Show HN: I made an embeddable user feedback tool – free for open source

[sonio]

Hi HN,

After I finished my thesis on feedback management for SaaS at the end of last year, I thought it was time to do something hands-on that topic. Since I like the idea of such feedback tools, that lets you collaborate with users to find solutions together - instead of having a separated feedback from each user - this became my starting point. I also like the approach of the chat widgets as they make it easy for users to get in touch with the people behind the app. So I tried to combine these two approaches with sleekplan.com.

Here are some of the main features:

* Collect & discuss feedback with an embedded widget

* Calculate an impact score for feedback items based on different factors (such as weight, users satisfaction, user engagement),

* Categories for different types of feedback (Feature requests, missing integrations, bugs)

* Custom statuses

* Roadmap

* Changelog

* Notify „followers“ that are watching specific feedback items on status updates

* Keep discussions simple (jump straight into discussions via email)

I initially focused on developing the tool itself. The next step is an integration to sync Github issues.

I'm sure there's plenty of room for improvement, so what do you think about it? I would really appreciate your feedback, don’t be nice, say anything that sucks. As Bill Gates says: „We all need people who will give us feedback. That’s how we improve“.

[nikhilbagadia]

This reminds me of canny.io

We decided against using it because given an option users might vote on features but unsure if they actually want a particular feature or not.

Worried about false positives distracting us, we decided against it.

However, I know a ton of products who still use it and they are happy with it.

[sonio]

Yes canny is more portal based whilst Sleekplan is more focused on a widget basis, you can interact with via $sleek SDK (so that it feels more integrated)

I am totally with you when you say that there is a chance that feature voting will backfire for the whole process. It depends on how you use it.

1. You shouldn't rely on up- and downvotes for feature priorisazion for example. Like I did for "impact scoring" at Sleekplan you could use factors like interaction of users, time staying on an item.

2. You shouldn't ask for solutions or features, You should ask for problems, issues missing functionalities and then collaborate (e.g. in the comments) to find a good solution that's satisfying everyone.

I currently writing a best practice (from my point of view) for the Sleekplan docs.

But having been in this orbit for some time I think that's simply a function of how teams want to handle feedback requests since everyone's needs are a little different.

[varlogix]

I agree to some extent. Unless you can filter the feedback based on the level of the user (plan, MRR from account, user engagement), it can result in some lower importance features being built. Also, making the roadmap public reduces the product team's flexibility to an extent.

[sonio]

Right, but these filters are not quite trivial. How would you filter (MRR by Upvotes, MRR by comments and subscriptions or all). I think it depends, that's one of the reasons I have implemented an impact score combining MRR, user engagement and so.

It's just more simple to filter. Therefore, a feedback item with 10 upvotes can have an impact score of 40, while a feedback with 100 upvotes can have an impact score of 3.

[sonio]

Site: https://sleekplan.com/ Docs: https://sleekplan.com/docs/

[shrutipathak]

The design looks slick.

Question on Pricing - Starter plan is $19 for 100 users and Business is $75 for 500 users.

Starter plan with 500 users - $79

There is not much difference in the plans either except for Prio* in support

[sonio]

Thank you!

You're absolutely right. I have spent a lot of time thinking about pricing. Here is one of my calculations: https://i.imgur.com/sB4CuAf.png I just wanted to give some kind of "discount" for more usage. The higher the number of tracked users, the lower the price will be in the end. In general you can think of a per tricked user pricing.

Prio support is just a "nice to have" addition

[shrutipathak]

Makes sense. But prio as "nice to have" will not hold much ground.

Maybe include a slider to show the pricing and remove the Business plan?

Or maybe not give out everything unlimited for the mid plan?

[sonio]

That's really a good point, I like the idea of the slider solution! Maybe with some tiered pricing, that would also make it very easy to explain.

I think a limit on functionality would not go over so well since you have to pay for it and then getting limited by tracked user plus functionality.

[kaushikt]

You meant Sleek? (pun intended)

[sonio]

PS: here is the https://sleekplan.com