How I've been getting feedback

I've been making lots of mistakes building Placemark. New mistakes, novel mistakes that I haven't made before. Every day is an adventure.

But one thing that has gone relatively well is feedback. I knew from the start that feedback would be what guided the product and made it possible to keep it going and re-routing to the better directions.

In app feedback

I started out with Feedback.fish to collect feedback in the application. The integration was simple to build into Placemark's React codebase. The key here is making the button big and obvious. Even in a pretty space-constricted prosumer tool interface, the Feedback button has been surfaced pretty much the whole time. I hid it in a menu for a little bit, but feedback went down. I pulled it out of the menu, feedback came back. Worth it.

I switched from Feedback.fish for two reasons: first, I hit some bugs in its implementation and there haven't been many updates. And second, I strung together a way of transforming an email from Feedback.fish to a GitHub Issue, so it became a custom setup anyway. Insourcing feedback fish was pretty simple: used Octokit to cut GitHub issues for feedback submissions, and my email system (Postmark) to send me an email. Still refining the email so that in the near future I can just hit 'respond' and respond straight to it.

And yes, all the feedback that people submit through the app becomes, directly, a GitHub issue :).

Cancellation feedback

This one's trickier. Collecting feedback from people who cancel accounts should be high-value, but it's been tough to do.

You can collect feedback via Stripe Billing, but the system for reading it is pretty obtuse - as far as I've gathered, you need to use Stripe Sigma to query for it. It doesn't seem to be included in webhook data, either. A bummer. Hopefully I'm wrong about that.

I've also added a manual form in the cancellation process, but that gets very little usage. Obviously, people are walking out the door - not the best time.

One protip that I've heard and haven't gotten to work yet, is to find people who have paid and then cancelled, and offer a refund somewhat in exchange for doing a call or user research session. No bites on this so far, but the n number is low.

What didn't work:

• I set up a Discord pretty early in Placemark's history, but it was not a great experience. Placemark's pretty early-stage, and occasionally the Discord would get some activity, but it was often when I was asleep or working on something, and though I'd switch modes to respond, the synchronous feedback mechanisms just don't seem right.
• So far I've done almost no outward-reaching user research. I know this is a major mistake on my part - a lot of this "research" has been passive. Making more active outreach is on my list, but easy to deprioritize because, frankly, I've only got a few hours in me a day that can be on a video call and be social, and it's hard to book those hours for work rather than time with friends.

What's worked for you?

I'm sure there's a lot of routes I haven't explored yet. Email? Something else? What's the best UX research approach that scales down?