How to collect feature requests: 6 options for small SaaS teams

1. Email and your support inbox

Where most requests start. It’s personal and you can ask follow-up questions, but requests are scattered across threads, you can’t see how many people want the same thing, and nobody else can see what’s already been asked.

Good for: very early products. Tip: tag or label feature requests so you can find them later.

2. Discord, Slack communities and forums

Great for conversation and for building a community around your product. The problem is that good ideas scroll away within days, the same requests come up again and again, and there’s no easy way to see which ones are popular.

Good for: discussion. Tip: pin a link to a feedback board so requests end up somewhere they can be counted.

3. Customer interviews and calls

The richest source of insight: you hear the problem behind the request, not just the request. But they take time, cover few people, and the notes rarely end up anywhere the whole team can see.

Good for: understanding why. Tip: after a call, add any requests to the same place as everything else.

4. Surveys and forms

Useful for specific questions (“which of these three should we build?”) and for reaching people who never email you. Less useful for open-ended ideas, because responses arrive as a spreadsheet nobody gets around to reading, and respondents never see what happened.

Good for: one-off decisions.

5. A spreadsheet or issue tracker

Many teams copy requests into a spreadsheet, Notion page or GitHub issues. It’s free and flexible, but it’s private, someone has to keep it up to date by hand, and counting duplicates is tedious.

Good for: internal tracking. For open-source projects with technical users, public GitHub issues can work well.

6. A feature voting board

A public board where users suggest ideas and upvote existing ones. Duplicates turn into votes instead of new emails, popular ideas rise to the top on their own, and users can see what’s already been asked and what’s planned.

The trade-off is one more tool to set up, and a board only works if people can find it. Put a link or widget inside your product, not just on your marketing site.

Good for: counting demand, cutting repeated questions, and showing progress.

Combining them

You don’t have to pick one. A setup that works well for small teams:

• A feedback board as the single place requests are counted, linked from inside the product.
• Email, chat and calls for conversation, with any requests added to the board (with a vote) so nothing is lost.
• A public roadmap fed by the board, so people see what happened to their idea.
• An occasional survey when you need a specific answer.

UserNote is built for exactly that middle piece: a feedback board and public roadmap you add with one script tag, where users vote without signing up. The free plan covers one board, so you can try the setup above at no cost.