How to Get Testimonials for Your SaaS When You Have Zero Customers

What Is the Cold Start Problem With Testimonials?

The cold start problem is the chicken-and-egg loop every early SaaS hits: you need testimonials to convert visitors, but you need visitors (or users) to generate those testimonials in the first place.

You have built your SaaS. The landing page is polished, the onboarding flow is smooth, and you are genuinely proud of what you have created. But there is one gaping hole on your site: the testimonials section is empty.

The good news is that this problem is solvable. You do not need thousands of customers, a PR agency, or a marketing budget to start collecting testimonials that actually move the needle. You just need to be intentional about it.

What Is the Social Proof Paradox, and How Do You Break It?

The social proof paradox is the sharper name for the cold start problem above: you need testimonials to convert visitors into customers, but you need customers before anyone will give you a testimonial. Every strategy in this guide exists to break that loop somewhere — either by finding people who are not customers yet but can still speak credibly (beta testers, peers, interviewees), or by borrowing proof from adjacent sources until your own supply catches up.

The mistake most founders make is treating the paradox as something to wait out. It does resolve on its own eventually — once you have fifty paying customers, testimonials show up without much effort — but "eventually" can mean six months of an empty landing page quietly killing your conversion rate the whole time. The founders who break the loop early do it deliberately, picking one of the strategies below this week rather than hoping the loop closes itself.

The paradox also bites harder for software than for almost anything else you could sell. A skeptical buyer can at least handle a physical product before deciding. A SaaS product asks a stranger to hand over an email address, sometimes a credit card, based on nothing but your copy and a few screenshots — the exact trust gap testimonials exist to close. Which means the paradox is not a minor inconvenience while you wait for customers. It is the actual obstacle standing between you and your first ones.

Why Do Testimonials Matter More Than You Think?

Testimonials are one of the most powerful conversion tools available to early-stage SaaS products — not a nice-to-have design element you sprinkle onto your landing page.

Research from the Spiegel Research Center found that displaying reviews can increase conversion rates by up to 270 percent. For higher-priced products, the effect is even stronger. When a visitor lands on your page for the first time, they are asking one question above all else: can I trust this?

A well-crafted feature list tells people what your product does. A testimonial tells them what your product did for someone like them. That distinction matters enormously. People trust the words of other people far more than they trust the words of the company selling the thing.

For indie developers and solo founders, testimonials carry even more weight. You likely do not have a recognizable brand name or a venture-backed reputation to lean on. A genuine quote from a real person who used your product and found value in it does more heavy lifting than any copy you could write yourself.

Testimonials also serve as objection handlers. A potential user worried about complexity might be reassured by a testimonial that says "I had it set up in under five minutes." Someone concerned about support might be swayed by "The founder personally helped me migrate my data." Each testimonial quietly answers a doubt the visitor has not voiced yet.

If you want to go deeper on the broader landscape of social proof types and strategies, check out our complete guide to social proof for indie developers. But right now, let us focus on the most impactful form: testimonials.

How Can You Get Testimonials Before You Have Customers?

You can collect real testimonials before paying customers by turning beta testers into advocates, using a give-first exchange with peer founders, mining support conversations, harvesting launch comments, dogfooding case studies, asking for short video clips early, partnering with complementary products, running structured user interviews, and borrowing proof from adjacent sources.

1. Turn Beta Testers into Advocates

Your earliest users are your most valuable source of testimonials, even if they never paid you a cent. Beta testers chose to try your product when it was rough around the edges. That says something about them, and about your product.

The mistake most founders make is asking too broadly. "Hey, could you leave a testimonial?" puts the entire burden on the other person. They have to figure out what to say, how to say it, and where to put it.

Instead, ask specific questions that prompt useful answers. Try "What problem were you trying to solve when you signed up?" or "What surprised you most about using the product?" These questions pull out concrete details that make for compelling quotes.

Here is another trick that works remarkably well: offer to draft the testimonial for them based on feedback they have already given you. Send them a draft and ask if they would be comfortable with you using it, with any edits they want to make. This respects their time and produces a better result.

2. Use the Give-First Exchange Model

This approach has quietly become one of the most effective ways for indie founders to build social proof, and it works precisely because it is not transactional.

The idea is simple: instead of asking strangers for testimonials, you lead with generosity. Find a fellow founder whose product you genuinely admire. Try it out. Then write them a thoughtful testimonial, tweet about their product, or publish a backlink from your blog. When you help someone first, the desire to reciprocate is a natural human response.

This is exactly the model that ProofSwap was built around. You submit your project and help other founders by giving them social proof first, which activates your listing and gets you matched with founders who can give proof back to your own product. It turns what would otherwise be awkward cold outreach into a structured, fair system where everyone benefits.

The key word is genuine. You should only give testimonials for products you actually believe in. Hollow praise helps no one, and savvy visitors can spot inauthentic testimonials from a distance.

3. Transform Customer Support Conversations into Testimonials

Some of the best testimonials are hiding in your inbox right now. Every time a user sends you a message saying "this saved me so much time" or "I wish I had found this sooner," you are sitting on a potential testimonial.

The next time someone says something positive in an email, support chat, or direct message, respond naturally and then add one line: "That really means a lot. Would you mind if we shared that quote on our site?"

Most people say yes. They already did the hard work of articulating their experience. You are just asking permission to amplify it.

Keep a running document where you log every positive piece of feedback you receive, no matter how small. Over time, this becomes a goldmine of authentic voices you can draw from.

4. Leverage Launch Platforms

If you have launched (or plan to launch) on Product Hunt, Hacker News, or Reddit, the comments section is a ready-made source of social proof.

People leave detailed, thoughtful feedback during launches. They share first impressions, describe how they see themselves using the product, and sometimes write mini-reviews unprompted. These comments are public, attributed to real accounts, and carry the credibility of the platform they were posted on.

After your launch, go through the comments and identify the most compelling ones. Reach out to those users and ask if you can feature their comment as a testimonial on your site. Attribution matters here. Include their name, handle, or profile link. A testimonial with a real identity attached to it is worth ten times more than an anonymous quote.

Even if your launch does not go viral, a handful of genuinely positive comments from real people is more than enough to populate your testimonials section.

5. Create a Case Study from Your Own Usage

If you use your own product, you already have your first case study. Dogfooding is not just good for product development. It is a credible source of social proof.

Document your own results with the same rigor you would bring to a customer case study. What was the problem? What did you try before? What happened after you started using your product? Be specific about numbers wherever possible.

"We used our own scheduling tool internally and reduced meeting coordination time by 40 percent" is a real, verifiable claim that communicates value even though the subject is also the builder. Visitors understand that you have skin in the game. They expect you to use your own product, and seeing concrete results from that usage builds confidence.

You can also extend this to your team, advisors, or collaborators. Anyone who uses the product in a real workflow can contribute a legitimate perspective.

6. Ask for Video Testimonials Early

Written testimonials are great. Video testimonials are better. They are harder to fake, more emotionally engaging, and they give visitors a real human face to connect with.

The barrier most founders perceive with video is that it feels like a big ask. It does not have to be. A 60-second Loom recording where someone shares their screen and talks through how they use your product is incredibly effective. It does not need to be polished. In fact, the more natural it feels, the more trustworthy it comes across.

Offer to make it easy. Schedule a five-minute call, ask two or three questions, and record the conversation (with permission). You handle the editing. They invest minimal effort and you get a powerful piece of social proof.

Start asking for video early, before your user base grows. Early adopters tend to be more invested in your success and more willing to go on camera. As you scale, getting personal time with individual users only becomes harder.

7. Partner with Complementary Products

Look for products that serve the same audience as yours but are not direct competitors. If you have built an invoicing tool for freelancers, the founder who built a time-tracking tool for freelancers is your perfect partner.

Reach out and propose a mutual exchange of genuine testimonials. Try each other's products. Write honest feedback. Feature it on your respective sites. Both of you benefit, and the testimonials carry extra weight because they come from people who deeply understand the problem space.

This works especially well when the partnership is visible. A quote from the founder of a recognized tool in your niche signals to visitors that knowledgeable people in the industry vouch for what you have built. That kind of endorsement is worth its weight in gold. These partnerships also naturally lead to backlink exchanges, which strengthen both your SEO and your credibility.

You can find founders who are actively looking for these kinds of exchanges on platforms like ProofSwap, including projects that need testimonials, where the matching is based on what types of proof you can give and what you need in return.

8. Turn User Interviews into Testimonials

A support message you mine for a quote is passive — you wait for someone to say something positive first. A user interview is active: you schedule fifteen minutes with a beta tester, an early adopter, or even someone who churned, and you ask structured questions designed to surface a quotable answer instead of hoping one shows up on its own.

The questions that work are close to the ones that surface useful product feedback: "What were you doing right before you found this?" "What almost made you not sign up?" "What is the single thing this has saved you the most time or money on?" A fifteen-minute conversation built around two or three of those questions produces material a rushed one-line support reply never will — enough detail to lift a full sentence, sometimes two, directly into a testimonial.

Record the call if they are comfortable, even just for your own notes. You do not need video to make this useful — a transcript is enough to pull an accurate quote, and reading it back to them for approval ("is it okay if I use this: '[quote]'?") turns the interview into a usable testimonial without a second, separate ask. If you are already running interviews to gather pre-launch feedback, the testimonial is often sitting inside the same conversation — you just have to ask permission to use it.

9. Borrow Proof from Adjacent Sources

Not every piece of credibility on your landing page has to come from your own customers. Until you have enough of your own, you can lean on proof that is true and relevant but comes from one step removed — the difference between claiming "our users report X," which you cannot say yet, and grounding a claim in evidence that already exists.

Two forms of this work well for early SaaS. Cite research about the category, not the product. A properly sourced industry stat about the problem your category solves tells a visitor the underlying category is worth their time, even before you have a single testimonial proving your specific tool does it. The Spiegel Research conversion stat earlier in this guide is exactly this pattern — borrowed, sourced, and doing real work before we had a single testimonial of our own to lean on. Get listed where credible parties already vouch for you by association — an integration marketplace, a "built with [platform]" directory, or a partner's own site listing you as a compatible tool. None of these are testimonials, but each one puts a third party's name next to yours before your own customers can.

This is different from the partnership strategy above: instead of a founder personally trading endorsements with you, you are borrowing structural credibility — a listing, a citation, a "works with" badge — that exists independently of any one relationship. It is thinner proof than a named customer quote, which is why it belongs early in your timeline and not as a permanent substitute for the real thing.

A third form worth knowing: your own track record is borrowable proof too. If you have shipped something before, built in public with a following, or have advisors who will put their name behind what you are building, that context belongs near your testimonials section, not buried on an about page. It answers a slightly different question than a customer quote does — not "did this work for someone," but "should I trust the person who built it" — and both questions are live in a skeptical visitor's head at the same time.

What Testimonial Tactics Should You Avoid?

Every tactic below either backfires immediately or backfires the moment someone checks — and skeptical visitors check more than founders expect.

Fake testimonials. Writing a quote and attributing it to "Sarah K., Product Manager" with no way to verify she exists is not a shortcut, it is a liability. The moment a visitor searches the name and finds nothing, or someone calls it out publicly, you lose more trust than an empty testimonials section ever would have cost you.

Buying reviews. Paying for reviews on G2, Product Hunt, or app stores violates the terms of every platform that hosts them — and reviewers paid to write something tend to produce generic, unspecific language that reads as bought even before anyone confirms it. The reputational cost when it surfaces outweighs whatever the reviews were worth. For more on which tools carry this risk (and which don't), see our comparison of social proof tools.

Vague, unspecific praise. "Great product, highly recommend!" is barely better than no testimonial — it answers no objection and proves nothing. If a quote could be pasted onto any product in any category and still make sense, it is not doing its job. Push for the specific outcome, the specific number, the specific before-and-after.

Testimonials from people who never used the product. A friend, an investor, or an advisor who has not actually opened your app can still write something nice — but it is not a testimonial (see the glossary definition), it is a favor. Visitors read testimonials as "this person tried it and here is what happened." A quote from someone with no hands-on experience breaks that contract the moment it is scrutinized.

The pattern across all four: anything that would embarrass you if the person behind the quote were asked to confirm it in public is not worth the short-term boost. Real, specific, attributable proof compounds. Manufactured proof has a shelf life measured in how long it takes one visitor to get curious.

Where Should You Display Testimonials for Maximum Impact?

Place testimonials where decisions happen: next to your primary CTA, in the hero, on the pricing page, and inside the sign-up flow — not on a dedicated page nobody visits.

Collecting testimonials is only half the equation. Where you place them determines how much work they do for you.

Near your primary call to action. The moment a visitor is deciding whether to sign up, a testimonial that addresses their likely hesitation can tip the balance. Place your strongest quote directly above or beside your main CTA button.

On your landing page hero section. A short, punchy testimonial near the top of the page establishes credibility before the visitor has even scrolled. It sets the tone for everything that follows.

On your pricing page. This is where buying anxiety peaks. Testimonials that reference value for money, ease of setup, or quality of support work hardest here.

In your sign-up flow. A well-placed testimonial on a registration page can reduce abandonment. When someone is filling in their email, a reminder that others have gone through this step and found value on the other side provides reassurance.

Do not hide your testimonials on a dedicated "/testimonials" page that nobody visits. Weave them into the pages where decisions are being made. For a detailed walkthrough of exactly where to place each type of social proof for maximum conversions, check out our guide on adding social proof to your landing page.

How Do You Get Your First Testimonial Today?

Pick one strategy and act on it before the end of the day — the fastest path is usually the give-first approach with a founder whose product you respect.

Find one founder whose product you genuinely respect. Try their product, then write them a short, specific, honest testimonial. Share it publicly. You will be surprised how quickly generosity comes back around.

If you want to make this systematic rather than ad hoc, add your project to ProofSwap and start helping other founders today. You will give social proof to projects you believe in and receive genuine testimonials and mentions in return — verified quotes that can live on your Wall of Proof. No cold outreach. No awkward asks. Just founders helping founders.

The testimonials section on your landing page does not have to stay empty. Every successful SaaS started with zero testimonials. The ones that grew fastest were the ones whose founders decided to do something about it. If you have not launched yet, even better — our guide on building credibility before launch shows how to start collecting proof while you are still building.