You send out invitation after invitation, asking potential customers for feedback. Not a single reply.
You need feedback before spending another month on the product. Do you change how you reach people, or go back and change the product?
"Could you take a look and give me some feedback?"
A small favor. At least, that's how it sounds when you're asking.
But a useful answer can mean learning an unfamiliar tool, explaining how they work today, then figuring out what you should change. You're asking them to help shape a product you hope to sell them.
That is a lot to pack into "take a look."
Your product might save them time later. Giving you feedback costs them time now.
Someone can be drowning in admin and still have no appetite for another tool to evaluate. Their problem is urgent. Helping you doesn't automatically join the queue.
The conversation needs a reason of its own.
Suppose you're building a tool for agencies that spend too long chasing client approvals. Come prepared to discuss a tradeoff: keep reviews in email, where clients already work, or move them into a portal that collects comments in one place but gives clients another place to check.
Now there's something for an agency owner to think through about their own business, whether or not they ever buy your tool.
And yes, you still want to learn from them. Say so. But do some of the thinking before asking them to do theirs. Give them something worth discussing.
Before treating silence as a verdict on the product, look at what you asked them to take on. Another feature may leave that request exactly as it was.
Your need for answers is real. It isn't their reason to say yes.
Top comments (2)
The approval-chasing example works because it hands them a decision they already own. Email versus portal is a live argument inside any agency, so thinking it through costs them nothing extra. The general rule hiding in here: an ask with no reason that belongs to them goes to the back of a queue that never empties. Giving the conversation its own reason is what moves it.
Agree, and showing people what happened to the last round of feedback helps a lot too. We run public roadmaps for our own plugins (we also make a roadmap plugin at Wbcom Designs), and people send far more ideas once they see earlier requests marked as shipped.