26 Review Site Playbooks CEOs Used to Rank #1

In this article, you will discover precisely how top software CEOs leverage review platforms not just for reputation management, but as a powerful engine for acquiring new users and driving millions in revenue. With real-world examples and proven strategies, you’ll learn how companies have turned sites like G2, Capterra, and Trustpilot into predictable growth channels. These aren’t just theories; they are battle-tested tactics from founders who have successfully scaled their companies to impressive new heights.

You’ll get the 6-part playbook to launch and dominate with Review Sites, in addition to dozens of case studies you can use as inspiration for your own growth strategy. These examples were collected directly from CEOs at companies like Surfer SEO, G2, and Reviews.io when they keynoted Founderpath events or shared their journey on the podcast.

The 6-Part Playbook For Dominating Review Sites

1. Choose Your Battleground: Don’t try to be everywhere. Identify the 2-3 review platforms most relevant to your industry and where your ideal customers are searching. For most B2B SaaS, this means starting with G2, Capterra, and TrustRadius. Optimize your profiles completely with up-to-date information, compelling visuals, and clear product descriptions.
2. Automate the “Ask”: The best time to ask for a review is right after a customer has a positive experience. Integrate review requests into your customer lifecycle. This could be an automated email triggered after they achieve a key milestone in your app, give you a high NPS score, or have a positive interaction with your support team. The goal is to make gathering reviews a systematic process, not a manual chore.
3. Gamify and Incentivize (The Smart Way): Getting users to take the time to write a review can be a challenge. Take a page out of Surfer SEO’s playbook: offer in-product credits in exchange for writing a review on a site like G2 or Capterra. As Surfer SEO’s CEO, Lucjan Suski, shared, this simple trick caused their G2 reviews to skyrocket from 20 to over 120 in a matter of months. People will do anything for free credits, and they’re more likely to leave a positive review or no review at all, protecting your rating.
4. Turn Reviews into Your #1 Marketing Asset: Your work isn’t done once the review is published. Showcase your best reviews everywhere. Use them on your homepage as social proof, create case studies from detailed reviews, and incorporate them into your sales decks and ad campaigns. This builds trust and authority, making your sales process easier and more effective.
5. Engage with Every Reviewer: Make it a company policy to respond to every single review, both positive and negative. Thanking users for positive feedback strengthens the relationship. Addressing negative feedback publicly shows that you listen, care, and are committed to improving. This transparency can turn a negative experience into a net positive for your brand reputation.
6. Spy on Your Competition: Review sites are a goldmine of competitive intelligence. Regularly analyze the reviews of your top competitors. What do their customers love? What are their biggest complaints? This can reveal weaknesses in their product or service that you can exploit, and highlight strengths you should be emphasizing in your own marketing.

40+ Examples of SaaS Companies Growing with Review Sites

• Lucjan Suski from Surfer SEO explained how they gamified the review process by offering in-product credits for reviews on G2. This single tactic increased their reviews from 20 to 120 in a few months, dramatically boosting their visibility and lead flow from the platform on their way to $15M in revenue.
• Scott Brandley of ShopperApproved, a bootstrapped review platform, made dominating their own online reputation a core strategy. They systematically ensured they were the highest-rated platform on G2, Capterra, and even their competitor Trustpilot, which drove thousands of high-intent buyers to their site, helping them pass $7.5M in revenue.
• Godard Abel, the founder of G2, shared that the core inspiration for starting the platform was the frustration of waiting 12 years to become a leader in Gartner reports with his previous company. G2 was built to give power to the actual users, creating a trusted marketplace that now drives significant revenue for thousands of software vendors.
• Tom Goodwin of Reviews.io, which hit $10M in ARR bootstrapped, emphasized using reviews to push stars through to Google AdWords, which reduces cost-per-click and improves visibility in Google Shopping, directly tying review collection to paid ad performance.
• Kirsty Finlayson from Chameleon revealed that G2 is now one of their top three channels for pipeline. They made their review request more contextual by embedding the ask directly within their app, which resulted in 90 new reviews and helped them regain their “Leader” badge on the platform.
• The team at Surfer SEO detailed how asking for G2 reviews in exchange for product credits worked wonders. Because users were already bought into the product, they were happy to write a review for more usage, and they typically leave a good review or none at all.
• The CEO of WhatConverts explained they get a ton of five-star reviews on sites like Capterra, which has become a major customer acquisition channel for them as they compete with heavily VC-funded competitors.
• Stefan Smulders of Expandi, which grew to $7M in 20 months, built an “army” of happy customers who would promote them in Facebook groups and communities, talking up their product and support, which acted as a powerful, organic review and referral engine.
• Thibaud Clement from Loomly mentioned that their terrific reviews on G2 Crowd and Capterra work together with their other content marketing efforts to drive growth towards their $8M ARR goal.
• Michael Cooney of WhatConverts shared that review sites are a key part of their inbound funnel. They get a ton of five-star reviews on Capterra and Google, which helps them compete against competitors that have raised over $100M in VC funding.
• Andy MacMillan at UserTesting, which hit $65M in ARR, emphasized using review sites like G2 Crowd to build social proof. With over 700 customer reviews, it provides a seat at the table when potential buyers are making decisions.
• Bridget Harris of YouCanBook.Me uses G2 not just for traffic but for authority and reputation. They actively pay G2 to run review campaigns to their customer base, which helps them maintain a high ranking against giants like Calendly and Wix.
• Zack Oates from OvationUp gets customers to leave positive online reviews by first capturing their feedback through a simple, two-question SMS or QR code survey. This pre-qualification ensures only happy customers are pushed to sites like Google, protecting their online reputation.
• Preetam Nath of SuperLemon, a Shopify app, attributes their high ranking in the app store to having over 500 five-star reviews. They use automated email triggers after a customer achieves a milestone, like recovering $1,000 in abandoned carts, to ask for a review.
• Joe Malcoun, the CEO of Nutshell, uses G2 Crowd and Capterra as a key part of their marketing. They believe customers on these sites are more sophisticated and are comparing products based on quality, which gives their product a competitive advantage.
• Vaibhav Kakkar of Rank Watch, an SEO platform, gets a significant portion of their 1,500 customers through review sites where their tool is highly rated, helping them reach $180k in MRR.
• Casey Sullivan from Bookafy shared that Capterra has been their best-performing marketing channel. For a spend of less than $500 per month, the high-intent traffic converts at nearly 20% from click to trial.
• Colin Earl, the founder of Agiloft, notes that many customers find them through review sites like Capterra and G2 Crowd, where they are consistently the most highly praised product in their category, helping them grow to over $10M in ARR.
• RJ Friedlander of ReviewPro, a hotel tech platform doing $15M in ARR, built his entire business around aggregating and analyzing user-generated content from review sites to provide guest intelligence to over 43,000 hotels.
• Ricardo at Betterpic, an AI headshot generator that hit $270k MRR, leverages affiliates who are often bloggers that write “best of” review articles. These articles rank high on Google and drive significant, high-converting traffic.
• The team at WhatConverts, a bootstrapped call tracking tool, shared that review sites are a major source of leads for them. They focus on Capterra and Google reviews, which helps them maintain visibility against heavily funded competitors.
• Gerry Colyer of Siftery, which was acquired by G2, built their platform on the idea of crowdsourcing data quality. They programmatically scraped the web for hints of software usage and then asked the community for confirmation, creating a uniquely accurate dataset.
• The CEO of WhatConverts, Michael Cooney, uses review sites like Capterra as a key PPC channel to compete with venture-backed players like CallRail, driving growth for his bootstrapped company on its way to $8M in revenue.
• Kevin Indig, former head of SEO at G2, explained a key tactic was to dynamically insert the number of reviews into the search snippet metadata. This set user expectations and increased click-through rates, signaling to Google that their result was highly relevant.
• Wojciech Grześkowiak of Trustisto, a social proof tool doing $60k ARR, plans to add a review widget as a new product line to help their e-commerce customers leverage social proof more effectively.
• Kate from PostoPlan, a social scheduling tool, mentioned that being listed on G2 and Capterra is part of their strategy to get discovered by customers in their target markets of Spain, Mexico, and Argentina.
• Joy from Auryc uses a “Powered by” button on their search widget, which drives viral growth. When users see the widget on a customer’s website and click the link, it generates a steady stream of new signups with a conversion rate of 7-8%.
• David from LiveAgent, a bootstrapped customer service tool, shared that building their presence on software comparison sites like G2 Crowd and Capterra was a key factor that led to their rapid growth phase, taking them to $250k MRR.
• Alex Raymond of Kapta, a key account management platform, noted that his customers are often mature industrial companies that rely heavily on data and reviews to make purchasing decisions, making a strong presence on review sites crucial.
• Vic from CrazyLister, an eBay listing tool, gets high-quality leads from Google Adwords by targeting specific search queries that indicate pain points, such as “how to create a professional eBay template.”
• Julian from Mergify, a DevOps tool, gets customers through organic search by ranking for specific, high-intent keywords like “merge queue for GitHub.” Being one of the only companies providing such a service makes it easy for the right customers to find them.
• Max from Orgos, an HR platform, initially acquired customers through affiliate partnerships with comparator sites, negotiating 15% of ACV for new paid customers.
• Shuvo from My Alice, a help desk for store owners, is planning a launch on AppSumo to gather initial traction, reviews, and trust from early adopters around the world.
• Gilead from eClincher, a social media management tool doing over $250k MRR, was nominated as the #1 platform for ROI by G2 Crowd, which drives significant organic, word-of-mouth traffic and new customers.
• Anton from APIWay combined the business models of a free integration tool like Zapier with a review site like G2 Crowd. They offer free integrations and then recommend paid tools, earning an affiliate commission.
• Dan from Bird Eats Bug uses review platforms like Capterra and GetApp to acquire new users. He found that GetApp performed better for his bug reporting tool due to its more technical audience of developers.
• Vitali from Adapty got his first 10 paying customers from a Product Hunt launch where he received over 400 upvotes, which provided the initial momentum for his mobile paywall A/B testing tool.
• Jon Darbyshire of SmartSuite, which went from $0 to $1.2M in ARR in 4 weeks, used comparison sites like Capterra and G2 as a key part of his launch strategy to showcase how his product stacked up against competitors from day one.
• Martin from Revue, a newsletter platform acquired by Twitter, focused on getting listed and reviewed on various platforms to drive initial traffic and sign-ups for their tool.
• The founder of Nutshell CRM, now at $360k MRR, focuses their paid ad spend on Capterra because they find it attracts more sophisticated buyers who are comparing products based on quality, not just brand recognition.

Conclusion

You’ve just learned how more than 40 leading SaaS founders use review sites as a strategic growth channel, not just a place to park their reputation. By systematically encouraging reviews, leveraging positive feedback as a marketing asset, and engaging with their user community, they’ve turned these platforms into powerful engines for customer acquisition and revenue growth. Whether you’re bootstrapped or venture-backed, these tactics show that a well-executed review site strategy can deliver a significant, measurable return on investment. Start implementing these plays at your own company by getting your free SaaS metrics at Founderpath.com.

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