You Wouldn't Buy Software Without the Reviews. Neither Would Your Buyer

Buying software these days rarely starts with a sales call. It starts with a G2 page open in one tab, a competitor's page open in another, and a Slack message to someone who's actually used the tool for a year and has opinions about it. Maybe there's a Reddit thread from eighteen months ago where someone complained about the exact bug that's about to matter. The demo comes later, if it comes at all, and by then the decision is usually already halfway made. Nobody tells the vendor any of this happened. From the vendor's side, a lead just showed up already convinced, or already gone.

TrustRadius surveyed close to 2,300 technology buyers and vendors for its 2026 B2B Buying Disconnect Report and found that 74% of buyers use reviews to inform their purchase decisions, while vendor marketing material ranks last among the resources they actually consult. The buyers who used to feel neutral about a vendor's own content became more skeptical, and they went looking for someone who'd actually used the thing.

Software buyers are, on paper, the last people you'd expect to behave this way. They're professional evaluators. Reading documentation and comparing feature lists is basically their job. So it's worth sitting with the fact that even they have mostly given up on trusting what a vendor says about itself, because it says something about where every other kind of B2B buying decision is headed too, not just software.

Even the AI answers point back to reviews

The interesting part isn't that people read reviews. That's old news. AI still hasn't replaced the habit but just routed straight through it. G2's own research found that 51% of B2B software buyers now start their research in an AI chatbot instead of a search bar, and 69% of them ended up choosing something other than what they'd originally planned, based on what the chatbot told them. That sounds like a win for AI over human proof, until you look at where the chatbot actually gets its answers. Ask ChatGPT or Perplexity to compare two SaaS tools, and it isn't summarizing a press release. It's synthesizing G2 pages, Gartner Peer Insights, TrustRadius threads, and Capterra comments, the same review sites where buyers were already reading directly. The scale behind that is enormous. G2 alone has passed 3 million reviews across more than 175,000 vendors, and after folding in Capterra and a couple of sister sites earlier this year, that network now reaches something like 200 million buyers annually.

So the AI didn't kill the review economy. It just became a faster way to read it. A buyer asking a chatbot "is this tool any good" is functionally asking the same question they'd have typed into a search bar five years ago. The answer just arrives faster and sounds more confident. 

The buyers doing all this research are drowning in software themselves

Here's the part that makes all of this land differently. The buyer reading a dozen reviews before adding one tool to their stack is usually managing a stack that's already out of control. The average company now runs somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 SaaS applications. According to Zylo's 2026 SaaS Management Index, that number is up from about 110 just a few years ago. More than half of what's paid for goes unused. Nobody set out to build a mess like that on purpose. It happened one reasonable-sounding tool at a time, just like most messes do.

That's the exact chaos NachoNacho exists to clean up. Tens of thousands of businesses use it to find, buy, and manage software from one place, saving an average of 30% on what they'd otherwise pay, with tens of millions of dollars in savings sitting across the marketplace in a given year. It's the same instinct as the review-reading habit above: don't take a pricing page's word for it, compare, verify, then commit. NachoNacho members have already internalized the whole lesson for buying software, but what most of them haven't done yet is apply that same lesson to selling it.

The buyer who won't add a project management tool without reading a dozen reviews first usually has no equivalent system for producing that kind of proof about their own product. They understand exactly why it works, since they lean on it constantly to make their own decisions, but they just don't have a repeatable way to generate it for themselves.

Paying more for something that's working less

Most vendors have responded to the trust collapse by spending harder on the exact channels buyers trust the least, and the price of that mistake keeps climbing. B2B SaaS customer acquisition cost is up somewhere between 40 and 60% since 2023. The median software company now spends around $2.00 in sales and marketing for every $1.00 of new recurring revenue it brings in, a ratio that's been getting worse, not better. Meanwhile, a referral, the closest thing to a peer recommendation a sales team can generate, costs a small fraction of what a paid search campaign runs.

Think about what that money is actually buying. A bigger ad budget gets a company in front of more people, but it doesn't make any of those people trust the company more once they've seen the ad. If anything, the opposite: the more polished and omnipresent an ad campaign gets, the more it reads as exactly the kind of vendor-controlled content buyers have learned to discount. Spending twice as much on the same untrusted format doesn't fix the trust problem. It just makes the untrusted format louder.

None of that should be surprising by this point. It's the same conclusion the review-site numbers point to from a different direction. People act on what someone else showed them, not on what a company says about itself, and every dollar spent trying to talk over that fact is a dollar that could have gone toward creating more of the proof buyers are already looking for. 

It looks different depending on who you are

A SaaS founder mostly needs a prospect to believe the product does what the landing page claims before that prospect has ever sat through a demo. A customer walking through their real workflow on camera does more of that work than another feature-comparison slide, because it answers the one question every landing page claim leaves open: does this actually work the way they say it does, for someone who is using it?

A growth team is usually less worried about producing one great piece of content than about keeping a steady flow of it moving without the whole system collapsing. The content itself matters less in the long run than whether the pipeline behind it survives a full quarter instead of just a launch week.

A startup is trying to look established before it technically is. UGC Creator and customer content is one of the few honest shortcuts to that, since there's no recognizable brand name yet doing the reassurance work instead. A handful of real users talking about the product, showing up consistently instead of once, tends to do more for early credibility than a single press mention that runs and disappears.

An ecommerce business needs proof the product works in someone else's hands, not just under studio lighting, and that proof has to keep refreshing on product pages and ads, not just exist once at launch and go stale.

An agency is trying to run this exact process across several clients at once, ideally without a different disconnected tool eating the margin on every account, and without every client quietly wondering why their creator program doesn't feel aligned.

What this actually looks like from the buyer's side

Picture a mid-market ops manager trying to pick a new expense-management tool. She doesn't open the vendor's homepage first. She opens G2, filters to companies her size, and reads the three-star reviews before the five-star ones, because that's where people actually explain what went wrong. She finds a comment from someone at a similar company describing the exact onboarding headache she's worried about, and a reply six months later saying it got fixed in an update. That one exchange does more to move her decision than anything the vendor could have written about itself, because nobody's paying that reviewer to sound convincing.

Now flip it around. That same ops manager, at her own company, is sitting on a product with real customers who'd say something just as useful about it, if anyone had ever asked them to and made it easy. Most of the time, nobody has. The proof exists. It's just sitting in a customer's private group chat instead of in front of the next person doing exactly the kind of research she just did.

That gap between the proof a business could have and the proof it actually collects is where the actual opportunity lies.

The idea was never the problem

Almost everyone above already knows creator and customer content works. The review-site behavior and the rising acquisition costs both make that case without anyone needing convincing twice. Where it actually falls apart is logistics. Finding people who'll make something genuinely usable, not just anyone with a following, takes real time. Coordinating approvals, usage rights, and payment across even a handful of creators turns into a workflow that somebody has to babysit indefinitely. And once the content exists, getting it out to a website, social, email, and paid ads without duct-taping together five separate tools eats exactly the hours a lean team doesn't have to spare.

So here's what we built with NachoNacho

Veel has partnered with NachoNacho, the marketplace hundreds of thousands of businesses already use to find and save on the software they run on, to put a real creator marketing system in front of people who already know how to evaluate a tool properly. 

As a NachoNacho member, here's what you get:

• 30% off your first 3 months on any monthly Veel plan, or 30% off any annual plan
• Priority onboarding, so your first campaign doesn't sit in a queue
• Creator marketing guidance specifically for SaaS, ecommerce, and growing businesses.

Inside, the platform covers both halves of the problem. Creator Collaboration connects you to a global network of 550,000+ verified creators across 121+ countries, matched to your product and audience. Brief them directly, review everything in one inbox, and pay them automatically, with content rights transferring the moment something's approved, so there's no renegotiating later. For businesses that need volume quickly, whether that's an agency stocking content across several clients or a founder pushing a launch, Public Campaigns let you post a brief and have vetted creators apply directly instead of reaching out to each one by hand.

UGC Reviews, , running on Veel AI Lens handles the other half of the equation: it continuously scans for the organic customer content already being posted about your product, so nobody's manually digging through hashtags at 11 pm, and lets you drop that content straight onto your site as social proof with a single click. There's also a free Social Media Audit that flags what's already working in your current content and what isn't, and the Veel Library for keeping every asset and brief in one place instead of scattered across drives and DMs.

None of this requires starting over if you already work with creators or an agency. Keep that relationship exactly as it is, and use Veel to manage the approvals and distribution around it more efficiently instead of replacing what's already working.

If you're a NachoNacho member, claiming this is straightforward: activate the discount, get matched with onboarding, and launch a first campaign, whether that's a creator walking through your product on camera, a batch of real customer testimonials, or turning reactions people are already posting into content your next prospect actually believes in.

Buyers trust the person who already used the thing over the company that made it, and that pattern isn't going to reverse itself because a vendor decided to spend more on ads. Veel works the same way for any growing business, NachoNacho member or not: find people who can speak honestly to what you've built, activate the content already being made about you, and get it in front of the next person doing exactly the kind of research you'd do yourself.

Sources: TrustRadius (2026 B2B Buying Disconnect Report), G2 (2026 research on AI-driven B2B software buying and review platform scale), Zylo (2026 SaaS Management Index).