Building a Custom Pulse

Availability: Pro plan (and trial orgs during trial).

On Pro you can clone any of the three core pulses and edit the clone, or build a pulse from scratch with your own questions and branching logic. The core pulses stay untouched — they're the baseline every plan ships with — and your custom pulses sit alongside them in the Pulses page.

This article walks through the three common flows.

The golden rule: clone before you edit

If you want a pulse that's "like the core one but with one extra question", always clone. Don't try to modify the core pulse — the app won't let you anyway, and even if it did, you'd lose the baseline every GAiGE org relies on.

Cloning is a one-click action: on the Pulses page, hit + New custom pulse ▾ → From The AI Pulse (or whichever core pulse you want to start from). You'll land in the Pulse Builder with an editable copy, ready to tweak.

Flow 1 — Clone a core pulse and tweak

Best for: "I want The AI Pulse plus one extra question about error rates" or "I want to soften the language in The AI Review."

1. Pulses page → + New custom pulse ▾ → From {core pulse}
2. You're in the Builder on the clone. The breadcrumb at the top says "Cloned from The AI Pulse" so you know what you're working from.
3. Change the name (it defaults to "The AI Pulse (copy)") to something specific — e.g. "The AI Pulse — Engineering cut".
4. Add, remove, or reword questions. The cadence, subject type and tool assignment came along with the clone — change any if needed.
5. Save draft to keep working on it, or Save and activate to start firing immediately.

Once saved, the pulse sits under Your custom pulses on the Pulses page, tagged "Cloned from The AI Pulse" so you can always trace the lineage.

Flow 2 — Build from scratch

Best for: something none of the core pulses cover — e.g. a one-off feedback sprint for a specific tool's onboarding experience.

1. Pulses page → + New custom pulse ▾ → From blank
2. The Builder opens empty. Start typing your first question at the top.
3. For each question, pick the answer type:
   • Single choice — one-from-a-list
   • Multi-select — any-from-a-list
   • Rating — 1-5 scale
   • Free text — short or long
   • Slider — e.g. 0-100
   • NPS — 0-10 recommend-a-colleague
   • Yes/No — the primary branching question type
4. For each question, optionally set a report category — which dashboard metric this question feeds (satisfaction, time impact, adoption, or none).
5. Pick a cadence — how often this pulse fires per user.
6. Assign to an AI tool (or leave blank if it's not tool-specific).
7. Save.

Flow 3 — Add branching logic

Best for: "only show question 3 if the answer to question 1 was 'yes'" — classic skip-logic survey design.

Every question in the Builder has a Flow (after this question) section at the bottom. That's where branching lives.

On a yes/no question:

• If answer is Yes → [pick the next question]
• If answer is No → [pick the next question]
• Leave either blank to end the survey on that path

On a single-choice question:

• Each option gets its own "if this option → next question" row
• Plus a Default next at the bottom for answers with no explicit route

On any other question type:

• Just a single Next question → picker

The extension honours this branching natively — the end user only ever sees the questions they're routed through, so a pulse can feel short to them (2 questions) while carrying the capacity for many (6 questions with 4 of them conditional).

What core pulses can and can't do

When you open a core pulse in the Builder, you'll see a navy banner:

"This is a core pulse — read-only for structural changes. Clone to customise →"

Allowed: rename, activate/pause. Not allowed: change questions, cadence, tool assignment.

The "Clone to customise →" button in the banner produces an editable custom copy in one click. That's the supported path for any change beyond a rename.

Editing a custom pulse that already has responses

The Builder shows an amber warning when you open a custom pulse with existing responses:

"Heads up — this pulse has N responses already. Adding, removing, or changing the meaning of questions can make it harder to compare new data with what you've already collected. Consider cloning instead…"

This is a soft guardrail, not a block. If you're making a minor wording tweak, proceed. If you're fundamentally changing what a question measures, clone the pulse, edit the clone, and pause the original — that way historical reports stay internally consistent, and new reports start fresh on the new version.

Pulse lifecycle

• Draft — new pulse, not yet firing. Toggle the Active pill on the Pulses page to flip it live.
• Active — firing per cadence.
• Paused — temporarily not firing. Existing responses still show in reports.
• Deleted — removed from the Pulses page. Existing responses remain in the database but no longer appear in reports. (Core pulses can't be deleted — that's a feature, not a bug: every org is guaranteed the baseline three.)

Response rates on custom pulses

Everything that makes the core pulses work on custom pulses too:

• Keep it short. 1-3 questions beats 10 every time. Response rates degrade fast above 5 questions.
• In-the-moment beats retrospective. The extension fires the pulse right after tool use. Asking "did that save you time?" 3 seconds later gets a much more honest answer than asking weekly.
• Respect skip. The dismiss button is first-class. People who can skip freely are more likely to answer when they choose to.

If your custom pulse response rate drops below 60%, see Why is my response rate low? — almost always either too-long or too-frequent, rarely something more fundamental.

Deleting a custom pulse

On the Pulses page, click Delete on any custom pulse. You'll get a confirmation that mentions the response count — those responses stay in the database but stop appearing in reports. You can't undelete, but you can always create a new pulse with the same questions and cadence.

What's not yet in custom pulses

Transparent about the gaps:

• Templates/marketplace — no public library of "here are pulses others have built for X industry" yet. In the roadmap.
• A/B testing a custom pulse — you can't split your team 50/50 onto two versions to compare wording. You'd need to create two pulses and assign them to different groups manually.

Neither of these is hard to add; neither is a top request yet. Tell us if they would be.

Related: The three core pulses explained · Reading your dashboard · Why is my response rate low?