How We Grew into a Fully Featured Customer Feedback Tool

It’s hard to believe we’re already on post number five in our startup journey series! In our previous post, The Mistakes We Made Falling Into the Featuritis Trap, we reflected on the challenges of overloading a product with features. This time, we’re taking a more positive look at the same topic: how expanding our feature set, guided by user feedback, allowed us to grow from a simple bug reporting tool into a fully featured customer feedback platform.

The Bug Reporting Days

In the early days, Gleap was designed to do one thing exceptionally well: bug reporting. Our tool enabled users to ship complete bug reports with all the logs and visual data developers needed to resolve issues twice as fast. It was simple but powerful. Developers loved it because it saved them time. Our users loved it because it meant their voices were heard and their frustrations addressed quickly.

But then users started to ask for additional features. That’s how Bugbattle turned into Gleap. 

The First Step Beyond Bugs: Live Chat

The first major expansion was our live chat feature. We saw that while bug reporting was essential, users wanted a way to engage directly with their customers. This feature became an instant hit and laid the foundation for what we now call Kai — our AI chatbot. It was the first glimpse of what Gleap could become: a central hub for customer communication.

Building a Complete Toolkit, One Feature at a Time

Our users continued to guide us. With each new piece of feedback, we identified gaps we could fill. Here’s how our journey unfolded:

1. Roadmaps: Our users wanted a way to share their vision with customers. This also benefitted ourselves because we could really build what our users needed. We built roadmaps so businesses could show what was coming next and gather votes on what mattered most.
2. Surveys: Feedback was no longer limited to bugs. Users wanted to ask targeted questions, so we introduced surveys to gather structured insights.
3. Knowledge Base: Customers were asking the same questions repeatedly. To empower self-service, we built a knowledge base feature.
4. Product Tours & Checklists: Onboarding is critical, and users wanted to guide their customers through their products and help them stay on track. We introduced product tours and checklists as simple yet effective tools to achieve this.
5. Marketing Automation: Businesses wanted to engage customers at the right moments. Our marketing automation tools made it possible to send targeted messages and drive action.

Btw, here’s a glimpse at our internal, overloaded roadmap and at features we are currently building. As you can see, we won’t get bored any time soon. 

AI Integration: Moving Fast with Kai

When AI and large language models became a thing, we were among the first in our space to integrate it into our platform. This led to the creation of Kai, our AI sidekick. Moving fast is important, and being an early adopter allowed us to stay ahead of the curve, providing our users with cutting-edge tools that enhanced their ability to manage customer feedback. Being early adopters now means that we are way ahead with our models, offering capabilities that others are just beginning to explore.

Becoming a Multi-Channel Platform

The final piece of the puzzle was uniting all these features into a cohesive platform. This way, we became a full customer feedback platform, addressing every stage of the customer journey. From there, we went even further and added multi-channel capabilities, ensuring businesses could collect, manage, and act on feedback across every channel where they interact with their customers.

Today, Gleap is more than just a tool—it’s a complete ecosystem for collecting, managing, and acting on customer feedback, across every channel where businesses and customers interact.

The Power of Listening

What guided us through this transformation? Listening to our users. Every feature we built was a response to real feedback. By staying close to our community, we could anticipate needs and deliver solutions that genuinely added value.

Looking back, it’s incredible to see how far we’ve come. To be honest, we are kinda proud. From bug reporting to roadmaps, surveys, and beyond, every step of our journey has been about one thing: helping businesses understand and serve their customers better.

And we’re not stopping here. As always, we’re listening to our users and dreaming of what’s next. Because at Gleap, we believe that the best tools are built not by guessing what people need, but by hearing their voices and acting on them.