Favors.dev
Getting testimonials for a new product is a give-first problem, not a collection problem. You don't yet have a pile of happy customers to email, so the move is to put the product in front of a few people who genuinely fit your audience, help them get a real result, and then ask — at the right moment, with the right questions. Three to five specific, honest quotes will do more for a fresh landing page than fifty vague ones you scraped for.
Almost every guide on this topic assumes you already have a customer base to mine. This one is for the harder, earlier case: a product that's new, an audience you're still building, and a testimonials section that's currently empty. Here's how to fill it honestly — including a copy-paste question bank, a weak-vs-strong teardown, and the one line you don't cross.
Why testimonials out-convert your feature list
A testimonial out-converts your own copy because it's the one claim on the page you didn't write. Prospects discount what a founder says about their own product by default — it's the seller talking. A specific quote from someone who was recently in the reader's exact situation carries weight your feature list never can, because it's social proof: people look to the behavior and judgments of others to decide what's safe and worth doing. The Nielsen Norman Group calls this out plainly in its work on social proof in user experience: we reference other people's choices to guide our own, especially under uncertainty — and nothing is more uncertain than a product nobody's heard of yet.
There's a newer reason to care in 2026, too. Testimonials and reviews aren't just working on the humans reading your page — they're feeding the machines that increasingly answer on your page's behalf. More on that below, but keep it in mind: the proof you collect now does double duty.
How to get testimonials when you're brand new
When you have no customers, you manufacture the experience first and the testimonial follows. That's not a trick — it's the whole point. A testimonial is a description of a real result, so your job is to create a handful of real results you can honestly ask about. There are three reliable ways to do that with a brand-new product:
Hand-place with early users
Onboard five people who actually fit your audience, then help them personally until they hit a first win. High-touch now buys you the quotes that scale later.
Ask at the moment it clicks
Watch for the trigger — a milestone, a 'this just solved my problem' message, a support issue you fixed fast — and ask then, while the feeling is fresh.
Trade with peer founders
Other founders will genuinely try your product and give you an honest, usable testimonial — if you do the same for them. Reciprocity, not cold outreach.
The third one is the one the other guides never mention, and it's the fastest for a pre-launch founder. The problem with cold-asking strangers for a testimonial is that they haven't used your product and have no reason to. Other founders launching right now are the exception: they understand exactly what a good testimonial does, they'll actually put your product through its paces, and they'll write you something specific — as long as the exchange is fair. This is the same give-first logic behind marketing a SaaS on no budget: you pay in effort and reciprocity instead of dollars.
That's the specific job of the testimonial action on Favors.dev. A founder marketing co-op runs on a points economy: you earn points by writing an honest testimonial for another founder's product after really trying it, and you spend points to have founders do the same for you. Every submission is verified before points move, so what you get back is a real quote from someone who actually used the thing — not a hollow favor. It sidesteps the cold-start entirely, because your first testimonials come from peers who get it.
The questions that actually produce a usable quote
The reason most testimonials are weak is that most requests are weak. "Could you write a few words about us?" produces a few words: "Great product, highly recommend." Useless. A usable testimonial has structure — a before, a hesitation, a turning point, a result — and you get that structure by asking for it. Never ask for "a testimonial." Ask these five questions instead, in a short call or a quick message, and stitch the answers into a quote they approve:
| Ask this | It surfaces | Why it works |
|---|---|---|
| "What were you struggling with before you tried it?" | The before-state | Anchors the quote in a pain your prospect already feels, so they see themselves in it before you've said a word about features. |
| "What almost stopped you from signing up?" | The hesitation | A testimonial that names the exact objection a reader is having — and then dissolves it — is worth ten that just say 'love it'. |
| "What was the moment it clicked for you?" | The turning point | Turns a rating into a tiny story. Stories are concrete, memorable, and far harder to fake than adjectives. |
| "What can you do now that you couldn't before? Any numbers?" | The specific result | The one line prospects actually believe. 'Saved me a day a week' beats 'super efficient' every time. |
| "Who would you tell to use this — and who shouldn't?" | The honest recommendation | The 'who shouldn't' makes the whole quote more credible. Nobody trusts a testimonial with no edges. |
Two mechanics make this land. First, do the writing. People are busy; if you turn their spoken answers into a tight quote and send it back for a one-click approval, your response rate roughly doubles and the quality goes up. Second, get explicit permission to use their name, role, and — ideally — a photo. An attributed testimonial ("Priya N., founder of X") is worth several anonymous ones, and named attribution is exactly what the answer engines reward, too.
What a strong testimonial looks like (vs a weak one)
The difference between a testimonial that converts and one that doesn't is specificity. A weak testimonial could be pasted onto any product on earth. A strong one could only have been written by a real person about your product. Here's the same customer, asked two different ways:
Weak — from "write a few words"
"Great product, really easy to use. The team is super helpful and it does everything I need. Highly recommend!"
Interchangeable, adjective-driven, kills no objection. A reader skims past it.
Strong — from the question bank
"I'd tried two other schedulers and still missed my own launch dates. I almost skipped this one because I assumed it was another dashboard to babysit. Two weeks in, my whole launch calendar runs itself and I've stopped losing Fridays to it. If you're a solo founder drowning in tabs, start here — if you have an ops team already, you probably don't need it."
Names the before-state, the hesitation, the turning point, a concrete result, and an honest "who it's not for."
(The strong example above is an illustration of the shape, not a real customer quote — never publish a testimonial you didn't actually receive.)
Where to collect and display them
Collect testimonials where the friction is lowest for the person giving them, and display them where the doubt is highest for the person reading them. For collection, a lightweight tool beats a back-and-forth email thread: services like Senja and Testimonial.to give you a single link where someone can leave a written or video testimonial in a minute, and they handle the permissions and formatting for you. For display, put your two or three strongest quotes next to your highest-friction moments — the pricing table, the signup button, the objection a prospect is most likely to be stuck on.
Here's the 2026 upgrade most founders miss. Mark your on-page testimonials up with Review structured data so engines can parse who said what about which product. This matters because search is going answer-first, and the engines don't weight all content equally. According to Similarweb's 2026 research on generative-AI citations, tools like ChatGPT lean heavily on community discussion and review content when they ground an answer — Reddit and review-style sources make up a large share of what gets cited. Reviews and testimonials are the same species of signal. Which means the honest proof you collect for humans now also helps you get cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity later. It's the same asset working two surfaces at once — the same double duty that makes your first reviews worth chasing early.
The line you don't cross
Only publish testimonials that are true, and never pay for a positive one. That's the whole ethics rule, and it's not just principle — it's the law. The FTC's endorsement guidance is explicit: a testimonial must reflect the honest opinions and real experience of the person giving it, and any material connection — money, free access, a reciprocal favor — should be disclosable. Writing a review for someone in exchange for one back is fine, as long as both are honest and neither was conditioned on being positive. Fabricating a quote, editing a lukewarm one into a rave, or dangling a reward that only pays out for five stars is not.
The practical version: incentivize the effort of writing, never the sentimentof what's written. Make it easy, thank people, disclose the connection if there is one — and if a user's honest experience is a three-out-of-five, treat that as product feedback, not a testimonial to massage. Manufactured social proof is brittle: it reads hollow to prospects, it can get your listing pulled from review platforms, and in 2026 it's exactly the kind of thin signal AI engines are learning to discount. Real proof is the only kind that compounds.
Frequently asked questions
How do I get testimonials for a product with no customers?
Get the product into the hands of a small number of people who genuinely fit your audience — early adopters, beta users, or peer founders who try it for real — help them succeed, and then ask at the moment they hit a small win. You don't need dozens; three to five specific, honest testimonials from people who actually used the product are enough to make a new landing page feel real. The mistake is waiting for a mature customer base that a pre-launch product doesn't have yet. Manufacture the experience first (real usage), then the testimonial follows.
When is the right time to ask for a testimonial?
Ask at a moment of high positive emotion, not on a fixed schedule. The best triggers are a user hitting a milestone, telling you the product solved their problem, or a support issue you resolved fast. For most products that's somewhere between two weeks and 90 days of real use — long enough to have a result worth describing, soon enough that the enthusiasm is fresh. A generic 'please review us' blast sent at day one gets you generic quotes or silence.
Is it okay to offer an incentive for a testimonial?
You can make giving feedback easy and thank people for their time, but never pay for a positive testimonial or condition a reward on the review being favorable. Under FTC endorsement principles, testimonials must reflect the honest opinions and real experience of the person giving them, and any material connection — a discount, free access, a reciprocal favor — should be disclosable. The safe rule: incentivize the effort of writing, never the sentiment of what's written, and only publish what the person genuinely believes.
How many testimonials does a new product need?
Fewer than you think. A handful of specific, credible testimonials that each name a real before-state, objection, and result will out-perform a wall of vague five-star blurbs. Prospects skim for the one quote that matches their situation, so range matters more than volume: cover a few different use cases and objections rather than collecting twenty near-identical 'great product!' lines.
Do testimonials help with AI search and SEO?
Increasingly, yes. Answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity disproportionately cite reviews, community discussion, and named-author content when they synthesize an answer — the same category of social proof a testimonial belongs to. Publishing real testimonials on your own pages, marking them up with Review schema so engines can parse them, and earning honest reviews on third-party sites all feed the signals that get a brand named inside an AI answer, not just ranked in a list.