I Built a Feedback Tool. Then I Realized Customer Support Was the Bigger Problem

When I started building FeedLog, I thought I had a pretty straightforward idea: give small SaaS teams a better way to collect user feedback.

The first version focused on feedback boards, feature requests, public roadmaps, and changelogs. Nothing particularly complicated. Just a place where users could share ideas and founders could keep track of what people wanted.

I liked the idea. I thought other founders would too.

Then I tried finding users.

Building was the easy part

I spent a lot of time reaching out to indie developers, talking to SaaS founders, and trying to get people interested in the product.

Most conversations were polite. A few people said it looked interesting. But getting someone to actually integrate another tool into their product was much harder than I expected.

And after a while, I started questioning the original idea.

It's not that feedback tools aren't useful. They absolutely are. But for a small SaaS founder with limited time, collecting feature requests might not be the most urgent problem.

When you're handling everything yourself, you're probably more worried about answering customer questions, fixing bugs, and helping users who are stuck.

A feedback board is nice to have. Making sure customers get help when they need it feels a lot more immediate.

That realization changed how I thought about the product.

Most product feedback starts as a conversation

Here's something I hadn't really considered when I started.

Customers don't always separate support requests from product feedback.

Someone might ask how to use a feature, then mention that the current workflow is confusing. Another person might report a bug and suggest a better way to handle the same task.

Sometimes a simple support conversation tells you more about what needs improving than a dedicated feedback form.

But those conversations are easy to lose.

You answer the question, close the chat, and move on. A week later, you vaguely remember that someone suggested something useful, but you can't remember who or what exactly they said.

I started wondering whether support and feedback really needed to live in separate places.

So we changed the direction of FeedLog

Instead of continuing to build only a feedback management tool, we started working on customer support.

We added AI customer support to help answer common questions, a knowledge base where teams can create and manage their own help content, and an inbox for conversations that need human attention.

The original feedback features are still there: feedback boards, roadmaps, and changelogs.

The difference is how I think about them now.

Rather than expecting customers to visit a feedback board and submit an idea, the goal is to make it easier to capture useful feedback during normal support interactions.

That's the direction we're exploring with FeedLog: bringing AI customer support and product feedback together, especially for small teams that don't want to manage several disconnected tools.

Why the knowledge base matters

One of the things I wanted to avoid was building an AI chatbot that just gives generic answers.

If someone asks a question about your product, the answer needs to come from actual information about your product.

That's where the knowledge base comes in.

A founder can create help articles, document common questions, and organize product information. The AI assistant can then use that content to respond to customers.

It also gives the team a reason to improve their documentation over time.

If customers keep asking the same question, maybe the answer needs to be easier to find. If the AI struggles to answer something, maybe the knowledge base is missing important information.

I like the idea that support conversations can help you understand not just what users are asking, but also where your documentation and product experience need work.

There's still one big question

I wish I could say this change immediately solved our user acquisition problem.

It hasn't.

We're still early, and I'm still figuring out whether combining customer support and feedback is something small SaaS teams genuinely want.

There's also a possibility that I've simply made the product more complicated because I was struggling to find users.

That's a pretty uncomfortable thought after spending weeks building new features.

But I'd rather test this direction than keep polishing a product without understanding why people aren't adopting it.

We're building FeedLog in the open, and the source code is available on GitHub for anyone who wants to explore the project.

What I'd do differently if I started again

I'd probably spend less time assuming I understood the problem and more time watching how founders actually handle customer requests.

I'd ask where their support conversations happen, how they track feature requests, and what gets lost between those two workflows.

And I'd try to understand whether their biggest frustration is answering questions, organizing feedback, or simply having too many tools to manage.

Because adding more features isn't necessarily progress.

Sometimes it just means you've found more things to build.

I'm still trying to figure out which one this is.

If you're building a SaaS, do you manage customer support and product feedback separately? Or would you rather have both in one place?