The moment I realized conferences needed a better way to listen

Why the traditional Q&A dies the moment you ask for it

That moment stuck with me. It's not that people don't have things to say at conferences and talks. It's that the format kills conversation before it starts. Raising your hand in front of 200 strangers requires a kind of courage most of us don't have on a Tuesday afternoon. The microphone gets passed. Everyone stares. You've got maybe 30 seconds before the speaker moves on.

What we see instead is a handful of extroverts asking questions they could've Googled, while dozens of thoughtful people sit silent with ideas the speaker would actually want to hear.

The problem isn't the audience. It's the mechanism.

Building something that doesn't ask people to download yet another app

When we started thinking about Feedr, we made one hard constraint: no app, no account, no friction. If your audience has to download something or create a login to comment on your talk, you've already lost half of them.

A QR code on a slide. Browser opens. They type. Done.

Our first beta involved a church preacher in Bristol. He projected the QR code, and within thirty seconds people started commenting. Not questions. Observations. Disagreements. A woman in the third row said something that made him rethink a whole section of his message. He pinned it live so everyone could see it mattered. After the talk, he said that was the first time he'd felt the room actually talking back.

That's when we knew we were onto something. It wasn't about collecting feedback. It was about making the audience feel heard while the talk was still happening.

The moderation question that nearly broke our launch

By week three of building, we hit a wall. A speaker testing early versions asked us a single question: "What stops someone from spamming absolute rubbish into my session?"

Fair point. We'd been so focused on removing friction that we hadn't built in the gates.

We tried two approaches. The first was real-time moderation, which meant hiring people to watch sessions 24/7. That didn't scale. The second was allowing the host to approve comments before they go live, but that killed the whole point. Real-time engagement matters because it's real-time.

We landed on a middle ground: a moderation queue that pops up on your host screen. You see the comment before the audience does. You tap approve or delete in under a second. It's fast enough that it still feels live to your audience. We added emoji reactions too, so people could respond without typing a novel. That was a Creator-tier feature we added because speakers using paid plans needed more control.

The Bristol preacher used it zero times in his second session. He just let the comments flow. But knowing he had that button changed everything about how he felt hosting it.

Three sessions a month isn't a punishment; it's honest

We decided early on that our free tier would cap at 3 sessions per month and 100 audience members. Not because those numbers are magical, but because they're honest.

If you're giving one talk a month, Feedr should be free forever. You don't owe us money for that. You owe us money when you start using it as a core part of how you teach or host or preach. When you run weekly sessions. When your audience grows past 100 people and you need analytics to understand what's working.

We've had exactly two people complain about the cap. Everyone else either stays on free because they don't need more, or they upgrade because they do. There's no resentment. It feels fair.

The Creator plan gives you unlimited sessions and an audience up to 500. The Pro plan is for people running events at scale where you need that analytics dashboard to see which comments got the most upvotes, when people engaged most, how your audience sentiment shifted across the session.

Why we're not building polls and word clouds (yet)

Every week someone asks if we can add live polls or word clouds. It's the obvious next feature. Webinar platforms have them. Audiences expect them.

But here's the thing: Feedr isn't a webinar platform. We're not trying to be. A poll is a cage. It forces the audience to pick from four answers you've already written. A word cloud is a parlour trick. It makes engagement look fun but it doesn't actually deepen conversation.

What we're betting on is that real comments, real upvoting, real pinning creates something more valuable than any of that. When someone in your audience can see that their question got 47 upvotes, and the speaker noticed it enough to answer it live, that's worth more than a poll result.

We've got the backend started on both features. We'll ship them when they fit the core idea, not because they're expected.

The question that matters now

We're at around 50 speakers and event hosts using Feedr regularly. Most of them run talks, conferences, church services, and industry events. The ones who keep coming back have one thing in common: they treat the comments as real feedback, not noise.

One conference organiser told us that using Feedr changed how she curates speaker panels. She now watches the comment streams to see which sessions sparked the most genuine curiosity. Another speaker said he completely rewrote his closing remarks based on what the audience was asking in real-time.

That's the conversation we're trying to enable. Not engagement for vanity metrics, but engagement as actual communication.

If you're running a talk or event in the next few weeks, what would change if your audience could actually be heard without raising their hand?