The hardest reviews to get are the first ten. By the time you’ve got twenty or thirty, it’s a rolling wave. Every finished job adds another one, and new customers read a healthy stack and feel comfortable hiring you. But getting off zero is another thing entirely. Customers don’t like being the first, and tradies don’t like asking. The business sits there with a blank profile for months, and the blank profile makes the next customer hesitate, which keeps the profile blank. It’s a loop worth breaking deliberately.
Here’s how to get your first ten Reviewey reviews without feeling like you’re begging, and without cutting any corners to do it.
Start with the customers you already know
Before you chase new leads, go back to the last ten jobs you did off-platform. Customers you’ve finished work for in the last three to six months. You’ve already done the work, they’ve already paid, and the job is still fresh enough that they remember it. A polite message saying you’ve joined Reviewey and it would help the business a lot if they could leave a review of the job, here’s the link, gets a much higher hit rate than asking strangers. These are your warmest leads. Use them.
Ask the moment the job feels finished
On new jobs, the best time to ask for a review is the day the customer tells you the job looks great. Not a week later when they’ve moved on, and not three months later when they’ll struggle to remember the details. The day they hand you a cup of tea and say “yep, that’s perfect” is the day they’ll happily leave a review if you make it easy. Have the link ready. Send it by text that afternoon. “Thanks for today. If you’ve got two minutes, would you mind leaving a review on Reviewey? It really helps us. Here’s the link.”
Make the ask short and specific
The longer the ask, the lower the hit rate. One sentence about why it helps, one sentence with the link, and that’s it. Don’t write a paragraph apologising for the inconvenience. Don’t explain the platform. Don’t suggest what they should say. A short, confident ask from a business that’s just done good work is easy to say yes to. A long, apologetic ask reads as though you’re asking a favour the customer shouldn’t agree to.
Don’t offer anything in return
Never offer a discount, a free service, a gift voucher, or anything else for a review. It breaches the guidelines of every reputable review platform, Reviewey included, and it produces the exact kind of incentivised review that customers have learned to distrust. The whole point of Reviewey is that reviews are tied to real jobs and aren’t bought. Reviews that were bought are the opposite of useful. Keep the ask clean. The only thing you’re trading is the fact that you did good work.
Ask the quieter customers too
The customers who hug you at the end of the job are the easy ones. The ones who say “thanks, looks good” and close the door are actually the more valuable reviewers, because their reviews sound measured rather than gushing. Readers trust a calm four-star review more than a breathless five-star one. Don’t self-select the ask to the most enthusiastic customers only. Ask the quiet, satisfied ones too. Their reviews will do more for you long term.
Don’t chase more than once
If a customer hasn’t left a review a week after the ask, one polite nudge is fine. “Hi, just following up, if you haven’t had a chance to leave that review yet, here’s the link again, no pressure at all.” After that, let it go. A customer who hasn’t replied after two asks isn’t going to, and hassling them turns a good job into an annoying one. The next customer will replace them.
Make reviewing customers part of your routine too
Reviewey is two-sided. Every time you review a customer, that review is visible on your profile too, and it shows new customers that you’re active on the platform. If you’ve done ten jobs, you should have ten customer reviews written by you alongside however many customer-written reviews you’ve collected. Doing this regularly makes the whole profile feel live rather than stale. It also helps the Passport system work the way it’s meant to, so the next tradie who gets a quote request from one of your customers knows what they’re walking into.
Respond to the first few reviews publicly
When the first reviews land, respond to each one. Keep it short. “Thanks Sarah, great working with you, glad the hot water is sorted.” It takes ten seconds and it sends a signal to everyone else reading the profile that you’re an active, engaged business. Empty reviews on a silent profile look hollow. Reviews with a warm, quick response from the business look like a real company.
Keep going past ten
Ten reviews is the threshold where customers stop treating your profile as experimental and start treating it as proof. Don’t stop there. Make the ask a permanent part of how you finish a job. The businesses with fifty, a hundred, two hundred reviews on the platform didn’t get there by being special. They got there by asking every customer, every time, for years. The first ten are the hardest. Everything after that is just the habit.