8. If I Were You: The Next 90 Days
The single most important thing
Get 5 UK or Irish web-design agencies paying ≥£39/month by day 45 for review requests, an honest widget and a monthly client report, run by hand. Before building the dashboard.
- Segment: small web-design agencies (1–15 staff) that maintain local businesses' sites on monthly care plans, and don't run GoHighLevel.
- Job: "Get my clients more Google reviews, show them honestly on the site, and give me a report I can put in front of them every month."
- How: hand-run it. Connect clients through the Business Profile API (or show reviews by hand while access is pending), send requests from a shared inbox and an SMS tool, and build the report in a spreadsheet and PDF. Charge from the first agency. Automate only what you've done by hand at least 20 times.
Targets below are for full-time. At ~15 hrs/week, use the figure in brackets and allow ~1.5x the time per step.
Week-by-week
| Weeks | Goal | Exit criteria |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Access and paperwork. Apply for Business Profile API access (you need your own profile verified 60+ days, a website and an owner email). Run a trademark and domain check on the working name. Book a UK consumer-law review of the planned defaults. | Application submitted. Lawyer booked. |
| 1–3 | Discovery. Call 20 agency owners (15 hrs: 12). Ask: how do clients' reviews come up today? What do you install? Do you use GoHighLevel? What's in your care plan, and at what price? Would you resell "more Google reviews, reported monthly"? At what price? | You can write the top 3 pains in agencies' own words. You know the GoHighLevel share in your sample. |
| 3–6 | Hand-run pilot. 5 agencies (15 hrs: 3), 3–5 clients each: QR card, request emails and texts, honest widget (the minimal script), a month-end report. Charge £39/month. | 5 paying agencies by day 45 (15 hrs: 3). If fewer than 3 will pay, the wedge is wrong. Change the agency type or the market, not the price. |
| 5–9 | Thin v1. Agency dashboard. Add a client via a Google consent link. Honest widget with notice (WordPress plugin + script tag). Request link, QR, email + SMS sequence. New-review alerts. AI-drafted replies with approval. Auto-generated monthly PDF report. Connection-health checks. | Pilot agencies move to self-serve. New client location live in <10 minutes. Support ≤2 hrs/week. |
| 9–10 | Free plan and one content page. A free direct widget with "Powered by ReviewPin" (1 location, 10 reviews). Publish "UK review rules for small businesses" (DMCC, Google policy, what a compliant widget looks like). | 50 free installs. First agency trial from organic search or a partner directory. |
| 11–12 | Measure and decide. | 10 paying agencies (15 hrs: 6), ≥$1k MRR (15 hrs: ≥$600), every month-1 payer renewed, median client ≥3 new Google reviews in the month. Hit it: keep going. Miss it: narrow to requests + report only, or apply the day-90 checkpoint in WHAT-TO-DO-AND-AVOID.md. |
Kill criteria (write these down now)
- Business Profile API access refused, or counsel says the display model breaks its terms → stop.
- Fewer than 3 paying agencies by day 45 → change the agency type or the market once. Missing twice means stop.
- Day 90: under 5 paying agencies, or any month-1 agency cancels because "Trustindex is free" → the wedge is wrong. Don't respond by lowering the price.
The one thing to stop doing
Stop thinking of this as a widget business. The widget is free everywhere, clonable in an afternoon, and bound by Google terms. Every hour on layouts, animations or extra review sources is an hour not spent finding out whether agencies will pay for new reviews and a report.
A close second: don't build review gating, incentives or a 5-star-only default, however often it's asked for. It's the feature that gets clients in trouble with Google, the FTC and the CMA, and it's the one thing your positioning exists to refuse.
What stays on the long-term roadmap (only after proof)
- A white-label dashboard on the agency's own domain, and client logins.
- Zapier/webhook triggers, then one native integration (the one 30%+ of clients use).
- Facebook recommendations, once 30% of paying agencies ask.
- A second market (Australia and New Zealand) after month 18.
- Pivot options: UK multi-location businesses, or one field-service tool's marketplace.