Most founders say they want feedback. Few actually go get it.

It’s easy to wait for feedback to arrive on its own: a support email, a churn survey, a one-star review. It’s much rarer to go looking for it before something breaks, or to actually ask the people already around you instead of assuming you know what they’d say.

I’ve been doing both this year, and twice now it directly changed a product I ship. The most recent one just shipped in SalesScraper Pro. Here’s the actual pattern, not the polished version.

Two different conversations, two different products

Neither of these updates came from a support ticket. But they didn’t come from the same kind of conversation either, and I think that distinction matters more than the outcome.

Earlier this year, I cold-messaged a support leader I’d never met, about the operational problem EscalationAI was meant to solve. At the time, EscalationAI delivered its risk alerts over email. A notification you’d get, not a workflow you’d actually use. That conversation is a big part of why it doesn’t work that way anymore. EscalationAI is now a full Zendesk Marketplace app, built directly into the ticket view where support agents are already working, instead of an email they’d have to act on separately. That’s not a small tweak. It meant rebuilding the authentication layer and going through Zendesk’s review process multiple times to get there. A stranger with no reason to reply ended up reshaping how the entire product works.

The most recent one: SalesScraper Pro

SalesScraper Pro’s latest update came from somewhere different. Anand Joshi isn’t someone I cold-messaged. He’s a first-degree connection, already in my network, who used the tool against his own LinkedIn connections and flagged something specific that wasn’t working the way it should. Not a vague “this feels off,” an actual, reproducible case, the kind you only find by putting a tool in someone else’s hands and watching where it breaks.

I’m deliberately not going into the technical detail of what changed here. Some of it touches how the tool interacts with LinkedIn’s platform, and getting specific about mechanics isn’t something I want to put in writing publicly. What I can say: the fix is live now, and it makes the tool noticeably more reliable in exactly the situation Anand ran into.

Thank you, Anand. The feedback mattered, and the product is better for it.

Why this works better than passive feedback channels

Founders default to two feedback sources: people who already paid, who are biased toward liking you enough to have stuck around, and people who complain loudly, who are biased toward the worst experience rather than the typical one. Both are real signal. Both are incomplete.

Neither of the conversations behind these two updates happened by accident, and neither came from waiting. One was a cold message to someone with zero reason to reply. The other was a connection I already had, who I actually asked instead of assuming I already knew what they’d say. Different starting points, same underlying habit: treating LinkedIn as somewhere to go looking for feedback, not just somewhere to wait for it to show up.

The actual takeaway

If you’re building something and relying on your own instincts, or on whatever feedback happens to land in your inbox, you’re working with a narrower sample than you think.

You don’t need a stranger every time. Some of the sharpest feedback is sitting in your existing network, from people you’ve simply never asked directly. Others you’ll need to message cold, because they don’t know you yet and have no reason to volunteer anything. Both are worth doing. Send a specific question, not a pitch. Most won’t answer. The ones who do will tell you something you couldn’t have guessed on your own.

SalesScraper Pro’s latest update is live on the Chrome Web Store now. If you’re already using it, you’ll notice the improvement Anand’s feedback drove. If you’re not, this is as good a time as any to see whether it fits how you prospect on LinkedIn.