Some ideas that have worked well for me in b2b/SaaS:

* If you're pre-product/market fit, just reach out to users via email, in-product messaging etc. You can incentivize them with Amazon gift cards as well. At this stage nobody actually needs your product so you'll have to do it by hook or by crook.

* If you're post-product/market fit then people actually _need_ your business. Once you make it clear that you're going to action on their feedback they're highly incentivized to help you out – so use the same strategies as above but make it clear what you'll use the feedback for.

* Set up automated surveys, especially ones that are unobtrusive in order to not create a shitty user experience – this allows you to baseline your product's effectiveness which is the first step towards continuous iteration. Eg last quarter we were at 3.3/5 satisfaction, let's get to 4.0/5 this quarter. These surveys are also a great way to find customers to interview.

* FullStory and Hotjar both allow you to view user sessions, highly recommend them as well.

The most important point: if you're an enterprise business, I highly recommend identifying the "best" customers that you have, building relationships with them, and favoring their guidance over others'. Once you hit scale all of your customers will want to give you feedback, but only some of them will have the wisdom/intelligence/creativity/whatever to have a great sense for what _you_ should build for _your_ business to succeed. When you find these customers, get them onto a customer advisory board / meet with them a lot as they will help you in the art of pulling a great product out of your market.

Hotjar is cool. You might look at https://www.luckyorange.com/, too. I'm using it for an upcoming project. I have a friend that works there, so I'm biased.

> allow you to view user sessions

If you value your user's privacy (as well you should if you ever want to do business in the EU) do not be tempted by this privacy-hostile path.

If the user is consenting to a usability study, it's not really an invasion of privacy. It should obviously be removed afterwards.

> If the user is consenting to a usability study, it's not really an invasion of privacy.

I fully disagree. Consenting to a usability study means I want to provide feedback and actively state what I'm doing, why I'm doing it, and what I didn't expect.

It does not mean I want you to see what I do, where I leave my mouse, what I click on, what input I type -- and what input I then delete. If I wanted that then I would take screenshots or a video and share that.

Disclaimer: I'm not an UX designer/analyst, but I've worked with people from the field closely.

> I fully disagree. Consenting to a usability study means I want to provide feedback and actively state what I'm doing, why I'm doing it, and what I didn't expect.

This is fine for an UX study that conducts in-person interviews as _one_ of the methods. This method is almost useless on its own, mostly because people behave differently when they know they're being observed (eg they do things in a more "optimal way" in order to avoid looking stupid in front of the person conducting the study).

Also, while active feedback is valuable, it can be harder to interpret. People say A, but mean B and then do something between A and B or just do C. Not because they're malicious, but because that was what came to mind when they tried to express something or just didn't know better, so there's an unintentional misalignment between intent, action, and what was expressed.

> It does not mean I want you to see what I do, where I leave my mouse, what I click on, what input I type -- and what input I then delete. If I wanted that then I would take screenshots or a video and share that.

This is exactly the type of thing you (as a designer) _want_ to know in order to identify friction and remove it. Obviously, you track what the user types only under certain conditions. An example would be, a number input: do user always type the same/similar values or increments of some values (isolated per user), should the input offer pre-defined incementors or buttons that just fill-and-submit it instantly (you'd do AB tests to see which work better then), etc.

I fully understand your concern about privacy, but not everything is run by reprobates who sell user's data. Sometimes "observing" is the best/easiest way to learn how to improve a user's experience.

So long as the methods of the study are fully-disclosed there is no issue here, and no invasion of privacy.

You would prefer not to participate in such a study, and that is perfectly fair.

That doesn't mean its an ineffective method for observing how users interact with software.

I've been surprised many times with (in-person) usability studies where we ask users to perform certain tasks with the tool. It's a great way to improve UX.

Inputs are not seen in HotJar

Instead of Hotjar you might want to consider https://www.usertrack.net, better for user privacy and you get more stats.

LiveSession (https://livesession.io/) is a cool alternative to HotJar and FullStory.

Crazy idea: if you're just starting out and "nobody actually needs your product" is a problem, build something else or pivot radically. You should not have to bribe users with gift cards in order to use your product. If you're going that far, you're far off the goal of having something useful.

In theory of course this should be the case, but in practice this is terrible advice IMO. There are tons of great successful businesses that wouldn't have passed this test.

Did anyone really need the early AirTable? No, you could just use Google Sheets. Did anyone really need WhatsApp? No, there was texting already. And so on.

In theory everyone should stay far away from building "nice to have" products and only solve hard business problems but that is a super high standard that even most companies that are already out there probably don't meet.

Of course, getting feedback and adjusting your vision is super important though and sometimes a radical pivot is needed.

Agree to disagree then I guess.

Yes, AirTable added additional benefits compared to Google Sheets. So did WhatsApp. That's why they succeeded in the first place, their first (public) iteration was useful enough to gain initial traction.

I'm not arguing that everything is useless unless they solve "hard business problems" (which I'm not even sure what that refers to), but if your thing doesn't solve anything at all, it's either entertainment or the wrong thing to build.

Eh, it’s not necessarily clear that nobody needs what you’ll end up with after iteration. Or maybe people need what you sell, but your marketing is unclear.

Can share what we do at our startup. (8 people, 100 - 200 customers). We create a WhatsApp group for every customer and stay with them right from onboarding onwards.

Beauty of it is they sneeze, we know. Everyone in the team kinda knows what's important what's not. we can confidently say things like "nobody cares about that fancy feature". It super valuable for a startup to get immedeate feedback. Especially valuable has been knowing - the first things the notice when they start using: where is sort? how do i add team members? do i have to prepay? - feature requests: it's painful to keep closing windows, need the ability to adjust windows, I also want to do this other thing you guys havent thought of. - Bugs: why am i seeing double messages.

Disadvantages are that some customers expect immedeate answers, unrealistic expectations. and its cringey to lay down the rules and set expectations every time. no matter how many times you do it.

Our take is its 80% good and 20% bad. As we grow the company, the idea is to keep doing this for a "representative sample of customers" . Customer feedback is gold. If you can setup some kind of process like this, its great.

So you have 200 WhatsApp channels? How do you keep up?

Not affiliated but looks like you'd love http://whatshash.com/

This works well if your product itself is a whatsapp clone XD

There's a pretty great book on this called The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick:

https://amzn.to/383bo92

It talks at length about the challenges, especially, of getting _honest_ feedback from prospective users. And it has a lot of ideas to that effect.

Clean link (affiliate information stripped).

https://www.amazon.com/Mom-Test-customers-business-everyone/...

This book really is worth a read. It is helpful for getting your ego out of your work and, instead, taking on the users perspective. Not affiliated with the book, but I did find it super useful.

It sounds like you're an early stage company - most established companies have the problem of too much feedback.

At the early stage my experience has been:

1. You should install SmartLook, FullStory, or similar to watch users. Qualitative feedback beats quantitative b/c your raw numbers are too low to be useful.

2. Identify key points in the customer journey when you want to collect feedback. For B2B SaaS I ask for feedback via email at these stages:

- When a customer signs up for a trial

- When a customer converts to a paying sub

- When a customer doesn't convert

- After 1-2 months of paying

- When a customer churns

First I'll make sure that I get system-generated emails when these events happen so I can send them manually.

I'll eventually automate sending these emails once volume gets too high. I'll automate them by sending from our app or from a tool like UserList or Intercom.

And when I get feedback I centralize in the tool I'm building (www.savio.io) and use it to prioritize what to build next.

We built a widget exactly for this! https://feedback.fish It integrates in your website so that users can give feedback immediately once they feel a need (whether that's a bug report or a feature request).

We have found that our customers collect up to 35x more feedback than before once they add the widget to their websites! It does depend on where you place the "Give feedback" button though — the more visible it is, the more feedback you'll collect.

Is there a possibility to self-host this thing? Looks really interesting though..

we are using feedback.fish at Splitbee and it helped us a lot gathering feedback in our app & from our docs pages

You are asking about user research. There is an entire industry of user researchers out there, and lots of great books and articles. It fascinates me that HN has such a blind spot for this topic.

The responses on here are reasonable but a bit short sighted. What works in one context will not work in another.

Yeah, right!

Heaps of information on how to get started in this blog: https://userresearch.blog.gov.uk

There's what people say, and what they do. One way to get feedback is to install analytics on your product to see what users are doing, or what they are not doing. There are many solutions, we currently use PostHog[0][1].

If you don't have any, log user actions when they succeed or fail to do something. Even a simple log can tell you many things.

It also tells you if they're failing to discover or use a certain feature, or if they're using something in an unintended way.

You can set up Slack channels for your product to help users troubleshoot issues. We have workspaces where users can get help. Whenever the 20th user complains about something, what to do next becomes clear. We tend to focus on issues with high frequency and high severity as opposed to say stylesheets, but it's because the field is struggling not for lack of good CSS. But it may be different for you and you may have a product where the value of the product is the better interface. Adjust accordingly.

- [0]: https://posthog.com/

- [1]: https://github.com/PostHog/posthog

(Shameless plug) https://smidge.app

We had this problem with our product (BugHerd) and built a solution for it. Our success rate was ~1% and we thought we could do better.

We created a JS embed that you install in your web app. It allows you to segment your users and place a call with them from within your app (using webrtc). Unlike email/calendly/zoom square dance, Smidge has a 17-20% success rate to call. It's been huge for us and we're now opening to beta. Would love feedback

(Screensharing, "request a call" and page/user calling coming soon!)

Looks good! But it's unfortunately just another "non-self-hosted" solution. Which is of course not your problem. But if you really like to offer privacy to your users, like us, we need a self-hosted solution, so no calls goes to or over foreign servers. Even the loading of the app itself is a problem.

We're working on a self-hosted alternative to Intercom if you'd like to check us out :)

https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups

Yeah I can understand that. This early version requires calls be routed via a server, but being webrtc it can be P2P. We'd like to provide recording and transcription in the near future (with the appropriate user permissions).

Down the track I believe we can deliver a self-hosted solution.

Yeah, I mean, it is not a problem to have a server, it just must be ours. :) And paying for a self-hosted solution is also not the problem. We just cannot give up our users privacy, so all the request needs to go to our domains and servers.

I agree, this occurred to me too. I don't want to share my user data with a 3rd party service.

You can also use Smidge without sending us any PII, but obviously segmentation will be limited.

Also in the next couple of weeks, with just a user id, you will be able to place a call directly from Zendesk (for example) without us knowing anything about the user.

Can you make it so I determine the user segment on my end and just send you the user id and segment id? I'd totally use this then.

Yep absolutely. You bucket users on your end and just pass through the user Id and the segment name. Then mirror the segment as call groups on our end e.g. segment='high value'

chaskiq.io is a nice open-source self-hosted intercom replacement.

Has varius API integrations too

This looks very promising! Do you think it is a good idea to install the development environment in a lxd container and run it in production? Because I could not find any documentation for self-hosting it. Just the heruko docs..

Hey, I'm currently working on installing this for our company as internal tool. I wouldn't know. But yeah, I'm kinda doing the same and maybe using dokku/ledokku to manage my own heroku-like infra

It is a nice project, but the docs need some love. You can also hire premium support for 30usd/month directly from the creator of the project, which I'm sure would happily help you with your prod deployment!

You have also development docs on docker / ubuntu / mac / win!

https://dev.chaskiq.io/en/articles/install-chaskiq-on-ubuntu...

I would certainly try/ dig deeper / pay 30usd, it's the best alternative I've found so far!

Looks cool, but why can't I find a screenshot of what the widget would look like on my website anywhere?

Edit: Found the answer on the video. Looks like nothing is shown until the founder starts a call with the user.

Suggestions:

- It'd be great if the user could initiate calls too, e.g if they fit in a certain group, let them initiate a call as a form of 'customer support'

- Can you allow audio only calls?

I LOVE this idea though. Will definitely be a user.

Sorry, we are still working on the landing page.

We don't show the user anything until you call them (so as to not interfere with drift/intercom etc). When you call them the current UI is like a mobile call UI.

EDIT: we are working on user initiated calling as we speak (it will show availability of support staff/CSRs)

Audio-only calling is in the next week or two

Nice design, but I'd definitely get some screenshots toward the top of the first page. As a non-video-watcher, that's the first thing I look for.

See my edit!

I approach this question slightly differently, and I guess this only works while your product is small enough. I develop and sell a desktop app and I try to build as much relationship with my users as possible, and then ask them for feedback.

- I have installed a chat popup on my landing page and I always try to answer any question within 1 hour, and then follow up with those users afterward.

- I have a feedback portal (similar to canny). Whenever anyone leaves any kind of feedback, I write them a thank you email and try to elaborate more on the feedback they left, no matter if this is negative, positive feedback or feature request. For example, if they ask for a feature, I tell them when I plan to develop it.

- Whenever user purchases a license for my app, I also write them a thank you email, and ask for a small feedback. I try to do a short investigation on what user is doing and include some personal touch in it. Usually, 50% of such emails get an answer.

- If I see some bug report coming from a known user I immediately send them an email explaining why that bug has happened, how and when I'm gonna fix it.

I also keep a page in my notes called 'Followups' where I put the user's name and the reason why I should follow up with them. For example next week I'm preparing a new release of the app that has changes which I know are used heavily by a couple of users and I will reach out to them this week, give them an alpha build and ask for their feedback. Whenever I get an idea of how I can bring someone's attention to the product, I add their name to this list.

I think it depends a bit on what type of feedback you're after. For quantitative feedback tools like hotjar.com's surveys can be quite effective (https://www.hotjar.com/tour/#polls).

For qualitative data such as user interviews/calls the solution for most teams is either to spend a lot of time on find users to talk to and set up calls or to pay companies like usertesting.com for access to their panels.

These tools don't allow you to get quick (and for most teams affordable) access to your own users for user interviews though, which is something that was enough of a pain point within my own team that we've built a tool exactly for that (https://tryribbon.com).

The Mom Test is also a great read on how to get useful user feedback in general (https://amzn.to/383bo92).

I have found the most effective way is to email users with an open question (not a survey form) about 7 days after purchase.

"We are very interested in how you are getting on with <product>. Please email us if you have any suggestions about how we can improve <product>."

But that only works if you are getting sales.

Also the more responsive you are to customers, the more likely they are to report bugs or make suggestions.

I wrote about my experiences getting feedback here: https://successfulsoftware.net/2008/04/28/getting-customer-f... (old article, but still relevant)

I find it surprising that you only had one "stop spamming me" reply. I've cancelled two services that have sent similar mails, and I figured I wouldn't be /that/ unusual.

My assumption being that if you're sending unsolicited mails so quickly, then I should be expecting a truckload to arrive by the end of a year. In one of those cases I felt vindicated as I received a bunch of huge exit interview type replies.

>My assumption being that if you're sending unsolicited mails so quickly, then I should be expecting a truckload to arrive by the end of a year.

That would be an incorrect assumption (in my case, anyway).

My bad, that was an uncharitable way to phrase it. I didn't mean to imply that you are filling inboxes, but more that I believe it tilts the balance in that direction.

This is why we've built STOMT. https://www.stomt.com - It's addressed towards Gaming atm, but we've companies from all industries using us.

Our idea is to keep the perceived effort to give feedback as small as possible and that works quite well. Also, it can embedded and triggered in any software to collect feedback right in place.

Feedback is collected publicly by default. Here is our own page: https://www.stomt.com/stomt but of course you can also turn your page private.

Make a discord and advertise it prominently. Hang out in there. Talk to people who join. Be actually interested in their use cases, and not in your own company.

A discord server is useful for far more than most people understand. You can show daily progress; show new features; highlight community contributions; have a centralized bug report channel; and the other users will start solving other users' problems when it attains critical mass.

The nit is "critical mass". But if you make something that people find remotely interesting, people will join. Broadcast what you're doing on twitter, and eventually you'll get noticed.

Surveys and cold calls are like trying to make fire by banging stones together. Tools from a different era. Sure, they work, but I've found the above process to be far more effective.

It helps to make your discord a general topic, by the way, rather than a specific product. Our ML discord recently passed 1,000 users. https://discord.com/invite/x52Xz3y

Community building is tough work, and I've had several failed attempts. You shouldn't expect yours to take off immediately. You should do it because you like it, and eventually something will work.

But it depends entirely on the business. Most businesses don't need a community. But I can't think of a single business with a community that would have been in such a strong position without it.

Agreed but replace 'discord' with the platform that your users already know and hang out on. For us, in a non-technical niche, that's Facebook groups. For others it might be slack or discord - just know your market and go where they are.

We use canny.io as SerpApi.com: https://forum.serpapi.com

It's pretty effective at getting very early bug reports, gathering interest on potential features, and their initial use was for feedback gathering. Random users won't give you feedback however until they came across a bug or a need though in my experience!

I've 3 sources of feedback that are working great for splitbee.io:

* Hitting up active customers on Twitter, just writing a short message: "Hi xyz, just saw that you are using Splitbee quite actively. Do you have any feedback for me, that would help a lot"

For this method I got answers from 9/10 people with amazing feedback. Very detailed and long messages. Be sure to target "power" users.

* I sent automatic emails if someone embeds splitbee successfully to their page & a mail if they don't do it within 24 hours. People often engage with them and explaining why they did not embed it yet. Also pretty helpful

* We added the feedback.fish widget to all of our https://splitbee.io/docs/embed-the-script and in our app. We get about 8-10 submissions a month which is quite a lot for our size.

High level:

Go where your customers already are and become a part of their community. Be a long-term person in a long term business. If they don't have a place, make it.

If you have that, you're on your way to Product-Channel Fit [1].

Low level:

I've also sent pointless emails and made useless phone calls and most people default to doing nothing when you contact them.

So:

If you think phone/email are where your people are, you need to follow up a lot. Steli Efti has lots of great content on this type of thing [2]. This is an unpopular view on HN because most people see this as spam, but this is what CRMs are built for.

[1]: https://brianbalfour.com/essays/product-channel-fit-for-grow...

[2]: https://blog.close.com/follow-up/

When starting out, asking for feedback on features or ideas might not be very effective. This is because your early adopters might be your close friends or people who do not want to hurt your feelings.

Instead, ask what is wrong with a product and you will receive genuine feedback. You can ask this question though email.

Connecting with users goes a long way. The way to do that may not be just asking for feedback but engaging them in thoughts around your product or thing you need feedback one.

Write an email to talk share your research, how market is doing a certain thing, what's coming up ahead for you and them in terms of trend, etc. Engage in active discussions around the business that your customers operate in. Post that seek opinions.

John does a wonderful job of explaining importance of this here: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/the-power-and-importance-o...

Start a thread and see where it goes. Build an active conversation around things before seeking feedback. Good luck

Getting actionable user feedback is something we struggled with at Aha! too. We experimented with different techniques but what we kept coming back to is that if you ask people directly, and engage them in a conversation, you get the most useful feedback.

Just knowing that someone is satisfied, or unsatisfied, with your product is not actionable. Often the reasons why a customer might be unsatisfied are subtle and would be impossible to discern with a questionnaire or survey. We think the answer is "empathy sessions" - kind of like focus groups meets modern online communication.

https://www.aha.io/blog/introducing-empathy-sessions

I'd check out something like https://userleap.com/ so that you can integrate bite-sized surveys right into your product. Great for onboarding, trial conversion, feature feedback, etc

If you're looking to understand how users are interacting with your website then screen recording tools like Hotjar combined with setting up task completion funnels in analytics platforms like Mixpanel can give you a lot.

It is often better to get feedback while the user is using the product that is what we recommend at http://featuremonkey.com/

When you send an email and ask user to give feedback they don't really have an incentive to give feedback, maybe giving Amazon gift cards etc.. can increase the likely hood of reply.

The placement of give feedback link can be really important.

Maybe keep in near places where you are more likely to have issues or you want feedback from.

Now that I think of it, it's very well put. Putting a feedback right where the product is being used or it might cause some issues is a good idea, otherwise you have to either force it out or give some rewards to collect feedback.

This is interesting. Having a widget would also be a good way of always keeping the feedback link near.

At Stories, feedback is our raw material to build a great product. Our PMs were struggling to set up a feedback generation process so they built a widget to help our users record voice + screen feedback.

We recently spin it off as a side project: http://hellozest.io/. It's free to install and works like a charm.

Hope it can help you get more contextual feedback and build better product

Look into the Nielsen-Norman group (nngroup). Tons of expertise to perform proper user interviews. Keep building on what you learn as opposed to looking for THE way.

If you're introducing a new technology or service, what worked with us is 1o1 meetings with local customers, just giving them an intent that the 15 minutes meeting is going to be worth their time.

Secondly, (maybe it's mentioned I've read all comments) you need a community and keep it active and read the on going discussion on how people think of your product

A further suggestion to the ones here, would making a public slack for your users to join help? Slightly different to the others in that this now remains open for everyone to join and stay for as long as they need. Pros: Builds a community perhaps, direct and fast feedback. Cons: Might become a support channel, perhaps difficult to manage and maintain.

If your product is in a domain where there are few players present, it will interesting to reach out the people who are sharing negative feedback about existing company. If they are sharing this feedback frequently, then they are highly engaged users who may be open to having a chat about what a product should do and try out yours.

You have to call them. The mom test has a great framework. But the best way it to ask for advice. Setup and low barrier impropt call right away not days away. Also prep questions you need answered before hand.

Don't make the conversation too formal. Don't use surveys. Don't try to automate this process. It much less effective.

On site surveys have been effective for us[1]. Ultimately this is a super general question and it depends on: 1. What data you want to collect 2. Where you place your poll (if it's on site) 3. What questions you ask.

[1] https://www.zigpoll.com

Offering to give users a $50 Amazon gift certificate in exchange for a 45 minute call works pretty well for us.

Since we know that 3 out of 10 users who receive this offer will accept it we segment users by industry / feature usage etc. and send offers to talk to them to listen their stories and feedback.

I use this strategy borrowed from Stephen Fry (Podia's founder)

https://medium.com/better-programming/podias-founder-on-the-...

My iOS app has an email button in it and I do get feature requests and bug reports from time to time, I also have a subreddit for the small community, when I was more engaged in marketing I was posting more there and getting some responses but I've lost a little motivation lately.

That subreddit might be your best feedback channel now that many people consider reddit as their default for product information and troubleshooting.

It's definitely worked well in that regard, better than other things I've tried in the past and I think it helps communicate that I'm just a single person building an app in my spare time rather than a big company.

For anyone wondering about this who has a Chrome extension, I'd highly recommend creating an uninstall survey. We have an incredible response rate (25%). We just link the user to a Google form with a couple questions, and a surprising number of folks are willing to fill it out.

Great question, as an early stage group(not a startup yet), we have also been faced with questions. What recommendations would you have for pre-product converstaions with potential target customer segments?

What users tell you is irrelevant. They will tell you X and then do Y instead. You have to focus on what they do, so all you need to do is find a way to observe them.

Here's an idea: pay your users to answer a survey. And don't just pay a few cents, pay them at least USD 20 or so. I bet your response rate will skyrocket.

I love this idea. Also, it doesn't have to be actual USD. Pay them in premium access to your product. I believe this will also build loyalty with your users.

I have had a lot of success cold emailing them after signup with something that's clearly not automated. Most people are surprisingly responsive.

2-3% isn’t terrible, but you’ll get selection bias.

You can pay people to use your product and then have them give your feedback. That’s the crux of UserTesting.com.

Tech support. If they have a good ticket system and they use it you can gleen all sorts of info.

This is a great topic and one that is near and dear to my heart. I love building software, but even more I like building valuable software that solves problems.

I'll share what's worked for me in the past and present, because I think context is important. What works for a b2b SaaS business at the early stage doesn't work for a later stage, larger services company. And vice versa.

Company A (a real estate brokerage with ~100 brokers and a customer service team):

I managed the tech team and worked on the product roadmap with CEO and COO. We set it quarterly.

* emails sent by the customer service team at crucial points (just after referring, after close, etc), including asking for reviews

* a chatbot on the website with the customer service team responding

* adhoc conversations the CEO had with customers and realtors.

Company B (startup, I was tech co-founder, B2B, SaaS):

Clean slate, co-founder had a research background and loved surveys.

* captive facebook group. This was great because this was a place to get feedback on the app and other issues facing our customers, but was also a great "offer", kinda like a whitepaper but more valuable. We could reach out to potential customers and offer them membership in the premier community of their peers for free. bonus!

* customer advisory board. I met with a few select customers once a month for an hour each time. Would get feedback on general usage, trends in their business, and had time to show them new features and discuss the roadmap.

* NPS survey: I installed delighted and we tracked that number over time.

* zendesk/intercom for tickets and chat.

Company C (funded startup, B2D/B2B, I joined, they pivoted):

Unique situation for me because when I joined they were still working on the business model, hence the pivot. Bigger team, I wasn't privy to the big picture.

* In app analytics. They had built out a way to see what customers were doing inside the app, so you could run queries and ask "is anyone using feature X", for example. I wasn't a common user of this, but it was interesting to run periodically.

* I filled a role for a little while doing customer research to help us as we pivoted. This consisted of trolling linkedin for connections with a certain profile, then scheduling calls to discuss their problems and how they were solving them. If appropriate, showing them a little demo. Recorded it all and wrote it up to share with the team.

* At this same company the CEO (post pivot) was a huge fan of having sales folks provide feedback from customers. I wasn't around to see how this turned out, but it made sense from an intellectual standpoint.

Company D (bootstrapped startup, B2D/B2B):

My current employer is unique in my experience because they have a product, it's multifaceted and can be used in many different ways (horizontal, not vertical), it's not entirely a SaaS offering, there's an intense focus on the security and privacy of our users, and they have both a community using the product for free and a customer base, paying for the product.

Here's where we get feedback from right now:

* web based forum. We use nodebb. Moved over from slack. We lost the community hangout feel when we did so, but gained: a lesser expectation of an immediate reply, permanence of questions and responses, SEO, searchability by users. I'll also use it as a lightweight doc repository where I can capture answers for questions asked elsewhere. If a question gets asked often enough in the forum, I'll promote it to the official docs. This feedback is more of the "this isn't working" type.

* zendesk and slack for paying customers. Again, "this isn't working"

* github issues. We provide templates for bug reports and feature requests. The community then votes on the feature requests and when we have time for new work, we sort by the number of upvotes and include that in our roadmap planning. Features are more "I wish the app did this" type of feedback.

* sales call feedback. This is adhoc, but valuable. I'd say the CEO aggregates this in his head and again the team uses it in our roadmap planning. This is more of the "we'd buy if it did X" type.

* email newsletters/drips: we have a couple of automated email drips after certain events (user signs up for newsletter, etc). Unsure what kind of feedback we get, but we always ask.

* ask for reviews on a site like capterra. We do this because it's a light ask for folks, helps get us feedback, and also helps with marketing.

* outreach and profiles: I have started to actively reach out to community members and customers and do interviews. These feed into marketing material (blog, case studies) but also inform the team about how folks use the software. This is time consuming but you can learn a lot about how people use this multifaceted tool in surprising ways.

* google analytics: goals have been set up for various actions and we track completions.

Taking a step back, I think the hard part is not collecting feedback (that's just putting in the work and there are tons of tools out there to help) but rather reifying it into an actionable roadmap and incorporate into company decisions. This is part of the role of a product manager, after all, and quite a valuable one.

Incentives. Pay for their time. That’s it.

Start a public BugZilla!

It's going to sound super simple, but initially you really just want to try and have as many conversations as possible with your users.

Firstly though, you need to have an idea (doesn't have to be perfect or 100% right) of who your target segment is. These are the people whose problem you are solving - and therefore initially are going to hold more weight with their feedback.

Once you have identified these users - use a combination of current users and potential users to get feedback from.

Some ideas:

* Email (like you've been trying) - Try and be candid and frank. Put yourself in their shoes - why should they respond? If it's a generic email their probably going to be of the mindset of either 'Someone else will do it' or 'I can't be bothered'. If you make it unique and more personal you're going to have a higher reply rate - but obviously a higher time commitment. I'd also suggest pushing for feedback calls rather then just messages. A call with a target user is worth its weight in gold.

As other users have suggested - offering a giftcard in exchange for a feedback call is also another valuable route if you can afford it.

* LinkedIn: Depending on your business (B2B or B2C) you can follow up with these users and potential new users on LinkedIn. Again this comes back to being somewhat more personal. Explain who you are etc.

* In app messaging: If they are constantly using your app - ask them while they are there in the midst of it. Don't be spammy though (this is approach we take mainly with delighted).

Lastly, once you have gotten your feedback - don't just take it at facevalue. Try and really understand what problem they are trying to solve as the solution might be completely different then the one they were thinking of.

E.g. if you were building an analytics app and someone gave feedback that they want to be able to export the data. If you take that at facevalue you will most likely build a tool that exports their data. However if you dig deeper and try and understand why they want to export the data, you might be able to solve a bigger issue for them AND for more users. E.g. if they come back and say they want to do XYZ with the data beacuse that means they can then gain ABC insight from the data - you might be able to add the ABC insight into the dashboard instead, skipping the need for export and customer work.

If you want more of a hand feel free to reach out! I'd be happy to help you out!

[1]: This is actually a problem we are trying to solve with Delighted so I feel your pain - https://getdelighted.co