How to Record a Good Testimonial on Your Own Phone

Five things, and the phone in your pocket does the rest:

1. Get within an arm’s length — sound matters more than picture, and there is no fix for it but distance.
2. Kill the loudest machine in the room. The dryer, the grinder, the extractor.
3. Put the window behind you, never behind the customer, or you get a silhouette.
4. Hold it vertical, two hands, elbows in. Instagram, TikTok and Shorts are vertical.
5. Ask your question, then be quiet. Do not coach, do not prompt, do not do a second take.

Nothing about the hardware is your problem — that phone is a better camera than anything a local business owned ten years ago. Everything that ruins a testimonial happens in the thirty seconds after you press record, and most of it comes out of your own mouth. Rule five is the one that actually matters; the other four are just housekeeping.

Sound first: get within an arm’s length

Phone microphones are good, but they are not selective. They pick up the hairdryer, the coffee grinder, the extractor fan and the radio with roughly the same enthusiasm as they pick up your customer.

There is no equipment fix for this at your scale, and you do not need one. There is a distance fix.

• Be within an arm’s length of the person talking. Every step closer buys you more voice and less room.
• Kill the one loud thing. The grinder, the dryer, the extractor. It takes four seconds and it is the difference between usable and not.
• Point the bottom of the phone at them, roughly. That is where the microphone lives on most handsets, and it is the end people habitually cover with their hand.
• Do not stand them next to the door. The street is louder than you think and the phone agrees.

A voice recorded close, in a slightly ugly room, beats a beautiful shot where the customer sounds like they are speaking from inside a cupboard.

Light comes from the window, and it goes behind you

One rule covers ninety percent of this: put the light behind the camera, not behind the customer.

Stand with your back to the window, so the daylight falls on their face — or on the work, if you are filming the result. If the window is behind them, the phone will expose for the bright window and turn your customer into a silhouette. Everyone has done this. It looks like a witness protection interview.

Do not use the flash. It flattens skin, kills the colour of the hair or the food you are trying to show, and announces that this is a production. Daylight is free, it is already in the room, and it makes everything look like it looks.

If the salon is dark and the window is far away, move. Two steps is usually the entire fix.

Hold it vertically, and hold it still

Vertical, always. Not because vertical is aesthetically superior, but because Instagram, TikTok and YouTube Shorts are vertical, and a horizontal clip arrives there with grey bars down the sides or with the tops of heads cut off.

Then keep it still. Two hands, elbows against your ribs, and stop moving. You are not directing a film; there is no shot to find. Frame it, lock it, leave it. A static shot of a person talking is completely fine. A slow drifting zoom toward their chin is not.

If you are recording the result rather than the face — the colour from behind, the plate, the finished panel — get the whole thing in frame and hold it there. Do not pan around it looking for a better angle while your customer is mid-sentence.

Do not tell them what to say

This is the hardest rule on the page and the only one that actually matters.

You will feel the pull. They are talking, they are being vague, they have not mentioned the thing you most want mentioned, and you know exactly what sentence would be perfect. So you help. “And you’d recommend us, right?” “Maybe say the colour came out great?”

The moment you do that, you have stopped collecting a testimonial and started producing an advert with an untrained actor. It sounds like one, too. Everyone can hear a person reciting somebody else’s line — the flatness, the slightly wrong stress, the way they glance at you halfway through for approval.

If they freeze, do not feed them words. Ask them a question.

Don’t say	Ask
”Say the colour came out great"	"What did you come in for today?"
"Say you’d recommend us"	"What would you tell a friend about it?"
"Mention how quick we were"	"What were you worried about before you came?”

A question gets you their answer. A prompt gets you your own words back in a stranger’s mouth, which is worth nothing to anyone.

Leave the mistakes in

The customer will fumble. They will start a sentence, abandon it, laugh at themselves, and start over. There will be an “ehm”. There will be a pause where they look at the ceiling.

Do not cut any of it.

Those imperfections are not damage to the recording. They are the recording’s credibility. They are the reason a stranger scrolling past believes that this is a real person who actually goes to your salon, rather than a friend of the owner doing a favour. Polish removes exactly the thing that was persuading people.

This is a principle, not a preference, and it is one we built the product around: a customer’s words are published verbatim. Not tidied, not shortened, not improved — not in the video, not in the subtitles, not in the quote underneath. The software may write the caption, because the caption is ours. It never rewrites what a person said, because that is theirs.

A testimonial that reads better than the customer speaks is not a better testimonial. It is a fake one, and it will be received as one.

The thirty-second checklist

Before you press record:

• Kill the loudest machine in the room.
• Put the window behind you.
• Get within an arm’s length.
• Phone vertical, two hands, elbows in.
• Frame the person, or frame the work. Decide before, not during.

After you press record:

• Say the question.
• Be quiet.
• Let them finish, including the bit where they think they have finished and then add one more thing. That last bit is usually the best sentence in the whole recording.

Then stop. Do not do a second take because the first one was “a bit messy.” The messy one is the one that works.

Now that you can record it properly, the question worth settling is whether to ask for voice or video in the first place.