The old tool kept forcing an embarrassing question back to the client: what did you mean by this?

The work

Kevin founded Farewell in 2016 while still holding a full time job, went all in on it in 2020, and the agency marks ten years this year. Five people building brand and web design for mission driven organisations: conservation groups, nonprofits, education foundations, sports bodies.

Their support product shapes how feedback has to work. Website support at Farewell is unlimited updates with a 48 hour turnaround guarantee , most requests done inside one business day. A guarantee like that reframes the whole feedback question. The clock starts when the client manages to tell you what they want, so the reporting channel is not an administrative detail. It is the part of the product that decides whether the promise is keepable.

The problem

The stack was BugHerd, Google Drive, and, in Kevin's own description, PDFs marked up in Microsoft Paint.

The failure that stung was not any of those being clunky. It was clients leaving comments in BugHerd and then nobody being able to find or reference what the comment was actually attached to. Which meant going back to a paying client and asking them to explain their own feedback again.

The problem

There was a second, quieter tax. On-site feedback tools work by putting a JavaScript snippet on the website, which means somebody has to remember to take it off again before launch. Forgetting to add it slows a review down. Forgetting to remove it means a client's live site goes out with your feedback widget still bolted to it.

Kevin had been looking for an alternative for years, and had tried at least ten of them across a decade in business.

What changed

Setup, in his words, was super smooth and barely an inconvenience. What made it stick:

What changed

Design review still happens in Figma. BugSmash picks up from build onwards: development notes, QA, launch, and the years of support that follow.

The moment it paid for itself

A client left hundreds of comments on a single project. A year earlier that would have been weeks of Kevin's life: reading each one, working out what it referred to, turning it into a task.

Instead he used the API to process the lot. What the tool removed was not the reading, it was the transcription step between a client noticing something and a developer having it queued.

The result

Kevin measures the change in weeks of back and forth clarifying notes rather than hours in a week, which is the right unit for the problem he had. The clarification round is simply gone.

Around twenty people touch BugSmash in a typical month across his team and his clients. The agency reads as more organised and more professional from the outside, and the failure that used to cost him credibility with clients does not happen any more.

Not every client has moved across. Some still prefer to email a PDF, and Kevin's read on why is worth repeating because it is not a criticism of the tool: the friction is unfamiliarity, not capability.

Who he would tell

Any creative team, and well beyond websites. He names video agencies, SEO agencies and content agencies as the obvious next fits, on the grounds that the problem is not specific to the thing being reviewed.

It suits agencies running delivery and ongoing support at once, where feedback is not a phase that closes at launch but a channel that stays open for years. And especially where the reviewers are not web people. Farewell's clients run rivers, schools and amphitheatres. The tool that collects their feedback has to be obvious on first use, because there will not be a second attempt at explaining it.