I sold 143 licenses and never asked for feedback

My Gravity Forms Send to API add-on has sold 143 licenses over the years. In all that time, I never once asked a customer what they thought of it.

Yesterday I finally did. It took ten minutes, and I got more useful input from that one email than from years of waiting.

Why I never asked

Looking back, I had a few reasons, none of them good:

I figured no news was good news. People renew their license, so it must be fine.
Feedback did come in over the years, but only through support. And support is reactive: bug reports, setup questions, the occasional suggestion attached to a problem. Nobody emails support to tell you things are going well.
Asking felt a bit like spamming people who already paid me.
There was always something more urgent to build.

If you run a small product, this probably sounds familiar.

The email I sent

I was working on the product page and realized it had zero social proof. Not because customers had nothing good to say, but because I never gave them a reason to say it to me.

So I emailed past buyers. Short, plain text, two specific questions:

Hi,

A while ago you bought the Send to API add-on for Gravity Forms, so I wanted to check in.

I'm currently improving the plugin, its documentation and the landing page, and your input would help a lot. Two quick questions:

1) Is there anything you wish the plugin did that it doesn't today or could do better?

2) What did you use the plugin for?

Any answer is much appreciated. Just hit reply to this email!

- Jeffrey

PS. If the plugin has been useful, I'd love to hear that too. A few sentences on why you bought it and what it helped you do would make my day - and with your permission, I'd feature it as a testimonial on the site.

The specific questions matter. "Any feedback?" is easy to ignore. "What did you use the plugin for?" is something everyone can answer in one sentence.

What came back

Within a few hours I had three replies.

One of them was this, from Jesse Bakker of Tatof.nl:

"I use it a lot on my clients' websites, a real lifesaver!"

That quote is now on the product page, with his permission. After years of selling this plugin, it's the first testimonial that has ever been on that page.

The use cases were just as valuable. One customer had connected forms to a popular CRM for sports and fitness clubs in Belgium. No WordPress plugin exists for it, but it has an API. That's exactly the situation this add-on was built for.

And then the feature requests:

Conditional logic: if a merge tag value is X, then do Y
A bigger textarea for editing field values
Keeping the API setup when duplicating a form
Receiving data from an API, not just sending it

My favorite part: the textarea request came up twice, described in completely different ways. One customer asked for it directly. The other mentioned, almost in passing, that he always wrote his values in a code editor and copy/pasted them in, because the field was too small. He didn't frame it as a problem. That's the kind of friction nobody opens a support ticket for, and it had been sitting there for years.

What I'm changing

When a support conversation ends well, I'll ask right then if I can quote them. That's the moment people are most happy to say yes.
I'm considering a short email a few weeks after purchase, asking the same one question.
Every quote goes on the site with a name and permission. Anonymous praise convinces nobody.

The obvious lesson

Your customers are not withholding praise. They're just never prompted.

It took me 143 licenses to learn that 😅 If you sell a product and haven't asked your customers anything lately, send the email. It's ten minutes.