Most review sites have never touched the products they rank. We’re the opposite. If it’s on this site, it’s been in our house, on our bodies, or under our kids — usually for months, sometimes for years. This page is the whole method, in plain English: who we are, whose money buys the stuff, how a review actually happens, what the score means, and what we do when we turn out to be wrong.
Two real people, one family, one real house
We Tried It is run by the Hanna family in Fort Collins, Colorado. Chip Hanna — Mr. We Tried It — is the early adopter and spreadsheet maker who’s spent more than a decade buying products, using them, taking notes, and writing the review he wishes had existed before he clicked checkout. Jessica Hanna — Mrs. We Tried It — is the practical filter. She’s less impressed by marketing claims and more interested in whether a thing actually makes family life easier, or just becomes one more object to charge, clean, fold, and apologize for owning. If a product doesn’t survive her, it doesn’t get our recommendation. Our kids, Scarlett and Teddy, are the built-in chaos lab — honest testers who don’t care about brand positioning, only whether the thing is fun, comfortable, and not secretly annoying.
That’s the whole newsroom. No freelancers copying spec sheets, no AI writing verdicts, no “best of” lists assembled by someone who’s never wrestled the thing out of the box. You can meet us properly on the Who’s behind We Tried It page.
[PHOTO: The Hanna family testing gear at home in Fort Collins — e-bike in the garage, kids in frame]
The money rule: our verdict isn’t for sale
We buy a lot of what we review with our own money — and when we do, you’ll often see the receipt right in our photos. We’ve spent seven years buying and wearing the clothes on this site, not borrowing them for a week.
Sometimes a brand sends something to test. When that happens, we tell you right in the review — and it changes nothing about the verdict. A free product still has to survive our house, and we’ve returned plenty of freebies with a flat “we’d skip it.” Brands cannot buy a positive review. They can send a product. They cannot buy the outcome. Those are different things, and the difference is the entire reason this site is worth reading.
How a review actually happens
A review here is not an unboxing. Unboxings are easy. Living with the thing is where the truth gets weird. The process is always the same three steps:
“Living with it” means normal use — school mornings, workdays, dog walks, Colorado weather, travel days, laundry cycles, bad instructions, and the general entropy of being alive. An e-bike gets ridden as daily transportation, with a 7-year-old on the back and the seat all the way down. A travel suit gets worn through actual airports and washed like a normal garment. Sleep tech gets slept on for years, not demoed for an afternoon. We tracked our Eight Sleep Pod Cover across 730 nights and 15,000+ temperature adjustments before we called it. Our Amberjack dress shoes have been in rotation for 4+ years. That’s the timescale we care about, because week-one impressions are worthless — anyone can like a product before it breaks in, or breaks.
Crucially, we write down the failures. Every review names what we didn’t like, even on products we love. If a review ever reads like an ad, we’ve failed — call us out.
What our /10 rating actually means
Every product gets a score out of 10. It’s not a lab measurement. It’s our honest answer to one question: knowing everything we know now, would we buy it again?
| Score | What it means |
|---|---|
| 9–10 | We’d buy it again without blinking. It’s in permanent rotation in our house. |
| 8 | A keeper with minor caveats we’ll spell out. Most of our tested products land here. |
| 7 | Good, but with real trade-offs. Right for a specific person, not everyone. |
| Below 7 | Something we returned, regretted, or wouldn’t buy again. We’ll tell you what to get instead. |
We’re not shy about high scores, and we’re not handing them out for free — the number reflects a product we actually kept. And these bands aren’t invented: when we crunched the numbers on 31 e-bikes we bought and tested, the average score came out to 8.13/10, and 81% earned an 8 or higher. That’s not grade inflation — it’s what happens when you only spend your own money on things you researched first and mostly got right.
Our data studies: the closet is the dataset
Because we’ve bought and rated so many products in the same categories, we occasionally have enough of our own data to answer a bigger question — and we publish the whole methodology and the raw numbers when we do. These aren’t surveys or scraped aggregates. They’re built entirely from products we personally bought, used, and scored.
Journalists and researchers are welcome to cite these figures with a link back to the source study. If you want a full dataset or a custom chart, reach out.
When we’re wrong (and we update it)
We get things wrong, and products change after we’ve reviewed them — firmware updates, quality slips, price hikes, discontinuations. When our opinion changes, we don’t quietly rewrite history. We add a dated update note to the review and say what changed. You’ll see these all over the site: that’s on purpose. When a product gets discontinued or a company folds its support, we date-stamp that too, so a five-year-old review doesn’t send you shopping for something you can’t buy or get serviced. A review here is a living document, not a monument.
How we make money (the honest version)
How to reach us
Got a product you want us to put through the wringer? Email us — if it survives our house, it’ll survive yours. And if you ever catch a review reading like an ad, tell us. That’s the fastest way to lose you, and we know it.
Frequently asked questions
Do you get paid to write positive reviews?
No. Brands can send us a product, but they cannot buy the verdict. We buy most of what we review with our own money, we disclose it whenever a brand sends something, and we’ve returned free products with a “we’d skip it.” The affiliate commission we might earn is the same regardless of the score, so it has no influence on the rating.
How long do you actually test products before reviewing them?
It depends on the product, but the answer is almost never “a few days.” We lived with our Eight Sleep Pod Cover for 730 nights, our Amberjack shoes for 4+ years, and we’ve tracked menswear across seven years of wear. Some reviews start after a few weeks of heavy use; many get updated for years as the product breaks in or breaks down.
What does a rating out of 10 mean?
It’s our answer to one question: knowing what we know now, would we buy it again? A 9–10 is a no-brainer repurchase, an 8 is a keeper with minor caveats, a 7 is good with real trade-offs, and anything below 7 is something we returned, regretted, or wouldn’t buy again. Across the 31 e-bikes we studied, the average was 8.13 and 81% scored 8 or higher — because we mostly buy things we researched first.
What happens when a product you recommended gets worse or discontinued?
We add a dated update note to the review explaining what changed — a quality slip, a price hike, a discontinuation, or a company that stopped supporting it. We don’t silently rewrite old reviews. The date stamp lets you see exactly when our opinion shifted and why.