SaaS Nails Everything Inside Its Own Walls
Software companies blog more than any of the 47 industries I ranked, and only one tracks harder. Then I counted their Google reviews, and only 71.3% have ever collected one.
Ten past nine on a Thursday, in the lobby of a shared office building, waiting on a software founder who was running late.
So I did what I always do with five spare minutes and a phone in my hand. I typed his company name into Google, the way one of his buyers would.
His site came up, then his LinkedIn page, then a panel off to the side with a space in it where the stars go.
The space was empty.
Out of nosiness I typed in his closest competitor, and got a column of reviews running off the bottom of my screen.
Two software companies. Same buyers, same size, same market, opposite results on the one page a stranger looks at first.
Then I went upstairs and had a good meeting with a man whose website beats his competitor’s on every check I know how to run.
Better website, worse result. How does that happen inside one market, on the page that gets checked before every demo?
That pair bothered me for a month, so I pulled the trade underneath them: 861 software companies sampled across 15 markets, with 757 of their websites audited.
Neither of them turned out to be unusual. Between the two, they cover nearly everything I found.
The one with the empty panel
Start with the founder I was waiting for, because on paper he does this properly.
He publishes. Two posts a month, written by an editor he pays for, off a calendar he can show you.
His trade does too: 66.6% of software companies publish a blog where only 37% of the businesses I audited keep one running, and no industry among the 47 I ranked comes in higher.
Do you know which of your posts brought in the most trials last quarter? He does, to the hour.
76.2% of his industry runs analytics against 58% across my whole audit, which puts software second of the 47.
Running it and reading it are separate habits, mind you. In Washington DC I kept opening sites that count visitors perfectly well for offices where nobody has the login.
There’s a contact form on his homepage as well, and 50.3% of software companies put one there against 28% of businesses in general.
Blog, analytics, form. He decided on all three, and all three happened.
So how does a company this organized end up invisible on the page it doesn’t own?
The one with the wall of reviews
I read the competitor’s site properly that afternoon, and it isn’t good.
The blog stopped two years ago. No form anywhere on the homepage, a stock photo of two people shaking hands, and a pricing page I had to read twice.
But the reviews keep going, most of them recent, and a lot of them use someone’s first name.
I asked around afterwards, and the explanation turned out to be completely unremarkable. The founder asks, out loud, on the phone.
He still runs his own renewal calls. When a customer tells him the product is working, he asks her to say so in public.
Plenty of them say no, or say yes and forget. He asks the next one anyway, and there’s no budget line for any of it.
Which of the two do you think a stranger trusts on a Thursday morning?
Where the whole trade sits
A pair of companies is an anecdote, which is why I ran the pair against the rest of my sample before writing any of this down, and why anybody who doubts the result can set the explorer on my report to SaaS, leave the city list alone, and get every rate back with the count of sites behind it. The rest of the sample sided with the competitor, comfortably.
Count the software companies with even one Google review to their name and you get 71.3%, where 88% of the businesses I sampled clear that bar without planning to, which is 45th of 47.
So which of the two is the exception? Not the founder. He’s the rule, and the man with the bad website and the good reviews is the one standing outside it.
What actually separates them
Put the two side by side and the line between them isn’t skill, it isn’t budget, and it certainly isn’t how much anybody cares. The founder cares more. He’s the one paying an editor.
Every check his company wins is a check nobody outside the building has to agree to.
The whole trade has that shape. Software wins every check you can type and loses the ones you have to build.
The blog goes up because a writer was hired to write it. The analytics went in because someone with a login switched it on. The form is on the homepage because a marketer decided it should be.
One person decides, one person does it, and nobody has to be talked round.
A Google review needs a yes from a woman who doesn’t work for you, doesn’t report to anyone who does, and got what she needed from your product a month ago.
You can’t ship that. You can’t put it in a sprint either, and I’ve never once watched “collect customer reviews” get pulled into one.
When did anything on your roadmap last depend on a stranger saying yes?
Ask a founder why the panel is empty and the same four reasons come back, and I’ve weighed each one on its own terms.
Every other lever your company owns answers to work. Write more, ship more, test more, and the graph moves inside a quarter.
The lever that needs another human being to act on your behalf just sits there.
Silence means something different in software
There’s a second reason, and this one belongs to your trade specifically.
In most businesses a happy customer walks out of the door and says goodbye to your face. In yours, a happy customer renews by doing nothing at all.
The card gets charged. The invoice lands in an inbox nobody opens. Not one word gets said out loud by anyone.
Silence reads as success inside your company, and after a couple of years it stops feeling like a signal at all.
Then a stranger runs the same search I ran in that lobby, and silence is what she gets too.
She can’t see your churn rate. She’ll never see the one question survey your product team emails out every quarter.
She has a company with no public sign of a single happy customer, and three competitors open in three other tabs.
What would you assume, sitting in her chair?
Count it the way you count everything else
When did anyone at your company last ask a customer for a review?
You’re the trade that counts everything, so go and count this too.
Add a row to the numbers you already email yourself on Monday morning: reviews collected last week.
Then leave it sitting at zero for a month, and notice how quickly a blank cell starts to irritate you.
My guess is it bothers you more than any chart on that beautiful dashboard, because for once you’ll be looking straight at the thing you’ve been avoiding.
And if the site sitting behind that empty panel is the part that worries you, software companies are what I build for, which is how I ended up counting any of this in the first place.
Who this one isn’t for
I didn’t write it for the founder who already knows what his customers would say and would rather it stayed private. That’s a different problem, and no review link touches it.
I didn’t write it for the company that’s been asking every month for a year and hearing nothing back. You’ve done your part, and I’d look at when you ask rather than whether.
And I didn’t write it for the competitor. His site loses to yours on nearly every check I run, and the buyer with two tabs open is still going to pick him, because a woman he’ll never meet spoke up for him first.
