Are People Really Testing Your Product Before Leaving Feedback? Let’s Find Out

If you’ve launched on Indie Hackers (or any startup community), you’ve probably noticed a pattern: you post your product, people leave comments or reviews, and many of them… sound like they haven’t actually tried it.

In some cases, it’s easy to spot. The “feedback” is vague, generic, and could apply to any app. But dig deeper, and you might discover they never even visited your site, let alone spent two minutes actually using your product.

The result? Founders get a wall of feel-good comments but almost no actionable insights to improve their product. It’s noise disguised as engagement — and it doesn’t help anyone.

So, how do we separate real users from drive-by commenters?
One way is to give something exclusive and see who takes the time to use it.

As proof of what I’m saying, here are real promo codes for my AI email assistant, Reply4.com:
"Promo2B", "Promo3C", "Promo4C", "Promo5A", "Promo6B", "Promo7A"

These give you free credits to instantly generate human-like email replies in Gmail extension. If you’ve truly tested Reply4, you’d probably use one. If you’re just here to drop a comment for visibility, you won’t bother — and that tells me a lot about the value of your feedback.

I’m curious to see what happens. Will these codes be used, or will I just get more “Nice product!” comments from people who never even clicked the link?

If we want to help each other grow as founders, we need to start valuing real, hands-on product feedback over shallow engagement.