Many creators would argue that talking to customers and collecting feedback are some of the most useful things they could be doing with their limited time. Yet, very few of them actually do it. It can be a time sink, uncomfortable and confronting.

Feedback is important for companies of all sizes. But collecting good feedback, feedback which you can act upon, is hard. One might even argue that talking to your customers is the easy part. Finding people that are willing to talk to you and give you feedback, is even harder.

If you’ve already built a community around your product though, things can be much easier. Even more so if you have an easy way of interacting with that community, like say, a Discord server.

Having a community, means you’ve already done the hardest part. Your community is likely there because they want to engage with what you’re building. The more invested and invested they are in what you’re building, the easier it is to get feedback from them.

There’s several ways to interact and get feedback from your audience through Discord. Some are messy and time consuming, others are easier and more streamlined. It’s worth investing some time into a solution that will help you get value and act on the feedback you collect.

A dedicated #feedback channel

The obvious solution most of us reach for in the beginning, is a dedicated feedback channel. For your users, this is a pretty good solutions. It’s low friction, they’re already on your Discord server anyway. They can type a quick message, and they’ll likely even get an quick message from you or your team, making them feel listened to.

On a small Discord server, and a community that isn’t too active, this is fine. But if you’ve tried it, you know it doesn’t really scale. In no time, you’ll start seeing duplicate request, and you’ll spend a lot of time copy-pasting all this feedback to an Excel sheet or a Notion table. In the process of doing that, you’ll likely also loose a lot of context. And if you have an update a few weeks later on a subject, it’s really hard to get back to your users and close the feedback look.

It’s still better than nothing though. And if you don’t have much time to invest in a proper feedback system, you should at least do this.

Periodic request-for-feedback

Another option is to ask customers for feedback in a periodic fashion. You can just post a message in one of the Discord channels, to see if your users have anything to share. In my experience, this works best if you’re looking for feedback on a specific feature or idea. Ask this question either before or after releasing something new, and you should get some good input.

This doesn’t work as well if you want users to share their general frustrations with your product or improvements they might have thought of while using your product. If you ask your question more vaguely “does anyone have any feedback right now?”, you’ll only receive top-of-mind ideas and won’t necessarily learn much about day-to-day use and frustrations.

Another issue with this approach, is that it will be again up to you to manage and centralise this feedback somewhere. This can be as easy or as hard as you want to make it, but if you want to do it well it will take time.

Closing the feedback loop with users will also be complicated. You’ll need to manually keep track of who you need to reach out to once you have an update on a requested feature or piece of feedback.