Survey Loop
After the acquisition of Denim Social by Capacity in late 2023, I started thinking about what to build next. Not long after, together with Brandon Spriggs, I co-founded Survey Loop — a customer-feedback product designed to feel less like a survey tool and more like a modern product surface.
I led design and engineering. Brandon led the product and commercial side. The plan was to bootstrap.
The hypothesis
Most of the incumbents in the customer-feedback space are dinosaurs. The UI is heavy, the data model is rigid, and the integration story is bolted on. Customers in 2024 expect their tools to behave more like Stripe than like SurveyMonkey.
If we started from a small, sharp foundation — a real design system, modern tooling, a proper headless API — we'd be able to outpace the incumbents on velocity even with a small team.
Three early bets shaped everything that followed:
- Design system first. Every component built once, themed once, reused everywhere. New screens cost hours, not days. The product looks the same in 2026 as it did at MVP, only better resolved.
- Headless API at the core. The web app is one consumer of the API, not the API itself. The same endpoints would later power integrations, embeds, and AI agents — without retrofit.
- Modern stack, no legacy weight. A boring, recent choice for every layer.
The bootstrapping reality
Bootstrapping is harder than people make it sound. The first stretch was moonlighting around contract work. A lot of people wanted to help — advisors, would-be partners, friend-of-a-friend introductions — and most of those conversations didn't pan out. The signal-to-noise ratio of early company building is low.
What worked was just shipping. We landed several large fintech players in our beta, and launched the MVP not long after starting.
Two rewrites
The MVP was built in Vue. It got us to first customers fast.
A few months in, we did a full ground-up rewrite in React. Not because Vue was wrong — it shipped — but because the ecosystem we wanted to lean into for AI tooling, and the depth of libraries we needed, all sat on the React side. We took the lessons from the Vue MVP, threw the code away, and rebuilt in weeks.
Better the rewrite now than after another year of features piled on top.
The AI inflection
Because the API was headless from day one, every piece of the product was already addressable as a structured surface. When the AI tooling around us matured, we didn't need to invent a new layer to make the product agent-friendly — agents could just talk to the same API a customer would.
Today most of the engineering velocity comes from AI-assisted workflows. The agentic capabilities we expose to customers — MCP support, structured analysis, agentic actions — shipped in weeks because there was nothing to refactor on the way there.
Where we're going
Internally we describe Survey Loop as "the Cursor of customer feedback."
The bet: an agentic-first experience, sitting on a foundation that is also pleasant to use directly. The two have to coexist. An agent that can collect, route, and analyze feedback at scale is only useful if a human can also walk in cold and run a survey in five minutes. We're building both halves.
Most of the interesting work is still ahead. But the boring early decisions — design system, headless API, modern tooling — are why we get to make the fun decisions now.