The testimonial collector every founder builds twice.

You shipped the thing. Users love it. Three of them emailed you saying so. Now you need those words on your landing page — and you're about to spend the next two hours copy-pasting them into a div with rounded corners.

The pain is documented.

Search "how to collect testimonials" on r/SaaS and you'll find the same conversation every month: someone asks what tool to use, six people recommend Testimonial.to or Senja, and the founder replies "that's $30/mo for a form and a grid."1 The thread ends with someone building it themselves in an afternoon — badly — and rebuilding it three months later when the HTML spaghetti breaks.2

The problem isn't collecting testimonials. It's that every tool in the space is priced for Series A companies, not solo founders running a $2k MRR product who need five quotes on a landing page.3

The evidence of demand.

The market is segmented wrong. Enterprise tools (Trustpilot, G2) serve companies with thousands of reviews. Mid-market tools (Testimonial.to, Senja) serve funded startups. Nobody serves the founder who needs five testimonials, a clean embed, and a $0 price tag.7

The proposed product.

A single deployable app with three surfaces:

1. Collect page — shareable link (yoursite.com/t/submit). Client fills in name, role, company, text, optional photo. Takes 30 seconds.
2. Wall of Love — public page displaying approved testimonials in a masonry grid. Shareable, SEO-indexed.
3. Embed widget — single <script> tag that renders a testimonial carousel or grid on any website. No iframes, no layout shift.

Competitive landscape:

The build flow.

1. Collect form — Next.js route with server action writing to a JSON file (or Vercel KV for production).
2. Admin — protected page listing pending/approved testimonials. One-click approve, edit, delete.
3. Wall page — masonry grid, server-rendered, responsive.
4. Embed — bundled JS widget served from /embed.js. Drop a script tag, it renders.

Reasons this might not work.

R-01 — JSON doesn't scale. Past ~200 testimonials, file I/O gets slow. Mitigation: the target user has 5–50 testimonials. At scale, swap to SQLite or KV — a 30-minute migration.

R-02 — Embed scripts feel invasive. Some founders won't add a third-party script. Mitigation: offer a static HTML export as an alternative. Copy-paste, no script needed.

R-03 — "Free" kills the upgrade path. If the free tier does everything, nobody pays $9. Mitigation: free tier caps at 10 testimonials and includes a small "Powered by" badge. $9/mo removes the badge, adds unlimited testimonials, custom colors, and import from Twitter/Product Hunt.