How to get software reviews: the first ten customers to ask

You have paying customers, a product they use every day, and a review page with two entries, or none. A buyer who searches your product's name plus "reviews" finds a thin listing and moves on to the competitor with forty. The answer to how to get reviews for a software company in that position is not a bigger campaign. It is a short, personal one, done in the right order: one platform, the ten customers most likely to write, an ask timed to the moment the product proves itself, and one follow-up. Here is that order, the email to send, and the rules you have to stay inside.

Software reviews are harder to collect than reviews for a shop or a restaurant. A shop asks for a star and a sentence. A software review platform's form is longer, and the platform may ask your customer to confirm they are a real user before the review appears. That is a real slice of someone's working day, so the ask has to go to the right person, at the right time, with every bit of friction you can remove already removed.

Step 1: where to get software reviews first: one platform only

Resist listing everywhere. Ten reviews on one platform read as a product people use; two reviews on each of five platforms read as a product nobody does, five times over. Pick one platform for the first batch and add a second once the first holds ten.

Which one? Search your category's name plus "reviews" and note which platform ranks on the first page. Then ask your last five customers where they looked before they bought; the answer is usually the same site. For most business software that means one of the big B2B review platforms (G2, Capterra, TrustRadius, GetApp, Software Advice, SourceForge) or, for a consumer-facing product, a general one such as Trustpilot. None of them is the right answer for every product. The right one is where your buyers already are.

Before you send a single ask, do two things on that platform:

1. Claim and complete your listing. A customer who lands on an unclaimed profile with no logo and a one-line description doubts they are in the right place, and some will leave without writing.
2. Read the platform's reviewer guidelines and note what it asks of a reviewer. Who may review, how the platform confirms a reviewer is a real user, and whether an incentive must be disclosed. You are going to repeat those points in your ask so nobody is surprised halfway through the form.

Step 2: shortlist the ten customers to ask first

The first batch is not a mailshot. It is a list of names, ranked. The question for each customer is not "do they like us?" but "have they done something with the product that is worth describing, recently, and would they say so in writing?". Build the shortlist from signals you already hold:

Leave off the list: trial users, anyone in a billing dispute, anyone whose onboarding stalled, and your own staff, investors, friends and family. The last group is not a judgement call; the rules on insider reviews are covered below.

An illustrative count, so you can set expectations: a company with 40 paying customers might find 10 to 15 who carry two or more of the signals above. Ask those first. If a third of them write, one round of personal emails gives you five reviews, and the next round goes to the rest of the list. Those are planning assumptions, not a measured rate; your customers will set the real one.

Step 3: ask at the moment the product proves itself

Timing matters more than wording. The right moment is just after a win the product delivered: the first report your customer sent to their own boss, the migration that finished, the renewal, the ticket you resolved and they thanked you for. The wrong moments are day one (nothing to say yet), the week after a price rise, and anything within a fortnight of an outage.

For the first ten, the founder sends the asks personally. An automated sequence is the right tool for review one hundred; for review one it reads as a template, because it is one. A personal note from the person who built the product can name the specific thing the customer did with it, and that specificity is what turns "sure, later" into writing now.

Here is an email to copy. Fill in the form yourself first and time it, so the minutes you quote are real. Then change the words in square brackets and nothing else about its shape:

Subject: Would you write up what you did with [product]?

Hi [name],

You mentioned last month that [the specific thing: "the weekly report now takes ten minutes instead of two hours"]. That is exactly what someone deciding whether to try [product] wants to hear from a real user rather than from me.

Would you write a short review on [platform]? Here is the direct link to the form: [link]. It takes about [N] minutes. [Platform] may ask you to confirm you are a real user before the review goes up.

Write what you actually think, including what we have not got right yet; an honest review is worth more to us than a glowing one.

Thanks either way, [your name]

Note what the email does and does not do. It names the customer's own result, so the review has a subject. It gives the form's deep link, not the listing's home page. It says how long it takes (a time you measured) and what the platform may ask. It does not suggest a star rating, and it does not offer anything in return.

For customers already inside the product, a short in-app message at the milestone does the same job in two lines:

Nice work: that was your 100th [invoice/report/import]. If [product] is earning its keep, would you tell other teams on [platform]? About [N] minutes, honest opinions welcome. [Write a review] [Not now]

Send one follow-up a week later to anyone who has not replied, then stop. A second nudge turns a willing customer into an irritated one, and an irritated customer who does write will say so.

Which route to ask through, and when each one earns its place

Each way of asking suits a different stage. The matrix below is our reading of the routes, not a survey, and it is the reason the first ten are a founder's job.

The personal routes work on day one and need nothing built, but they do not scale. An in-app prompt lands at the perfect moment and scales, but someone has to build it, and it needs a milestone event to fire on. An automated email at day 90 or at renewal scales without a build, but a date on a calendar is not a milestone: it cannot name the customer's own result, so it converts the warm and misses the undecided. A promoter follow-up from an NPS survey is excellent when you already run one and pointless to start one for.

A pattern that fits a small software company: personal asks until the listing holds ten reviews, an in-app prompt at the first milestone from then on, and an automated ask at renewal for the customers the prompt missed.

What you may offer, and what you may not

The temptation, at zero reviews, is to make it worth the customer's while. Some of that is allowed; some of it is not, and the line is clearer than it used to be.

In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission announced its final rule on the use of consumer reviews and testimonials, 16 CFR Part 465, on 14 August 2024, effective 60 days after its publication in the Federal Register. As the FTC's announcement summarises it, the rule bans fake reviews, bans compensation or other incentives conditioned on a review expressing a particular sentiment, positive or negative, and prohibits certain reviews by company insiders unless their relationship is clearly disclosed. In practice, for a software company asking for its first reviews:

• A thank-you for any honest review, offered to everyone you ask and stated in the ask, is a different thing from a thank-you for a positive one. Only the first is allowed, and the platform's own rules may be stricter than the law, so check them before you offer anything.
• Your employees, contractors, investors and their relatives do not write reviews of your product. Disclosure is what the rule requires for the reviews it covers; not asking them at all is the simpler policy, and it keeps the listing honest when a buyer looks at who wrote what.
• Never ask a customer to change or remove a critical review, and never make the ask only to customers you know are happy while hiding the form from the rest. That is our advice rather than a line from the rule, and the reason is practical: a buyer who spots either leaves the listing and does not come back.

This is a description of the rules as published, not legal advice; a business outside the United States, or one with any doubt about an incentive, should ask a lawyer.

Two things a review campaign will not fix. If customers do not like the product, asking them to write about it moves the dislike from your support inbox to a public page; fix the product first, ask second. And if the listing is on a platform your buyers never visit, ten reviews there help nobody; that is why step 1 comes before step 2.

What to do with the first ten, including the bad one

The first batch will contain at least one review that stings, and that one is worth the most. Reply to it first, within a day or two, in plain words: thank them, say what you are doing about the specific complaint, and give a date if you have one. A buyer reading a three-star review with a straight answer underneath learns that support exists, which is the thing they were worried about. Reply to the good ones too, briefly, so the page shows a company that reads its reviews.

Then use them. The complaints that come up twice are your roadmap for the next quarter, with a customer's words attached. The praise is copy for your site, your sales deck and your next ask, quoted with the customer's permission and within the platform's terms for reusing its content.

A caution on scale: once the asks go automated, the count rises and the quality of each review falls unless the prompt still fires on a real milestone. Keep the question "what did you do with the product?" in every version of the ask.

This week and next

This week, claim your listing on the one platform your buyers check and read its reviewer guidelines; next week, build the shortlist from the signals above and send the first five of the ten personal asks. That is the whole first step, and an empty listing says it has not been taken yet. The tools that automate the rest, request campaigns, review monitoring and reply inboxes, are compared on the reputation and review management software listing, and the wider software categories show how a complete listing reads to a buyer when you are deciding what yours should say.