I can imagine that business leadership would really want something like this, but as a user I honestly couldn't hate anything less than these distracting popups. We're building something similar for user feedback in our application, but they're inline and activated by user interaction. Louder, attention grabbing things like these may increase response rate, but drastically reduce the user experience in my opinion, especially for existing users who often want to finish their task and move on.

Regardless, congrats on the launch.

We are actually considering in-line, subtle feedback widgets as a next step. I am with you in that this pop-up style can be less appealing to certain users. Although by asking user for opt in / opt out initially would help, I do like the approach of more subtle, embedded feedback widgets.

Feedback like this is what makes HN great. Thank you!

This is great. Two comments/questions

1. What comes with the free tier? Says I can get started for free but not sure if it is a trial or dev account etc.

2. I would love a way for the widget to close if the user clicked outside of the popup instead of having to click the X. It would be nice to have this as a setting to be less intrusive on less important surveys.

Actually just thought of a third.

The steps seem to load rather slow (well, not instant) with a fade effect. Totally down with a quick fade effect but would like it to be a bit snappier, not sure if you have to query for the next step but if you are, and thats whats causing the slowdown, maybe pre-fetch the next step (could be on hover of an answer if there are a lot of branches), or first step before showing the widget, so it can be a bit faster.

Great points! Here're my answers:

1. Free tier allows you to test for several days without limits and no need to put down CC / payment.

2. Widget to lose when clicked outside: I like this, have put this down on our list. This is something that I'd personally want to see using 1Flow as well!

3. Yeah I agree. Animation should be faster, especially because we load everything instantly so it's just the frontend animation taking time.

Thanks for your feedback! Cool ideas and very practical improvements we could make.

Awesome! Thanks!

Would love to see a developer tier. We aren't launched yet so it's always hard to integrate something into the product when you don't exactly know when that will be and have to pay in the meantime. Even if it's EXTREMELY limited (10 tracked users or something) as long as I don't get kicked out I would be happy.

Great feedback! We're gonna add this very soon, like before your free trial ends. Please shoot me a message kai@1flow.app and I'll make sure you get a tier you're happy with :)

The company I work for does it this way: you sign up without a CC, and you get access to an environment that has all the features, but you're not allowed to use it in prod, and it shows a "you're using this product in test mode" banner on the widget. Maybe that's something you could consider.

Thanks for the suggestion - think it might be a valid approach for us.

I saw that "...works 100% identical in production and development mode, except that we don't backup the data from development apps nearly as often" - so does this mean you don't really prevent users from using it in prod if they want to, but just warm them that this may result in loss of data and therefore is not recommended?

Well, we do actively say that you're not allowed to use it in production, and we have the banner to try and discourage it, but we also actively look for suspicious usage patterns on dev accounts.

Aha that makes sense. Thanks for sharing this tip!

Congrats on the launch. I've used Google Forms and Typeform before on different projects, both of which are simple to set up. But we've only ever put questionnaires on an external link. Do you have any data on whether in-app surveys get better responses than using a link to an external form like that? I can see why it would a better experience in-app, but does it make a big difference vs linking as far as response rates go?

We've seen that on average in-app surveys in general gets 30-60% response rates. Versus link surveys typically get 5-10%. Our in-app survey response rate can reach 70-80%, with the right placement in the user flow, and it's such a pleasant find for us. So in general it is a few times higher just because in-app surveys are shorter, targeted and seems really relevant to the user's current context.

That's a meaningful difference. I'd have only have expected a couple of percentage points. Are there any downsides you hear in user feedback from doing them within an app? Another commenter mentioned privacy concerns. What sort of stack are you using and could you ever see offering a self-hosted version (like say PostHog with analytics) to address that?

Yeah so from my experience a lot of tech companies are actually already doing this - google has their own version, instagram has their own version, etc. etc. The downside of using this approach is if you don't do it right and respectful to the user, you might be annoying them. We've addressed this with our tool with an easy control over how frequent and when / where the in-app survey should show up, so that it is 1) relevant 2) not annoying. With regards to privacy, we are using MongoDB cloud with standard encryption hosted on AWS. Later this year we're gonna offer European servers for GDPR compliance. Right now though, users can close the pop-up anytime in the flow and they are not blocked from what they are doing, so only users who WANT to tell you what they think will, and when they voluntarily give you their thoughts and info, that is your 1st party data - you have full ownership over it and you (as the company) should make sure to not abuse user data (which I really hope all of our customers do!)

>> I tried showing a pop-up in my app that led users to a Google form.<<

This is what I currently have for https://nocommandline.com (but it’s positioned at bottom right of the page) and just like your experience, it doesn’t seem to have worked.

Will give your App a spin.

Yeah my understanding for this is that when users see a google form or otherwise some interface that's clearly not related to the website, they just instantly navigate away. With 1Flow we're trying to optimize the experience for users to like us and interact / click to respond - so far it's surprisingly effective. :) Please give it a spin and message me any feedback / questions in Intercom.

This is great! When I design a product I always make sure that it has a built-in feedback/bug reporting mechanism because I know that as a user I hate searching their website for the link to the page with the email to send feedback, and usually don't.

But this takes it to the next level.

Thanks for your encouraging words. "The key to scaling is finding bottlenecks before your users do" - I really resonate with this (I saw your talk in 2019) and we're helping companies solve the bottleneck with scaling user feedback. If you or someone else you know would benefit from using our solution, we'd love to chat!

> I really resonate with this (I saw your talk in 2019)

<3 Feedback like this make all the effort of doing talks worth it!

> If you or someone else you know would benefit from using our solution, we'd love to chat!

I'm messaging you right now!

Some minor feedback -- I would make it clearer on the landing page and in the docs that there is an npm module available for the web integration. As a frontend engineer, not being able to handle software dependencies as part of my standard build process is a major frustration.

Only supporting snippets signals to me that a company might be behind the times and could be dealing with globals in a way that would cause problems in a complex web app.

Having an npm module as an integration option is a major selling point to me, and I think it might benefit you guys to call this out more clearly.

Great to know this! We will add this in our next version of landing page - thanks for telling me that npm module is important to you as a developer.

I’d recommend replacing Intercom on your marketing site with your own product. I know they serve different purposes, but I think it would be much more impactful seeing you ‘dog food’ your own product.

Thanks for this feedback, we're currently showing a pop-up 1Flow widget when you first visit our site, although Intercom is there for the chat communication. I think we would actually replace it soon with our floating widget - def much more powerful demo then!

Congrats on the launch.

Note that higher response rates don't always translate to better data. As you make the survey experience more intrusive you incentivize certain users to provide junk answers simply to remove the barrier. Just something to consider... especially if you decide to scale to enterprise.

Good point! Initially this is our way of getting in front of users more to get quality answers but I think your point is solid. We're working on a consent feature which will allow users who don't want to be bothered to opt out from the very beginning - this also helps with data quality! Anecdotally from today's launch I'm already getting some good, thoughtful responses from the pop-up widget on our website, and I think the data shows the general distribution but with maybe some noise from users who just clicked around. We could improve this to be close to 0% noise when we implement user consent window. Just getting started!

I could see this being useful when reporting bugs as well. Seems like the "Oops, something went wrong" screen is pretty standard for handling unexpected errors. Being able to programmatically trigger a user-detailed bug report whenever this happens would be pretty cool.

I love this - this is one use case that I haven't thought about but makes a ton of sense. Will discuss with team on how to best implement this. Ty Ty!

I had a click through your test widget, 2 small updates that I think could make it feel so much smoother:

1) - Slow fade in is annoying and is just a lag on inputting the feedback.

2) - From what I can tell it doesn't move to the next 'slide' until it receives a response from the server which again feels really slow, if possible move it to the next slide immediately whilst it's sending messages to / from the server in the background.

Great looking product though!

* Also have a dedicated email input field if capturing emails is a value add, having it in a text box that has a 280 character max looks strange

Thank you for this feedback. Agree with both 1) and 2) and I've noted this down for us to improve next! Plus the email field is a good point, too - when we initially built this we didn't think of email collection use case, but now we're even using it this way ourselves LOL so it's best to build it out.

I'm a potential customer of yours and I'm quite put off by your landing page. Presumably the pop over that takes a few seconds to load is an example of your service? It left me very frustrated having a white bar covering half my screen waiting for text to load... Why would I do that to my users? There are also a ton of data privacy challenges with a service like yours, and having your data policy (https://1flow.notion.site/1Flow-Data-Policy-77dda979b2794331...) say "to be updated" is very discouraging.

It reminds me of the BS that the shopify app puts me through every time I make an order. I'm already paying for the service--there should be an easy way to opt out of ALL ratings/reviews/feedback/telemetry if I don't want to be bothered.

This is very important for us to hear. We are planning a feature for people to opt in / out of user research in order to address this. Our goal is to build a research tool that both software makers and their users will love, and this is an obvious next step we need to take!

Thanks for checking it out! We will look into the white bar issue that you mentioned, this is not the expected behavior and in customer websites our widget would load immediately. Could you please send me a quick email at kai@1flow.app? I would love to show you how it works since you might be looking for a solution like this, even if you won't use ours I'd be happy to share my research on all the tools in the market!

Congrats on the launch.

Actually the bottom-drawer UI is now the default for Android in-app store review API:

https://developer.android.com/guide/playcore/in-app-review

Thanks and yes correct, the review API uses the drawer UI on Android. What I meant in the original post is a dialog with the users asking them if they'd be willing to support us if they're happy, and that upfront communication with the users alone (rather than a standard Android pop-up) did all the magic for me when I was an indie!

Site bug report: on the pricing page the 'Use cases' and `Features` links in the footer are throwing errors in the browser console. I guess they are trying to jump to a specific section on the home page without going to the home page first.

Thanks for reporting this! Yeah we'll fix them, poor navigation...

I was looking at pricing. What is a "tracked user"? I'd be more inclined to pay for a certain number of survey responses. Typeform's model of scaling price with # of responses seems in line with 1Flow's value.

A tracked user is anyone who opens your app. Yeah with people who are familiar with survey tools we've heard similar feedback as what you said. The reason we're currently pricing it based on MTUs is because we actually track what users do (i.e. events and sessions) in the background, and give you the option of targeting any specific user cohort anywhere in their user flow to get the most relevant and contextual feedback in the moment. So our vision is to give you qualitative + quantitative insights in one wholistic view. A second reason is that our product's goal isn't to give you some static reports, but rather we'd want to help you GROW your user base with insights - build features users care about, address the issues they had in your conversion funnel, so you can grow. That said, we are staying flexible and open-minded so some situations we do have custom pricing with our customers based on their needs if that's more special.

How do you count users from the EU who send „do not track“ requests via their browser? It would actually be illegal for you to track them - would they count?

No they wouldn't count. We need to explain this better in our docs so thank you for bringing this up, it's on my to-do list now. Oh, btw we do not use cookies so if your site didn't need cookie notices before, you won't need them after adding 1flow.

Thank you for the reply!

Not to be nitpicking, but it’s not (only) the cookie that requires consent, but the storage and the use of the data itself. So if your customers do not have a cookie consent yet, they might even have _more_ work to do to implement your solution because they still have to ask for permission and store the answer.

We believe in a privacy-first internet. We also believe in continuously listening to users efficiently to solve their problems better. I think there's a right way of doing it and we're on a mission to pave the way for all teams building software.

For sure this is good feedback! We've planned a feature for explicit user consent at the first interaction, so that our customers who don't already have good privacy practices in place will use our one-click solution.

Landingpage says „starts at 30$“, pricing page lists „from 75$“ - quite confusing tbh.

Oh nice catch! Corrected this and deployed - sorry about that! it's free to setup & test and our pricing starts at $75/mo for up to 10k monthly users.

Congrats on the launch! I’ve definitely run into this problem before and even made a custom in-app survey solution for my apps. How are you different from a product like Sprig?

Clicked on one of the feature tabs (Pricing study) while the widget was open, and the widget crashed. Just fyi.

So just so I understand this, I need to spend $75 just to see if I like it?

Hey you can actually test it out without putting down a CC. Just embed the code snippet, track one event and then turn on your survey. You will start seeing responses. When you like it enough you can subscribe! Or let us know your feedback. We're also giving detailed live demos via Zoom - you can book one on our landing page. Hope this helps.

I would love to see that stated on the site. At this time there is no indication other than a button that says "free" but we all have been burned by dark patterns - I won't even click that button unless there is a clear statement of what that means.

For me, I work on personal side projects for weeks if not months and need to gather feedback from my loyal fans (family) - I would love to see a free option for 100 or less users - forever.

Good to know, we are adding this (better explanation) right now on the pricing page. Also planning on a starter tier for your exact situation. If you want to be notified just fill out the pop-up widget on our site and I'll make sure to let you know.

Very interesting! Does this work with Expo RN projects?

I've never personally used Expo to create apps, so I'm not 100% sure, but we do have RN SDK support! So I think it should work since Expo is a tool for using RN.

Very cool experience! Kudos for the team on launching!

Thank you, glad to hear you like it. :)

This is gimmicky and intrusive to the users. How is this any different from the other 999 solutions that do the same thing?

I think you're right in pointing out this shouldn't be done without respect to the users. What we're seeing is that many users who interact with our widgets actually appreciate this - they would recommend the app they're using and tell us they recommended the app because they felt important and their opinions valued. You're 100% right that some folks might not want to interact with this and we've optimized our UX such that users who don't want to interact with this, don't need to at all. I wrote detailed answers to why we're different in the original post, so I'd be happy to hear your thoughts on what you think on these points! :)

Disclaimer: I’m the Founder/CEO of Sprig (sprig.com) - the industry leader for in-the-moment research.

Congrats on the launch! It’s great to see other companies emerge in this space. Product managers, designers, researchers too often rely on panels with people placed in hypothetical situations. Research is most valuable when conducted with actual customers as they are experiencing your product.

We haven’t seen the problem as you’re describing for smaller startups. It’s actually better to speak with customers directly 1:1 until your product starts to achieve scale.

One suggestion for you is to add video questions. This is a great way for early-stage startups to see and hear from users directly. It’s been so well received by startup founders that video questions are included in Sprig’s Free plan.

Also, the 50-70% response rate is suspect. Sprig has surpassed 2 Billion unique users tracked and millions of survey responses for customers including Dropbox, Loom, and Square. We’ve seen response rates as high as 90%, but on average are seeing a 30% response rate. 1Flow’s survey design is an exact clone of Sprig (see comparison: https://www.loom.com/i/356c650a70b94fffa9a85da83b546595) so differences in design won’t be a factor. Even a 30% response rate is significantly higher than an email survey though which is actually around 2-5%.

Hi Ryan, nice to meet you here. I have lots of respect for what your team is able to accomplish in terms of being able to fundraise at crazy speed and valuation, and building a user research product that gets a few large companies to try.

I've actually talked to a lot of startup founders, product leaders, and even current customers of Sprig, and learned that most didn't want to put video chats inside of their app because of how disruptive it is to the user experience. Zoom, UserTesting.com, etc. have a lot better ways of doing this and they've been doing it for years successfully. We think you're really serving big brands user research teams well because they really need video customer chats and because of our different approach to who we serve and our design philosophy, we don't yet see it a priority to add video.

We did months of customer research before building 1Flow - if your users are truly happy, we wouldn't exist.

With regards to the UI "clone" issue, I couldn't agree. There are already many tools such as Pendo, Appcues, Survicate, etc. that are using this approach, but as I had explained in my post, it is really about providing an experience both software makers and their users will love - at least that is the goal of 1Flow. Thank you for brining this to our attention, with regard to UI, I think we definitely can do a better job! :)

Our response rates are based on true data we see. We are a smaller startup trying to serve other startups of the world, and we are not serving enterprise customers at our stage. So I couldn't join you in making this a number competition, and also not interested in. All I can say is your 90% seems one-off, but I understand how things work and wouldn't want to take you up on this.

Finally I want to say that we are both trying to innovate in a space traditionally dominated by players like Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey, Medallia, InMoment, and 999 other survey tools. So I'd LOVE to stay connected with you and support each other however we can.

Kai

P.S. As founders we are all bit scared about competition, I understand. At 1Flow, we've tried our best to focus on actually delivering value to our users.

- AirBnB wasn't the first home sharing site

- Stripe wasn't the first payment platform

- Facebook wasn't the first social network

What really matters at the end of the day is finding product market fit and execute well.. This is just my 2 cents.

Great response. Looks like you guys are targeting two totally different groups. Sprig only has linked responses, which are the same as google forms, unless I "Contact Sales" which I am not going to do as a small startup.

If you're looking for a solution that takes data privacy and security seriously you should look into Sprig (sprig.com). We work with many customers in the FinTech space, such as Square, who have extremely high data privacy standards.

Disclaimer: I'm the Founder/CEO. Just send me a note (see my profile) and I'm happy to get you setup or you can create a free account on our website.

You already posted a marketing blurb for your competing startup in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30377349. Continuing to do that is excessive and distasteful, so please don't.

Because this is a YC startup's launch thread, I would normally hesitate to post like this (we moderate less when a YC startup is involved: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...), but I would say (and have said) the same thing in non-YC launch threads, and something about this case feels worse than usual.

Launch threads are a bit different from regular threads in this respect. It's of course fine for users to sincerely ask how the launching thing is different from existing things; it's borderline for a competitor to post a link to their thing, depending on how they do it; but to try to divert discussion to one's own thing is just bad manners.

I've detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30375868 and marked it off topic.