The short answer
Ask inside the product, on the screen the question is about, right after the user has done the thing you want to learn about. Ask one short question that takes a tap ("How easy was it to export your report?"), then an optional "Where did you get stuck?". Keep a "Help us improve" button in the app for people who want to say more. Then put every piece of feedback, from the widget, email and support, in one list, tag it by theme, and fix the theme that comes up most.
A small SaaS product often has a few hundred users who log in every day and almost none who say anything. A survey emailed to all of them gets two answers, both "looks good". The people who do write in send long emails about one thing, and the inbox becomes a second job.
Founders keep asking about this on Reddit, in r/SaaS, r/microsaas, r/buildinpublic and r/nocode. Each section below takes one of their questions, in their words, and answers it.
How do I get feedback from existing daily active users?
Your daily active users are already in the app, so that is where to reach them. An email arrives later, somewhere else, about something they no longer remember clearly. A question on the screen arrives while the experience is fresh, and answering takes a second instead of opening a link and a form.
Pick the screens where you know least about how users feel, and ask about that screen only:
| Moment | Where to ask | Question |
|---|---|---|
| First run of a feature | On the feature screen, after first use | How useful is this for you? (1 to 5) |
| End of onboarding | On the last setup step | How easy was it to get set up? (1 to 7) |
| A task that often fails | On the results or confirmation screen | Did this do what you expected? (Yes / No) |
| Settings and billing | On the settings or plan page | Is anything here hard to find? |
| Anything, any time | A "Help us improve" button in the app menu or a side tab | What would make this product better for you? |
The first four ask about one moment, so every answer is tied to a screen and a task. The button is always there for users who have something to say and would not otherwise know where to say it.
How to ask for app feedback that people actually answer
"Do you like the app?" gets polite answers. People who stay with a product mostly like it, or they would have left, and they do not want to sound ungrateful to a small team. "Where did you get stuck?" asks about a fact, not an opinion, and gives them permission to complain.
| Instead of | Ask |
|---|---|
| Do you like the new dashboard? | What were you looking for on the dashboard today? |
| Any feedback? | Where did you get stuck this week? |
| How would you rate our app? | How easy was it to send your first invoice? |
| What features should we add? | What did you last do in another tool because you could not do it here? |
Questions about what someone just did, or last did, get specific answers. Questions about what they might want in the future often get wish lists that say little about what they would use.
Tip: One rating question plus one optional comment box is enough. Each extra question loses some of the people who would have answered the first.
How do I increase the amount of feedback from users?
Change when and how you ask before you ask more often. A common story: a founder with about 100 users prompts for feedback on the site, emails everyone who finished sign-up and everyone who abandoned it, and gets a handful of replies. That is normal. Most users never answer a survey, and the ones who do are not a random sample.
Check these first:
- The question arrives at the wrong time: on login, before the user has done anything, or in an email days later
- The question is too broad to answer quickly, such as "Tell us what you think"
- Answering takes too long: a link to a form with ten fields
- The same users see the question on every visit, even after they answered or closed it
- Users do not believe anything will happen with their answer
For users who signed up and left, a personal email from the founder usually gets more replies than a survey link. Send it within a day or two, ask one question ("What stopped you from finishing setup?"), and make it easy to reply in one line. Expect few replies, and read every one.
How do you collect user feedback if telemetry is not possible?
Some products cannot track users at all: privacy tools, health and finance apps, tools for journalists, anything people chose because it does not watch them. Others choose not to. Without analytics you lose the "where", so the feedback has to carry it. Make feedback something users choose to give you, and make it safe to give:
- Ask without an account or an email address, and say next to the question that answers are anonymous
- Store the answer and the screen it came from, nothing about the person: no cookies, no user id, no IP address
- Let users type freely, and remove emails and phone numbers they paste into comments before you store them
- Offer a way to get a reply (an email field, or "reply to this email") only for users who want one
- Write a short privacy note for the feedback itself: what is kept, for how long, and who reads it
In the EU and the UK, a feedback tool that sets tracking cookies or identifiers in the browser needs consent first. Feedback collected this way spares your users another consent banner, and matches what they signed up for.
How do you handle user feedback for your SaaS?
Give it one place and a routine, so you read each message once. The problem usually shows up after the first few hundred users: feedback arrives by email every day, each one a long message about several things, and keeping up takes hours.
-
Put every channel in one list
Widget answers, support emails, chat, app store reviews and calls go into one spreadsheet, board or help desk view. One row per point, not per message: a long email with three points becomes three rows.
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Tag each row with a theme and a screen
Keep the list of themes short (setup, billing, exports, speed, a missing integration) and add one when something new keeps coming up.
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Reply in batches
Answer feedback emails once or twice a day, with a few saved replies for the common cases. Thank the user, say whether it is planned, and ask one follow-up question if the point is unclear.
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Use AI to sort, not to decide
A language model can draft tags and summaries for a batch of emails. Check its tags against a sample, and keep the decision about what to build with a person who has read the originals.
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Close the loop
When you ship a fix, tell the users who asked for it, and mention it in the changelog. Users who see their feedback lead somewhere tend to send more of it.
How do you analyse customer reviews to find recurring complaints?
Tag them like any other feedback and count. App store reviews, review sites, support emails and survey comments belong in the same list, because the same complaint often shows up in all four. The theme with the most rows is not always the one to fix first, but it is where to look first. A spreadsheet is enough at this size: one column for the theme, one for the screen, one for where the complaint came from, and a pivot table.
- Count how many different customers raised a theme, not how many messages: one customer writing five times is one customer
- Where you know who wrote, split by plan or by how long they have been with you; new users and power users get stuck in different places
- Look for phrases that repeat word for word, such as "where is the" or "I thought it would"
- Compare a theme month by month, so you can see whether a fix made it go away
Example
Example: a small invoicing app finds what its daily users struggle with
Say you run a small invoicing app with about 300 users who log in most days. You sent a survey email to all of them last quarter and got six answers, all positive.
You add two questions in the app. On the screen that appears after an invoice is sent: "How easy was it to send this invoice?" (1 to 7) with an optional "Where did you get stuck?". In the app menu, a feedback button opens one free-text question. Neither asks for a name or an email.
After four weeks, the invoice screen has far more answers than the email survey ever had. Most scores are high, but the comments on the low ones keep naming the same thing: users cannot find where to change the currency on a single invoice. The answers from the menu button ask for recurring invoices.
You tag the support emails from the same month and find the currency question there too. You move the currency setting onto the invoice screen, reply to the users who emailed about it, and add a line to the changelog. A month later the low scores on that screen drop, and recurring invoices goes on the roadmap with the comments attached.
How to collect feedback from your first users when nobody leaves reviews
A developer on Reddit asked: "How did you collect feedback from your first users when nobody left reviews?" Talk to them directly, and stop waiting for reviews. With five or ten users, surveys have too few answers to count:
- Email each user personally and offer a 15-minute call; ask them to show you how they use the product
- Watch a user try a task over a screen share, and keep quiet while they do
- Offer something useful for their time, such as a free month or a longer trial, to everyone who answers, not only to people who are positive
Keep a way to write in for the users who will not take a call, and move to short in-app questions once you have enough users that a call with each is no longer possible.
Where Asklet fits
Asklet puts the questions from the first section on the screens of your web app. You paste one iframe, with no SDK or npm package, and a path pattern such as /app/projects/*/settings lets every project's settings screen share one survey. A survey can mix a rating, a Yes / No, an NPS scale, a choice list and a free-text box, and you read the results screen by screen.
Respondents need no account with us, the widget sets no cookies and stores no IP addresses, and emails or phone numbers typed into comments are removed before they are saved. It does not read your support inbox, track sessions or link answers to user accounts, so keep your help desk for the emails and calls for the follow-ups.
The Free plan covers one website or app with 10 live pages and 100 responses a month, and needs no card.
Your next steps
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Read last month of support email
Note the two screens that come up most. Those get the first questions.
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Write the question for each screen
About the task the user just finished, with a scale they can answer in one tap.
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Give the rest a way in
One feedback button in the app menu, so feedback about other screens does not end up in your inbox.
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Set up the list before the answers arrive
Columns for theme, screen and source, so the first week of answers is tagged as it comes in.
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Book a monthly review
Half an hour to count themes, pick one fix and reply to the people who raised it.
Try these steps on your own site. Asklet adds the questions to every page with one snippet. Free plan, no card needed. Compare the plans.
Start freeCommon questions
Should a small SaaS use NPS?
Not as the main question. NPS measures how likely users are to recommend the product as a whole, and with a few hundred users the score moves a lot from one month to the next. It does not tell you which screen to fix. Ask task questions on the screens first, and add NPS once or twice a year if you want a loyalty trend.
Should in-app feedback be tied to the user account?
Only when you need to reply. Answers tied to an account let you follow up and split results by plan, but users are more careful about what they write when their name is attached. A common setup is an anonymous in-app question with an optional email field for users who want an answer.
Should I build my own feedback form or use a tool?
A form that saves to your database takes an afternoon. The rest takes longer: showing the right question on the right screen, not asking the same user twice, removing personal data from comments and reading the results per screen. Build it if you need full control over the data. Otherwise a tool saves that work.
How long should I collect feedback before acting on it?
There is no fixed period. Act when the same theme has come up from several different users, not from one loud one. For a product with a few hundred daily users, that can take a few weeks per screen. Fix bugs and broken flows as soon as one user reports them.
Related
- In-app feature feedback for SaaS products
- What is a feedback widget?
- How to collect anonymous feedback
- How to collect customer feedback: 8 methods
- What is a good survey response rate?
- Is NPS still worth it? What to ask instead
- Asklet vs building your own feedback widget
- Feedback widget for React, Vue and Svelte
- Free CES calculator
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