From the Reel: the full guide

The rebound method: win your competitor's unhappy customers

People who just had a bad time with a tool are the easiest to win. Their complaints are public. Here is how to turn them into a cold email, step by step.

The short version

  1. Find the reviews. Open your competitor on Capterra. Filter the rating to 1 and 2 stars.
  2. Scrape them. Use Instant Data Scraper, a free Chrome extension. Save the file.
  3. Ask Claude what these buyers want and aren't getting. You get the biggest complaints, with job titles.
  4. Ask for the email. You get a cold email in the words buyers really use.
  5. Send it to people in the same job at companies still using that tool. Never to the reviewer.

1. Find the reviews

Capterra is a public review site for business software. Each review shows the writer's job title, and that is what makes this work.

  1. Open Capterra and search your competitor's name. You don't need an account.
    Open Capterra →
  2. Open the tool's page and go to its Reviews.
  3. Click "Rating" and tick 1.0 and 2.0. Now you only see unhappy customers.
  4. Read the count. The line "Showing 1-25 of …" tells you how many there are.
A review page filtered to 1 and 2 stars: Showing 1-25 of 476 available reviews, with Rating, Company Size and Reviewer's Role filters
The page from the Reel, filtered to 1 and 2 stars: 476 unhappy customers of one tool.
Go one step furtherNext to Rating there are two more filters: Company Size and Reviewer's Role. Use them to keep only the kind of buyer you sell to.
Look at the datesEvery review has a date. A review from the last few months means the pain is fresh. That is the "rebound": you reach people while they still feel it.

How big can it be?

The tool in the Reel had 8,542 reviews on the day we looked. 277 of them were one star. 476 were one or two stars. Your competitor's worst days are sitting on one page.

2. Scrape them

You could copy each review by hand. A free scraper does it in one go.

Instant Data Scraper logo
Instant Data ScraperFree Chrome extension. It saves what's on a page as an Excel or CSV file.
  1. Add it to Chrome.
    Get Instant Data Scraper →
  2. Go back to the filtered reviews and click the extension's icon. It finds the list of reviews by itself.
  3. More than one page of reviews? Show it the site's "next page" button, then let it run through the pages.
  4. Save the file as CSV or Excel.
You don't need all of themTwo pages is enough to start. Our example used 49 reviews and the patterns were already clear.
No Chrome? No problemSelect the reviews on the page, copy them, and paste them straight into Claude. It works the same.

3. Ask Claude what they want

Open Claude, start a new chat, and add the file (or paste the reviews). Then send this:

What do these buyers want and aren't getting? List their biggest complaints, with the job titles of the people who made them.
A real answer · 49 reviews of one accounting tool · names removed

Claude found 7 groups of complaints. Here are three of them, in its own words:

1. Support that solves problems instead of deflecting them

This comes up in more than half the reviews.

  • Owner, Accounting, Administration: spent 3.5 hours on the phone and the problem is still there.
  • Language Arts Tutor: can never reach the same person twice, so has to explain everything again on each call.

2. Software that works

  • CFO: the software crashes at least three times a day, and they've called support 11 times in 7 months.
  • Owner: can create a customer but not an invoice, and has to log in and out several times.

4. Prices that match the value, and help that isn't behind a paywall

  • Owner: was quoted $550 to fix a bug on a $35/month plan.
  • President: had to buy an upgrade just to get a callback, then was pitched another upgrade on that call.

And it told us who to talk to: "Owners and Presidents, the people paying, drive most of the support, pricing, and upsell complaints."

How to read itThe top complaint is your opening line. The job titles next to it are your list of people to email.
Stay honestThese are only the unhappy reviews. They show what is broken, not that every customer feels this way. So never write "everyone hates it".

4. Get the email

Stay in the same chat and send this:

Craft a personalized cold email to one of those job titles at a company still using this tool, in the words these buyers actually use.
The real email Claude wrote · the tool's name is hidden

Claude added one note: "In the three bullets, keep only promises your product can actually deliver: these buyers have already been burned by sales claims that didn't hold up."

Before you send it

Two more prompts that help

I sell [what you sell, in one line]. Here is what we really do better: [2 or 3 true things]. Rewrite the email so the three bullets are only things we really do. Keep the buyers' own words.
Now write the same email for a [job title from your list], built on the complaint that job title raised most.

5. Who to send it to

Send it to people in the same job, at companies still using that tool. They feel the same pain. They just haven't written a review yet.

Three ways to find companies still using it

Job posts

Search a job board for the tool's name. A company asking for "experience with" that tool is using it today. This is also a natural first line, as in the email above.

Your competitor's own site

Look for its "Customers" or "Case studies" page. It lists the companies it is proud of, by name.

The company's website

Some tools show on a site: a chat box, a booking page, a form. Look for the small "powered by" mark at the bottom.

Then pick the personTake the job title from Claude's list (say, Owner or CFO) and find that person at each company.

The rules