In this exclusive CanadianSME Small Business Magazine interview, Ali de Bold, Founder and CEO of Butterly (and co‑founder of Canada’s first product review site, ChickAdvisor), shares how nearly two decades of championing everyday consumer voices have shaped her vision for modern brand trust in the age of AI. She explains why authentic user-generated content is becoming the core “fuel” for search, shopping assistants, and recommendation engines, and offers practical advice for small and mid-sized businesses on using real customer reviews, photos, and stories as strategic assets to drive discovery, credibility, and resilient growth in an AI-driven marketplace.
You launched ChickAdvisor back in 2006, long before “UGC” was a marketing buzzword. What problem were you trying to solve then, and how did that early experience lead to building Butterly as a full-service consumer advocacy platform?
Back then, there was nowhere for people to review products. Believe it or not, that concept didn’t exist. Amazon was mostly an online bookstore, Facebook didn’t exist and YouTube was only a year old. We launched ChickAdvisor so people could review the products they love and give each other advice. We wanted to create a trusted space where real people could help each other make better purchase decisions.
That early experience taught us two critical things. First, authentic consumer voices are incredibly influential when they’re respected and structured properly. Second, brands benefit most when those voices come from genuine product experiences, not paid promotion.
We launched Butterly in March 2020 (the day before the COVID shutdowns – yikes!), as the natural evolution of ChickAdvisor with a heavier technology focus to provide brands with more in depth consumer insights and also get away from being pigeonholed into a women’s only vertical. As the digital landscape matured, I saw that brands weren’t just struggling to collect reviews, they were struggling to manage the entire ecosystem of community, sampling, and data. We built Butterly to turn user-generated content into a strategic growth engine for brands.
Butterly leverages AI to provide brands with in-depth analysis of how consumers really feel about their products and what key messages will resonate more for future marketing opportunities.
AI tools from search to shopping assistants and chatbots are changing how people discover and choose products. How do you see this shifting consumer behaviour, and what does it mean for how brands earn trust in 2026 and beyond?
It’s huge. The discovery phase is shifting from scrolling search results to interacting with AI to make product recommendations and often, complete the purchase. Consumers are no longer just searching; they are delegating their decision-making to AI because it can aggregate information in seconds and make specific recommendations based on what it knows about you. This means it will be more difficult for brands because unless there is a strategy in place to teach AI that your products are loved by real consumers, it won’t be included in the recommendations.
This shifts the brand’s role from interruption-based advertising to validation-based credibility. For a brand to be recommended by AI, it needs a massive footprint of verified, high-quality human sentiment. Brands can’t game an AI the way they used to game SEO. These systems are trained to look for patterns of authenticity.
In this environment, earning trust means ensuring that whenever an AI evaluates your brand, it finds a consistent, high-volume stream of genuine customer experiences. Human proof becomes essential to prevent a brand from becoming a commodity in an automated decision-making world. The consumer voices that brands cultivate today directly influence the recommendations AI systems make tomorrow. This makes authentic user-generated content not just a marketing tactic, but a fundamental requirement for discoverability and competitive positioning in an AI-driven marketplace.
In an AI-driven world where recommendation engines surface “the best” products in seconds, why is it so important for brands to proactively shape the content and reviews that these systems see and how does high-quality UGC factor into that?
If AI is the engine, UGC is the fuel. Recommendation engines are built on large language models that analyze content across the internet. If a brand isn’t proactively generating high-quality reviews, photos, and videos, AI systems either lack sufficient data or rely on outdated, thin information.
High-quality UGC provides the context AI needs to make accurate recommendations. A star rating indicates a product is “good,” but a detailed review explaining how a moisturizer performs on sensitive skin in a dry climate provides the specific data points that help an AI recommend your product to the right person.
Authentic reviews, real photos, and honest video feedback give AI systems rich, trustworthy data to work with. They help algorithms understand not just what a product is, but who it’s for, why it works, and when it’s the right choice.
By strategically generating diverse, authentic content, brands aren’t just influencing humans, they are training the algorithms that determine their market visibility. At Butterly, we help brands activate real consumers, guiding quality without scripting, and ensuring content appears where decisions are made, including at retail.
In a world where “best product” recommendations are generated in seconds, the brands that win are the ones who’ve already earned that recommendation through real customer voices.
Butterly helps brands collect ratings, reviews, and rich user-generated content, then turn that into measurable retail lift. For a resource-constrained SME, what are one or two practical steps they can take to start using customer voices more strategically in their marketing?
The key is strategic focus. The first practical step is to intentionally collect feedback from your customers. Don’t wait passively for reviews, proactively ask at the right moment, when product experience is fresh, and make it easy to share both written feedback and visual content.
The second step is to maximize the value of that content: on your product page, in retail listings, or social media. What many small brands overlook is that customer voices outperform brand claims in driving conversion. Even a modest number of high-quality reviews and photos can dramatically improve conversion and confidence at point of sale as long as the content is recent. A good rule of thumb is a minimum of 20 reviews per sku within the last 30-60 days.
Also, never suppress negative reviews and never buy fake reviews. The negative reviews add credibility to the positive ones. Fake reviews can be spotted from a mile away – including by AI.
At Butterly, we see SMEs succeed when they treat UGC as a growth asset rather than a vanity metric. Start small, stay authentic, and build consistency. Those early signals compound over time, especially as AI and retail algorithms increasingly rely on real customer feedback to inform purchase decisions.
As a women-led Canadian company working with both leading and emerging brands, what have been the biggest lessons from building Butterly about authenticity, growth, or resilience that you’d want other small and mid-sized business founders to hear?
One of the most important lessons has been that authenticity isn’t a “nice-to-have”, it’s a growth strategy. Building trust with your audience, your partners, and your team creates resilience when markets shift or challenges arise.
We’ve also learned the importance of patience and focus. Sustainable growth often looks slower than hype-driven growth, but it’s far more durable. Listening closely to customers and evolving with them has allowed Butterly to stay relevant through massive changes in technology and consumer behaviour.
Finally, resilience comes from community. Being a women-led company in Canada has reinforced the value of collaboration, mentorship, and lifting others as you grow. You don’t have to build alone and the strongest brands are built with people, not just products, at the centre.
The impact you create with your customers and community will ultimately define your success more than any single metric. Authenticity, patience, and community aren’t just ideals, they are competitive advantages.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this interview are those of the interviewee and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of CanadianSME Small Business Magazine. Our platform is dedicated to fostering dialogue and sharing insights that inspire and empower small and medium-sized businesses across Canada.
