Early-Stage Feedback: Fast, Scrappy Ways to Get Ahead

I love the scrappy stage of product building. At the very beginning, you don’t have the luxury of steady inbound early-stage feedback. You’re not swimming in NPS scores, review data, or neatly structured survey results. Instead, you make your own luck. When I was first building ProdPad, I spent my days jumping on calls with anyone who’d give me five minutes, DMing strangers on Twitter, and setting up coffee chats just to hear what might make their lives easier.

It felt messy and sometimes even a little desperate, but that’s where the sharpest insights came from. Waiting around for feedback to arrive is not a strategy. It’s just procrastination with a fancy name.

Here’s the thing most people miss: this scrappy approach isn’t only useful for two founders in a cafe trying to find product market fit. It’s just as essential for big, well-resourced companies. In fact, the bigger the company, the more likely it is that the early-stage feedback muscle has atrophied. Teams get lost in dashboards, surveys, and process. Everyone assumes someone else is talking to customers. And before you know it, you’re making product decisions in a vacuum.

That’s why I argue that scrappy feedback gathering is not just an early-stage survival tactic. It’s a discipline that every product team, no matter the size of their company, needs to embrace.

Why scrappy feedback matters at scale

Early on, scrappiness is baked into survival. If you don’t get customer feedback, you fail. But in larger companies, the danger is subtler. Everyone has a role, a process, and a job description. “Stay in your lane” becomes the norm. And that often means no one is responsible for doing the unglamorous but vital work of just picking up the phone or jumping into a Slack channel to ask a customer, “How’s this really working for you?”

The irony is that big companies have more users and more data than startups could dream of. But more data does not mean more insight. Data tells you what is happening. Only scrappy feedback tells you why.

Think about how many product flops you’ve seen from giant companies. They had the resources. They had the metrics. What they lacked was the scrappy truth-finding that would have revealed customer indifference or confusion before launch.

So whether you’re at a startup fighting for traction or at an enterprise trying to stay relevant, the principle is the same: get out of the building. As Steve Blank put it, there are no facts inside your building. There are only opinions. The facts are out there with your customers.

Scrappy tactics to gather early-stage feedback

Scrappiness is not chaos. It’s deliberate, lightweight, and customer-focused. Here are some practical ways to put it into action, whether you’re two people in a garage or a product team at a global company.

Be proactive, not reactive

Don’t wait for feedback to trickle in. Reach out. Cold email prospects, send quick polls in Slack groups, or drop into LinkedIn communities where your users hang out. In my role here at ProdPad, I’ve reached out to product managers on Twitter and LinkedIn and simply asked, “What’s frustrating you about your roadmap process?” Those short exchanges gave me insights that shaped features years down the line.

For larger teams, this might mean encouraging PMs to shadow support calls, join a sales demo, or run an informal chat with a handful of customers every month. It’s not about launching a research study. It’s about staying curious.

Do things that don’t scale

Startups are famous for this, but big companies should do it too. Airbnb’s founders once flew to New York to photograph listings for their early hosts. That move doubled their revenue almost overnight. Scrappy, unscalable work pays dividends because it gives you raw exposure to your users.

They weren’t the only ones. Dropbox validated its product before it even existed with nothing more than a demo video. Drew Houston put together a simple screencast showing how Dropbox would work, then posted it on Hacker News. The blunt comments, critiques, and demands from early adopters weren’t always pretty, but they confirmed the idea was worth building.

Zappos did something similar in e-commerce. Nick Swinmurn tested whether people would buy shoes online by posting photos of shoes from local stores, then personally going back to purchase them at retail whenever someone placed an order. Customers gave very direct feedback about trust, shipping speed, and the buying experience. That uncomfortable early-stage feedback highlighted the barriers Zappos would need to overcome to scale.

Slack’s early days also hinged on uncomfortable truth-seeking. Originally built as an internal tool, Stewart Butterfield handed it out to other startups and begged for brutal honesty. Instead of praise, he wanted to know what didn’t work. That feedback—complaints about onboarding, confusion over channels, quirks in notifications—was what shaped Slack into a product people loved.

The pattern is clear: companies that grow don’t just embrace praise. They deliberately invite critique. That’s what doing things that don’t scale really means: being willing to ask for the raw truth before you’re ready for it.

In a big org, that could mean personally onboarding the next five enterprise customers instead of delegating it. Or sitting down to read every comment from a survey rather than waiting for a report. Scrappy means hands-on.

Be everywhere your users are

If you have users, embed feedback opportunities everywhere. An in-app widget, a feedback link in your email signature, or even a pinned message in your customer Slack channel. ProdPad has tools for this because I learned the hard way that if you make feedback hard to give, you won’t get it. Lower the barrier and you’ll be surprised how often people will tell you what you need to know.

Try “micro feedback”

Not every conversation has to be a formal 45-minute interview. Sometimes the gold comes from five minutes at the end of a support call, or a quick DM after a webinar: “What did you think of this?” In 2025, you have more channels than ever. Use them. A Discord server, a LinkedIn poll, a one-question Typeform. The smaller the ask, the easier it is for people to respond.

Buffer is a classic example here. Joel Gascoigne validated his idea with a landing page. Visitors who clicked “Plans & Pricing” saw a message that said, “We’re not quite ready yet. Leave your email.” That tiny test, essentially a micro feedback experiment, gave him unfiltered responses and a list of people eager to try the product.

Glossier followed a similar path, but with community. Founder Emily Weiss didn’t start with a product. She started with Into the Gloss, a beauty blog where she asked readers blunt questions about their routines and frustrations. Sometimes the answers were contradictory. Sometimes they were critical of existing beauty brands. But it was that messy, uncomfortable early-stage feedback that became the foundation for Glossier’s brand: transparent, relatable, and community-driven.

These examples show that micro feedback doesn’t have to be polished or expensive. Sometimes a simple landing page, blog, or direct question surfaces more insight than a year’s worth of surveys.

Making early-stage feedback actionable

Collecting feedback is only step one. If you don’t capture and process it, you’ll just have a pile of sticky notes that no one ever looks at again.

Here’s how to make it useful:

1. Centralize it. Get every scrap of feedback into one place, whether that’s a spreadsheet, a shared doc, or a customer feedback management tool like ProdPad. The key is that nothing gets lost.
2. Tag and connect it. Feedback should be linked to the relevant product area or idea. That way, when you’re revisiting your roadmap, you can see which ideas are backed by real voices.
3. Look for patterns. Don’t just skim. Analyze. Use AI to help if you’re drowning in volume. ProdPad’s Signals, for example, runs through your feedback and pulls out the themes and sentiment so you don’t have to read every single transcript yourself.
4. Prioritize with context. Not every request is equal. Weight feedback from target personas more heavily than random asks. Look at severity, frequency, and alignment with strategy.
5. Close the loop. Let customers know when their feedback has led to action. A quick “You asked for this, it’s live now” message builds massive goodwill and encourages them to keep contributing.

A quick word on feedback bias

One trap teams fall into is only listening to the loudest or happiest voices. That’s dangerous. Your power users will always have opinions, but they don’t represent the silent majority.

Here’s how to keep your perspective balanced:

• Talk to churned or inactive users. Their reasons for leaving are pure insight.
• Don’t shy away from negative comments. As uncomfortable as they may be, they highlight what needs attention. In fact, a customer who hates your product or a prospect who chose not to buy often gives you more valuable insight than your biggest fans ever could.
• Seek out fresh eyes. New users will spot friction that veterans no longer notice.

Avoiding bias deserves a deeper dive of its own, but the main point is simple: if all your feedback comes from people who already love you, you’re not getting the full story.

Scrappiness as a team habit

Gathering scrappy feedback isn’t a one-off project. It’s a habit. You want a culture where everyone feels empowered to grab early-stage feedback when they see the opportunity, even if you’re not early-stage as a company.

Some ways to bake it in:

• Make “customer story of the week” part of your team meetings.
• Give PMs a quota of customer calls or chats each month.
• Encourage engineers and designers to sit in on a customer session now and then.
• Celebrate initiative. When someone goes outside the process to uncover an insight, back them up.

At ProdPad, we run a customer community called ProdPad Talk where we float ideas and collect candid reactions. We also keep a beta tester list that includes people outside our customer base, so we get feedback from folks who aren’t already bought in. It keeps us honest and stops us from getting trapped in our own echo chamber.

Challenge yourself to be scrappy

Scrappy feedback gathering is about curiosity, humility, and action. It means not waiting for permission or process, but going out to learn what your customers really think.

Startups know this instinctively because they have no choice. Big companies forget it because they have too many systems telling them they already know. But the best product teams, no matter their size, never stop being scrappy. They talk to customers continuously. They chase uncomfortable truths. They act on what they learn.

So here’s my challenge: this week, find one scrappy way to hear from your customers. Sit in on a support call. DM someone on LinkedIn. Read through a transcript and highlight where the customer sighed or hesitated. Then take that insight back to your team and ask, “What should we do with this?”

That is how you build products that resonate. Not by waiting for the perfect dataset, but by staying scrappy, curious, and connected to the people you’re building for.