Meet Paul Stratch: The Local Business Owner Who Built a Better Review Engine
I am not a software developer. I am just a regular small business owner, like you. The company I own is called Trash Daddy Dumpsters, and we are a local dumpster rental company. When I started my business over 5 years ago, I looked online to try to find an automated review system I could use to get more Google reviews. I knew that reviews are a ranking factor with Google, so I wanted to get as many as I could. Not to mention it builds your business credibility with customers. When I started I had none.
I looked at the big companies - Birdeye, Podium, Nicejob, and many more. And I tried many of them too. I didn't really like any of their systems. The software was either too complicated, or I just didn't like how it contacted the customers, or what the emails said. It's not that they didn't work - they did, some better than others. But the process was more complicated than I wanted, and just didn't feel like what I was getting was worth what they were charging. Most of them had a ton of features I did not need, and I didn't want to pay for all that extra stuff.
I have a few friends who own their own local service business, and I told them I could help them get more reviews. So in 2026 I decided to build this site and offer my automated review system to other business owners. I thought there are probably thousands of business owners who are in the situation I was in - needing a simple but affordable way to get more reviews for their business.
I had used ActiveCampaign before for other businesses I owned in the past. It's excellent for sending marketing emails to large customer lists to announce special deals, or anything else. I knew that ActiveCampaign is recogized as having an exceptional email delivery rate, meaning very few emails get caught in the customers' spam folders. This is when I thought I would just my ActiveCampaign account and build my own automated review system.
I wrote the emails and built the automation, and since then I have accumulated over 760 5-star reviews for my business. It's simple to use - I just upload an excel list of customers every month, and I have a steady stream of reviews that come in. And the best part is it only costs me $79 per month (though you can start for as low as $59/mo depending on your list size). This was perfect for me, because Trash Daddy has 18 Google Business Profile locations, and other software systems charge by location, which would have been completely unaffordable for me.