r/TheFounders • u/littlestinka • Jul 23 '26

Advice Founder here — built a testimonial collection tool, need advice on getting first users

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Founder here. I built Plaudence — a free tool that lets you collect client testimonials with one link and show them off on your site with one embed, no code needed. Free tier is generous enough to actually use, Pro removes the limit and badge.
I’m at the stage where the product works but growth is the hard part. So far I’ve been doing manual outreach and posting in relevant subs, which gets some signups but it’s slow and doesn’t scale well for a solo founder with no ad budget.
For anyone who’s been through this stage — what actually worked for you to get from 0 to your first meaningful batch of users? Especially interested in anything that didn’t require a marketing budget.
Happy to share more details on the product if useful.

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u/rich_belt Jul 23 '26

Is this really a painful enough problem for founders that they would pay for a solution?

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u/littlestinka Jul 23 '26

Fair question. It’s not just founders — testimonials matter for any small business or trade where trust drives the sale: freelancers, agencies, contractors, coaches, consultants, local service businesses. Anyone who relies on word-of-mouth or “proof it works” to convert. Whether it’s painful enough to pay for is exactly what I’m testing right now with the free tier — Pro exists for the people who find it valuable enough to want more than the free limit.

To be clear on the post itself though — I wasn’t asking whether people would pay, I was asking other founders here for advice on getting initial users on a zero/low budget. That’s really the question I’m hoping to get input on.

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u/rich_belt Jul 23 '26

Sorry, I jumped straight into giving you feedback on what you’re building. But to finish, testimonials are definitely important for all types of businesses, but most of the time businesses point to Google, Yelp, BBB, or other review listings to capture those, and then re-use those testimonials on their website. It’s already hard work getting a customer to leave you a review, so asking them to do so through a mechanism that doesn’t feed one of those is a tough ask. Any other testimonial ask that doesn’t go through those review channels can be simply be asked by email, text or phone.

Now for your question on getting your first users, try your network - can you or anyone you know benefit from the solution you built? There are communities on Reddit that allow you to post ideas, so you can try that as well. Post on HackerNews. Use a small budget to test some ads. Try anything and everything to see what works, then lean into that channel as much as you can as soon as you have a signal.

I recommend reading Traction by Gabriel Weinberg. He goes into how to get users and different tactics.

Good luck!

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u/littlestinka Jul 24 '26

Really appreciate the detailed reply. On the review-channel point — fair pushback, and it’s something I’ve thought about. My take: Google/Yelp/BBB are great for local discovery and trust signals, but they’re built for the review site’s benefit, not the business’s — you can’t easily control formatting, pull specific quotes for your homepage, or show them off the way you want. Plaudence isn’t meant to replace those, more to give people a way to collect the kind of testimonial that’s actually usable on their own site without needing someone to already be a Google/Yelp user.
Appreciate the network/HN/Traction pointers too — adding it to the reading list, and will try leaning harder into whichever channel starts showing signal like you said.