I don't know about you, but these days, when somebody sends me a link to a new product they've built, I'm immediately skeptical. I'm running through a mental checklist:
Is this thing dependable? Is it secure? Are these people going to be around in a year? Are they shipping regular updates, or was this a vibe-coded weekend project that's going to disappear in three months?
And I don't think I'm alone. In the age of AI apps and autonomous companies, your potential customers are doing the same thing. They land on your site and they're asking themselves: Is this real?
Here's the good news: there's a simple, powerful way to build trust on your website. Show real pictures of the people behind the product. Tell your story. Prove you're human.
I recently reviewed a product launch that illustrates this playbook really well. Let me walk you through what they're doing right.
Case study: Freek and his team launch There-There
Freek is well known in the Laravel community, and his team at Spatie is launching a new customer support tool called There There.
The first thing I noticed: right in the hero, they put "Built by a team that does support every single day" with avatars of the actual team members. You can hover over them and see their names. It's a small touch, but it immediately says: there are human beings behind this product who care.
Contrast that with what's happening over on Polsia, where you can launch an "autonomous company." I've had to start filtering those emails. Who wants to give money to a product where nobody's at the wheel?
Then, as you scroll down, they've got a real testimonial from a real person, with her photo. And at the bottom, there's a picture of the whole team sitting around a desk in a real office. "We're Spatie, a small team from Antwerp." It's simple and effective.
As a customer, a search I'm performing more and more is: "Is X company a scam?" I decided to test this out for this product. I went to Google and typed "Is There-There app trustworthy?" and the AI overview came back with:
"There-There is a legitimate AI-powered help desk tool developed by Spatie, a highly respected Belgian software company known for its contributions to the open source community."
That's the reputation you want to be building. The team at Spatie has spent years building a real footprint across the web, and now they're leveraging that trust for a new product.
How to leverage this in your marketing
Here's what I'd recommend for anyone launching a product right now:
Put human faces on your website.
In the hero, next to testimonials, and at the bottom of the page. Have an about page with real photos of the team. People are asking, "Do I like these people? Do I trust them? Are they going to be around in a year?" Your homepage is the answer.
Tell your story as founders.
Talk about your experience, why you built the thing, and what you've learned. The more authentic and human you can be, the more people will trust you. People are tired of AI-generated everything. They're looking for the real human building products they can trust.
Build your company's reputation across the web.
Google and the LLMs are both looking at the same thing: is this a real entity with a real footprint? Do real people use it? Are there real reviews? Real founders with real profiles? A product that only exists on its own website looks sketchy. You want reviews on Trustpilot, G2, and Product Hunt. You want founders showing up on LinkedIn, YouTube, podcasts, and Reddit under their real names. Every piece of that builds the trust signal.
Build your founder reputation across the web.
You want potential customers to be able to look you up and think, "Oh, this person is real. They've been in this space for a while. They have expertise. They care about this stuff." This might mean showing up on LinkedIn, talking about the problems your product solves. It means participating in Reddit threads and Hacker News discussions. It means being on podcasts, making YouTube videos, writing blog posts, not as your brand, but as you, the founder.
Your personal reputation and your product's reputation reinforce each other. If someone can Google your name and see a real person with a track record and a history of caring about this space, that trust transfers directly to your product.
Send a personal welcome email.
When someone signs up, send them a short email from a real person. I email every new Transistor customer with the subject line "What brought you here?" It's just me introducing myself as one of the co-founders and asking what's happening in their world that brought them to us. These emails do double duty: customers feel like they're connecting with a real human behind the product, and you get incredibly useful information about why people signed up and how they found you.
Being human influences LLMs as well
LLMs are now a real customer acquisition channel. At my company, 20-25% of our new signups now come from people who found us through ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity. And those models are looking at the same trust signals I've been talking about: real reviews on Trustpilot, real founders with real profiles, a real footprint across the web. When someone asks ChatGPT, "What's a good app for this?" it's scanning the internet for evidence that you're legit. So everything in this playbook (the human faces, the reviews, the founder profiles on LinkedIn, YouTube, and Reddit) isn't just building trust with the person on your website. It's building trust with the AI that's going to recommend you (or not) before that person even gets to your website.
Use the pre-launch to build trust.
The most potent time for marketing is actually before you launch. Build a waiting list. Drip out updates. Tell the story behind what you're building and why. Get people invested in the journey. When you finally launch, those people are on your side: they'll leave reviews, share the news, and show up for you.
Right now, too many people are launching anonymous apps with no faces, no names, no story. That's a huge missed opportunity. In an age when anyone can spin up a product overnight, what differentiates you is proving there are real humans behind it who actually care.