It’s frustrating to share ideas and to get nothing in return. If your customers participate in the roadmap and don’t know if they are heard, they will go elsewhere.

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Follow-up with the customers that have helped you forge the path of your product. They are your allies and need to be complimented.

Show some empathy and send them a personal email when you release a feature they have interacted within the roadmap.

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Another possibility is to give them beta access to those features and try to get feedback from them.

At StatusPage.io, they track customer feature requests in a Google spreadsheet. When a user makes a request, they log it in the spreadsheet and get on the phone to chat with the customer as appropriate.

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When the feature is built, they reach back out the customer to tell them about the feature. Often, that will be part of a short sales process in which they get the customer to upgrade to a higher tier plan that includes the new feature. They used this method to grow their annual recurring revenue from $0 to $2.49M and it drove upgrades which increased their average revenue per customer by 2.4x.

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