From collecting customer testimonials to $1M in annual recurring revenue: Testimonial.to

The small market he found in customer testimonials

Damon Chen was a software engineer who had spent eight years at Cisco. In 2020 he built several side projects, but simply launching products was not earning him money. With Testimonial.to, a video testimonial collection service he launched that December, he finally saw the possibility of a paid business.

The seed of the idea was on other products' landing pages. Damon felt that many websites displayed customer testimonials made up of only short sentences and photos, which did not convey enough trust. On some pages he even spotted default placeholder photos that had shipped with a design template. He turned his attention to video testimonials, where customers show their faces and describe their experience in their own words.

Much of the technology he needed was already inside IndieLog, a service he had built earlier where independent makers shared updates by video. There he had already implemented recording, uploading, storage, and playback. Damon took the video-recording piece and developed it into a separate product for businesses collecting customer testimonials.

Four days after his first code commit, his first paying customer appeared. On day five, December 22, 2020, he launched on Product Hunt. From launch day, he said he would work on product improvements, marketing, and sales together.

Connecting requests to website publishing

Testimonial.to's basic flow starts with a seller creating a collection page and sending the link to customers. The seller sets the prompts and design to match the brand, and can receive testimonials by video or text. Without building a separate intake page, the seller gives customers a place to respond.

The collection page can include questions for customers to answer. For example, it can ask what difficulties they had before using the product and what changed afterward. By presenting questions up front, the seller requests exactly the information needed, while the customer gets guidance on what to talk about.

Submitted testimonials gather in a dashboard, where the seller selects which ones to publish. The selected testimonials appear together, in text and video, on a public page called the 'Wall of Love.' Reviewing what was collected and publishing it happens in a connected sequence inside one management space.

Adding testimonials to a website was also kept short. The seller pastes the provided embed code into the site once, and afterward manages which testimonials appear and how they are arranged from inside Testimonial.to. Changes carry over to the website, so there is no need to edit page code each time a testimonial is added.

Reviews already posted elsewhere can also be imported. Posts on X and reviews on external review sites are gathered through integrations and a browser extension, then organized in the same space. This reduces the need to ask existing customers to write a testimonial again, and lets sellers put scattered reviews to use on their sales pages.

Closing the lifetime deal that was selling well

At launch, Damon sold a $199 lifetime deal. Revenue over the ten days after launch was $5,124. Early buyers also sent feedback and bug reports, which he used to improve the product.

On January 1, 2021, however, he stopped selling new lifetime deals. Storing and playing video kept incurring costs, and that burden could grow as usage increased. There was also the problem that customers waiting for a lifetime deal showed no interest in a monthly subscription. Damon needed recurring revenue that could replace his job income.

After changing the pricing model, no new revenue came in for about three weeks. A friend pointed out that the landing page was still written to sell the lifetime deal. With that friend's help, he rewrote the copy to encourage subscription signups, and subscription payments began to come in.

In an update published in February 2021, he had 29 subscription customers and about $500 in monthly recurring revenue. Damon explained that gaining subscribers was far harder than selling lifetime deals. He decided to be patient and build recurring revenue.

When a testimonial arrived, paying made sense

To grow subscription customers, new signups first had to understand how to use the product. Damon improved the product guide and onboarding emails so users could become familiar with the features. He reasoned that presenting paid features was useless if customers did not know what to do.

At the time, free users could use two video testimonials. He let new videos keep arriving even after that limit, but required an upgrade to view the third video onward. In effect, he proposed payment at the moment the customer had actually received a testimonial. In this design, a review that had already arrived from the customer's own client became the concrete reason to convert to paid.

He also kept experimenting with pricing. In a Q&A in October 2021, Damon said he had doubled prices twice over the previous six months. He adjusted subscription fees as features and delivered value grew, and admitted frankly that raising prices felt frightening.

Growing a solo-built product into a business

Relationships with fellow independent makers helped him meet early customers. Damon asked friends to try the product and share feedback, and satisfied friends introduced it on Twitter, spreading word of mouth. That flow, where a recommendation from someone who used the product brings in the next user, matched the very value Testimonial.to was trying to offer its customers.

In March 2021, after passing $1,000 in monthly recurring revenue, he left his job. In May that year, he received less than $100,000 in investment from Earnest Capital, later Calm Fund. In deciding to take the investment, he valued being able to ask for advice when needed and connect with a founder community.

In September 2021, he reached $100,000 in annual recurring revenue (ARR). When he later disclosed $400,000 in ARR, Damon said he was ending the solo-operated period and starting the next stage as a team of two. He had built the product and revenue foundation first, then expanded the operating team.

In a November 2023 interview, Testimonial.to's ARR had passed $800,000. Damon later announced on his LinkedIn that the product's ARR had reached $1 million. The video testimonial tool that had received its first payment within days had grown into a $1 million ARR business run by a small team.

Building work customers keep handing over

According to the official pricing checked in September 2026, Starter costs $25 per month when billed annually at $300, and includes unlimited text testimonials. Ultimate, which includes unlimited video testimonials, costs $600 per year, or $50 per month, per workspace. The structure moves customers to higher tiers as testimonial usage and required features grow.

The service scope has also widened into surrounding work that puts customer evaluations to use. The official product includes NPS surveys asking about willingness to recommend, customer case-study collection, online brand-mention discovery, and automated testimonial-request emails. In particular, customers who give high recommendation scores are routed into testimonial or case-study requests, linking the step of finding satisfied customers to the step of securing usable material.

What stands out in this case is how the product defined where its job ends. Testimonial.to took charge of everything from the moment a testimonial arrives through publishing it on a sales page and managing it afterward. By reducing what a customer must do to put a single testimonial to use in sales, it turned a narrow problem into a service that can keep earning subscription fees.