If you’ve got 10 users on your website, you’ve got 10 brains that are spending time on your work. Every brain has a timeline of existence. Every brain has its own thoughts.

How many of these brains take the time to write you, the creator, if something is wrong?

And how many thoughts of “hmm, this is uncomfortable” are put out every second. Even in a 30-second-interaction something like this might come up in someone’s head. Multiply that by 10, if you’ve got 10 users on your website today.

Then imagine how it might be like if you’ve got millions of users.

Sure, there’s an email address somewhere, where you might say “Hey, the padding on this form field is messed up”. However:

1. No one makes this huge amount of effort to inform someone about something so minor, like the padding on box
2. We only reach out if we’re super frustrated and we want a solution right now
3. Even so, it might not reach the right person

The solution? A Chrome extension that allows people to leave suggestions.

How? The same way Dropbox or Google Drive have that feature where you can highlight a certain area of the page and add a comment.

This way, both big problems that are a real pain in the butt can be reported, but also the extra comma or extra space that was added somewhere by accident can be highlighted.

In other words, it works for both text issues and technical issues.

The challenge? Not a lot of people will take the time to report some problems. But at least those who have a natural tendency to report stuff will have a channel of communication.

Why would someone do this? I personally feel like doing this in those cases where:

1. I’ve got enormous amounts of value from that specific product/website
2. An important mission is undertaken by those people. And I feel like supporting the mission by helping them optimize even a small thing such as an extra space in a paragraph

Ideally, you’d be able to see all the other suggestions that were added to a page, so that you can just vote something, if it’s already been proposed — or on some rare occasions enrichen your critical mind by seeing what others have pointed out.

Essentially, this Chrome extension would be a layer that can be created on any website and which would come on top of the screen — just so that you can add comments. Click the button one more time and the “extra layer” disappears.

I don’t find this particular idea very smart — but it needs to be done. Even if it’s used 10 times, we’d be looking at 10 extra cases of “optimisation” on the planet.

As a bonus though, you’d have network effects since:

1. Once you report something on a website, you’ll invite the owners of the website to see them
2. You can even go as far as letting the people behind the website invite each other. I.e. the blogging team will be able to invite the technical team so that they can assign some “reports” or “suggestions” to them
3. The more people use it, the better. More people means more suggestions

I’ll end with this: it would be the most impactful on indie developers. Why? What this Chrome extension does, in a nutshell is this: it opens a channel of communication for feedback. And in the early days, that’s the most important thing for a founder.