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I Built a Canny Alternative — Then Realized the Feedback Board Was the Easy Part

Hareesh Vemasani on July 24, 2026

Almost every customer-feedback product starts with the same three features: A feedback board An upvote button A public roadmap Technically, non...
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Nazar Boyko

One Slack thread holding four separate requests seems to break the idempotency key, since that's a single source reference covering four items. Do you fold the extracted request into the key somehow, or keep the thread as a parent with the requests hanging off it?

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Hareesh Vemasani

Great question. When a Slack thread contains multiple pieces of feedback, we split them into separate feedback items and link each one back to the same original thread.

So in your example, the thread remains the shared source reference, while the four extracted requests become four individual items that can be tracked, prioritised, and managed separately.

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PubliFlow

Building the actual feedback board is definitely just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to user retention and feature prioritization. The real challenge always shifts to integrating that feedback loop directly into your development workflow so it doesn't just become a graveyard of ignored feature requests. If you want to skip the boilerplate and get straight to building those core differentiators, I built a SaaS starter with Next.js and Supabase that handles the heavy lifting. You can check out how we structured it at publiflow.vip to see how it accelerates getting the core product to market. Have you found any specific tools that actually help map user votes directly to Jira or Linear tickets?

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Hareesh Vemasani

Absolutely. A feedback board becomes valuable only when feedback moves into the product development workflow.

In ProductBridge, feedback items can be linked directly to Jira and Linear issues. This keeps the original customer context, votes, and related feedback connected to the development ticket instead of leaving them buried in a separate feedback board.

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PubliFlow

Linking directly to Jira or Linear solves the classic context-switching problem where developers lose the why behind a feature request. How do you handle the sync when a single feedback item gets split into multiple engineering sub-tasks, or do you just map it to the main epic?

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Hareesh Vemasani

We allow a single feedback item to be linked to multiple Jira or Linear tickets, so the customer context stays connected across all related engineering tasks.

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PubliFlow

Linking a single feedback item to multiple tickets is a smart way to handle complex features that need to be broken down into sub-tasks. It prevents the original context from getting lost when a user request spawns tasks across different squads. How do you handle the UI when a feedback item has several linked tickets with varying statuses?

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Robert mine

I like that the focus is on making AI an assistant rather than the decision-maker. Product teams still need to prioritize based on strategy, but having AI consolidate feedback, identify patterns, and preserve customer context could save countless hours every week. That's a much more practical use of AI.

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Hareesh Vemasani

Exactly. AI should reduce the manual work of processing feedback, not decide what gets built.

Product strategy, business context, and trade-offs still require human judgment. The most useful role for AI is to surface patterns, consolidate related feedback, and preserve the customer context teams need to make better decisions.

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Greeshma Reddy Chinthakunta

Really enjoyed this read. I like how you focused on the entire feedback lifecycle rather than just the feedback board itself. The emphasis on AI assisting decision-making instead of replacing product judgement, along with the event-driven architecture and normalized feedback model, makes this a practical and thoughtful approach. Congratulations on the launch!

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Rohith J

The identity resolution point is spot on. For us, the most manual part is still connecting feedback from support emails and app reviews to actual paying accounts, so prioritization ends up being a vibe. Curious how your AI dedup avoids false merges; two requests that sound similar but are different problems seem like the riskier failure mode. Will give ProductBridge a try.

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Hareesh Vemasani

Given the full context of the product and the knowledgebase - every time a new feedback comes, we validate with the existing features and feedbacks - and deduplicate accordingly. Thanks for your comment.

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Nagothula Sai Giri

This is a super grounded take. The distinction that AI should present the evidence rather than make the roadmap decisions is spot on, vote counts without account context usually lead product teams down the wrong path.

The event-driven approach for handling status updates makes total sense too. Congrats on the launch!

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Hareesh Vemasani

Exactly - AI should surface the evidence, while product teams make the decisions. Thanks for the thoughtful comment and the support!