Alex Cloudstar

How do you get early users to give feedback?

Hey Product Hunt,

I just launched the closed beta of CoLaunchly for waitlisted users. It’s a marketing co-pilot for indie devs that creates personalized launch plans, content templates, and channel strategies based on your app and target audience.


Now that it’s out in the wild, I’m realizing how hard it is to actually get feedback from early users. Even the ones who signed up seem quiet.


So I’m asking the community:

How did you get your first real users to share feedback?

Did you send personal emails? Offer incentives? Engage in niche communities?

What worked and what didn’t?


Here’s a short demo if you want to see what I’m working on: Loom Demo – CoLaunchly: Launch Smarter. Not Harder.


Any tips or experiences would mean a lot!

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Karan Arora 🚀

Congrats Alex on the launch 🚀

For the early feedback, we created a no-brainer offer (like 70-80%discount) and DM potential users on X to share their feedback. That worked all the time for us.

Here is the sample message that we have used for it.

Hey Alex 👋

We’ve just launched (product name) for AI startups.

It might be a great fit for your (product name).

(explain what your product does and how it can help them)

We're offering a 70% discount to the first 10 users in exchange for feedback and testimonials. Let me know if you're interested or have any questions!

(Website link)

Alex Cloudstar

@gamifykaran Nice! This sounds good, thank you! 🙏🏻

Nika

Reached out to potential customers, offered a free version and asked.
I think that for a call 10 people is a good stepping stone :)

Alex Cloudstar

@busmark_w_nika Thank you for your advice!

Kan Singh

I used short, no-pressure questions like one-liners. Nobody wants a homework assignment.

Alex Cloudstar

@kan_singh True, true. Thanks!

Vhim Jana

Honestly? I just kept asking. Kindly, consistently. People will respond if you keep showing up.

Alex Cloudstar

@vhim_jana Got it, thank you so much!

Naseer Kahn

Once I implemented their feedback and showed it off they got excited to give more.

Alex Cloudstar

@naseer_kahn got it, thank you!

Kirill Golubovskiy

People generally like to share their opinions, so it’s worth asking — while highlighting the importance of their feedback.

Alex Cloudstar

@kirill_golubovskiy true, thank you for your advice!

flo merian

Great topic, Alex! From my perspective, you need both qualitative and quantitative data.

  • Qualitative: reach out to your users. Take @Supabase for example. In this AMA session, @rors detailed how they spent a weekend going through over 3,000 developer profiles on GitHub, reaching out to as many as possible to chat with them about their likes and dislikes. "In the early days, there is no substitute for speaking to as many users as possible."

  • Quantitative: add a feedback button for example. Technically, we flag features we want to test. We use a requestFeedback function and trigger it on a button.

That's something we're doing constantly at @Bucket — full disclosure: we're a FF provider. We wrote a detailed breakdown in this blog post ↗︎


Hope it helps!

Fabs
What my team found is that very few people proactively give feedback, either in feedback forma or even in community groups. The best feedback so far has come from 1:1 discussions without leading questions, and from watching users use the product without hints. Analytics is great too, it’s gives really good insight at what part of the user journey users are likely to churn, what your bounce rate is, etc- it shows you the things users won’t tell you