How Canny got its users

Host the shared output on a subdomain you own, not the customer's domain. Canny gives every account a portal at company.canny.io and sells custom domains only on the top Business plan, so the boards, the posts and the search results all sit on canny.io. Take the one output your customer will send to other people and serve it from your domain by default.

done whenOpen your product's main shared output and read the URL bar. If the domain belongs to your customer, you have no channel here yet.

Give every item its own URL instead of one dump page. On Canny each request lives at an address like company.canny.io/feature-requests/p/kanban-trello-style-board, titled in the customer's own words, with the vote count and the status label on it. That single page is what a stranger lands on from a search result or a support reply, and the customer wrote it for you.

done whenCount the distinct public URLs one customer account can create in a month of normal use. If the answer is one, split the output into per-item pages.

Let anyone read the page with no account, and put the wall on the action instead. A Canny board is fully visible to anyone with the link, but voting, commenting and posting all require the visitor to be identified first. The recipient reads the whole thing, sees who else voted, and only meets a sign-in prompt at the moment they want to take part.

done whenOpen your share link in a private window with no session. If a login form appears before any content, the page cannot work as a channel.

Stamp the footer of every public page and make the mark a tracked link to a page built for that exact visitor. Canny's footer reads "Powered by Canny" and points to canny.io/powered-by-canny with parameters naming the account that sent them (utm_source=feedback_subdomain, utm_medium=powered, utm_campaign=<company>). The visitor lands on a page with its own sign-up CTA, not on a generic homepage.

done whenClick your own badge from a live customer page. If it lands on your homepage, or carries no parameter naming the source account, fix that before anything else.

Sell removal of the badge at the top of your price list, not the bottom. Canny keeps "remove Powered by Canny branding" and custom domains on the Business plan only, so free accounts and $79/month Pro accounts both keep shipping pages with the name on them. The accounts with the most visitors stay the ones carrying your mark the longest.

done whenList your plans and mark which ones still ship your mark. If your cheapest paid tier already strips it, you sold the channel for your smallest check.