Reading the room without asking everyone to download an app
Three weeks into January, a university lecturer sent us a message: 'I finally know what my students actually think.' She'd just run her second lecture with Feedr. Sixty students, a QR code projected on screen, genuine questions surfacing in real time. No awkward silence when she asked, 'Any questions?' Just immediate, honest feedback flowing straight to her phone.
The problem we didn't know we had
When we started building Feedr, we weren't thinking about lecturers. We were thinking about conference speakers and event hosts. But the more we talked to people running sessions with audiences, the clearer a pattern became: everyone had the same frustration. Getting real feedback from a room full of people is genuinely hard. You ask a question. You get silence. Or one hand goes up, and you convince yourself that's representative.
A lecturer at a London university reached out during beta testing. She explained that her lectures had 200 students, but she had no idea what most of them were thinking. She'd set up a Slack channel once. Two people used it. She'd tried anonymous Google Forms. Students filled them out after, not during. By then, the moment had passed.
That's when it clicked. Lecturers aren't running conferences. They're managing something much harder: a large group of people who are all in the same physical space, all paying attention to one thing, but who have no way to speak up without drawing attention to themselves.
Why a QR code, not an app
We could have built an app. Made it slick. Added a login. Sent push notifications. Everyone does that. But we watched lecturers' actual behaviour during testing, and something stood out: friction kills adoption.
One lecturer agreed to try Feedr with her intro class. Eighty students. She sent them an email the day before with instructions to download the app and create an account. On the day, maybe thirty had actually done it. The second time, she just projected the QR code on the board. No email. No instructions beyond 'Scan this.' Seventy students engaged in the first minute.
That QR code is the whole thing. No account. No app. Their phone browser opens, they see the comment stream, they post. It's the friction of an actual in-person moment, not the friction of trying to get technology out of the way. A student sitting at the back of a lecture hall doesn't want to think about an app or a password. They want to comment. That's all.
What lecturers actually do with live comments
After six months, we started seeing patterns in how lecturers were using Feedr beyond what we'd imagined. One lecturer told us she'd noticed that three identical questions came up across two weeks of sessions. She redesigned a whole section of her module around that. Another used the comment stream to flag that half the class was lost on a particular concept, so she stopped, slowed down, and redid it in a different way. That wouldn't have happened without live feedback.
The upvoting feature turned out to be surprisingly powerful. When five students upvote the same question, it's not just louder; it's visible proof that confusion is shared. One lecturer said it gave her permission to spend time on something rather than rushing through. 'I would have felt like I was holding up the class for one person's question,' she told us. 'But when you see twenty upvotes, you know it matters.'
A few lecturers started pinning particularly good student questions or comments to keep them visible throughout the session. One told us it changed the tone of their lectures. Instead of it being her talking into the void, it felt like a conversation with visible participants.
The moment we realised we'd got something right
We released the Creator tier (unlimited sessions, moderation tools, emoji reactions) in October, mostly because we thought event hosts would want it. But it was the lecturers who drove adoption. They wanted comment moderation, not because they feared chaos, but because they wanted to filter out spam or off-topic posts before the full room saw them. They wanted emoji reactions because it gave lurking students a way to participate without typing. They wanted to run unlimited sessions without wondering if they'd hit their three per month limit.
What surprised us was that the most requested feature from lecturers wasn't something flashy. It was a simple session report after the lecture ended. They wanted to review the comments later, see which questions came up, read things they missed in the moment. We built that into the free tier because it felt fundamental to what lecturers actually needed.
One department integrated Feedr into their teaching feedback loop. Instead of waiting for end-of-term surveys, they now review live comments session by session and adjust course material in real time. That's not something we designed for. That's something lecturers built by using the tool in their own way.
What we still get wrong
We're not perfect. Some lecturers have asked for live polls or word clouds. We're working on that infrastructure now, but honestly, it took us a while to understand that lecturers wanted different things than conference speakers. A poll in a business conference has one purpose. A poll in a lecture might serve entirely different pedagogical needs. We're taking time to get it right rather than rush it out.
We've also learned that some lecturers need analytics beyond what we currently offer on the Free tier. They want to track engagement across the year, see which topics generate the most discussion, understand their audience better. That's on Pro now, but we're still figuring out what's actually useful versus what just looks good on a dashboard.
The honest thing is this: we built Feedr as a general tool, and lecturers adapted it. Now we're trying to understand what their actual needs are beneath the feature requests. That's harder work than just adding bells and whistles.
Why this matters beyond lectures
This isn't a post about selling more subscriptions. It's about something we noticed: when you remove friction, people behave differently. They're more honest. They participate in ways they wouldn't if they had to think about technology first.
A lecturer friend of mine runs a postgraduate seminar with twelve students. She told me that before Feedr, the same two students dominated every discussion. Now, with live comments, she gets contributions from people who never speak up. Not because they're afraid of speaking; they just prefer thinking, typing, reading other people's thoughts, then responding. That's a different kind of conversation, and it's one that synchronous verbal discussion doesn't always allow.
Event hosts have told us similar things. A podcast host uses Feedr to let listeners comment in real time. A church preacher uses it during sermons. A conference panel uses it for the Q&A. The tool doesn't change what those are fundamentally about, but it changes who gets to participate and how.
The question we're still learning to answer is this: when you make participation frictionless, what are you actually finding out about the people in your room? And what would you change if you knew?