15-20 reviews monthly. But the numbers only tell part of the story.
More importantly, the quality of reviews improved. Because we were capturing feedback at peak satisfaction moments—right after successful milestones—the reviews were more detailed and enthusiastic than the testimonials they'd been manually collecting.
The automated system also captured a wider range of customer voices. Previously, they were only reaching out to their most vocal advocates. The automated approach captured feedback from satisfied customers who would never have responded to manual outreach but were happy to share their experience when prompted at the right moment.
From an operational perspective, the transformation was dramatic. The founder went from spending 3-4 hours per week on testimonial outreach to spending zero time on review collection. The customer success team could focus on actual customer success instead of testimonial administration.
The social proof impact was immediate. Their website conversion rates improved as more authentic reviews populated their testimonials section. Sales calls became easier when prospects could see consistent social proof from similar companies using the product successfully.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
This experience taught me five critical lessons that completely changed how I approach business challenges:
1. Industry blindness is expensive. SaaS companies spend thousands of dollars and months of development time solving problems that other industries have already solved. The assumption that "our industry is different" costs more than it helps.
2. Proven systems beat custom development. Trustpilot's automated review system works because it's been tested across millions of businesses. Their "aggressive" email templates convert because they're optimized based on massive data sets, not theoretical best practices.
3. Automation scales, manual doesn't. No matter how organized your manual review collection process is, it will always be limited by human capacity. Automated systems scale infinitely without additional overhead.
4. Cross-industry learning is undervalued. Some of the best business solutions come from adapting proven approaches from other industries. E-commerce, retail, and service industries have solved problems that SaaS companies are still struggling with.
5. Perfect timing is less important than consistent asking. Waiting for the ideal moment to request reviews means most requests never get sent. Consistent automated requests at good moments beat perfect timing every time.
6. Building vs. buying calculations are usually wrong. Most teams underestimate the true cost of building custom solutions. They factor in initial development but forget ongoing maintenance, feature updates, and opportunity costs.
7. Customer behavior is more universal than we think. B2B buyers and B2C buyers both respond to well-timed, relevant requests for feedback. The purchasing context differs, but human psychology remains consistent.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
Implement automated review requests at key customer success milestones
Use proven platforms like Trustpilot instead of building custom systems
Set up multiple trigger points throughout the customer lifecycle
Focus on automation over perfect timing
For your Ecommerce store
Connect purchase completion events to automated review requests
Use the same proven platforms that work across all industries
Automate follow-up sequences based on customer satisfaction signals
Adapt e-commerce email templates for your product category