Want People to Use Your Product? Use it Yourself First

AKA, “eat your own dog food”.

Dogfooding—which just means that you use your own product—is very popular in software (although it applies to all kinds of products, as I mention below).

Windows NT at Microsoft was actually built on a daily build of… Windows NT: initially text only, then including a graphical user interface, and eventually networking. That sped up development and kept everyone motivated (about 200 developers!).

However, I believe the benefits of dogfooding aren’t unique to software, but apply to any product you’re trying to create.

Benefits of dogfooding

There are many benefits to dogfooding. There are the ones I think are the most important, from experience and talking to other people whom are building products.

It makes you try harder

I believe that dogfooding can actually help you try harder: if you know your friends and family will use it, you’ll actually do your best not do disappoint them (or at least that’s how I see it).

It’s very different when you think about creating something for someone out there, whatever… If your goal is to make the best _______ that you can, because you want to use it, and your family will use it, that’s a totally different thing.

It makes you create a better product

Using your own product allows you to improve (or at least attest) both its quality and usability right from the beginning. It could help you find problems early on, and figure out if a feature is missing/useless and could be removed, or if it could be improved.

If anything, think of the process:

person buys product

person unhappy with feature

person contacts support

if 2,000 people do that, a memo will get to your desk

next release/iteration might contain a fix if deemed important

Versus:

you use the product every day

something makes you unhappy/frustrated

you fix it right away because it pisses you off/don’t want anyone to see it

It’s good publicity

Of course, using your own product shows others that you believe in the project and that you’re doing your best.

I mean, if you won’t even use it, or recommend it to your friends and family, you know you’re not doing a good job, and so will your customers.

A good product is one that you would recommend to your friends and family (I think Steve Jobs said that, like everything else in life).

Conclusion

I’ve been at work at my own product (a sitebuilder) for about a year now. Actually, I’ve been wanting to do it for over 5 years on and off, and it’s pretty amazing thinking that it’s almost ready now.

During the first few months I was working on it, I kept a blog to log my progress. From the day it was barely usable, I started using it to write it

It sucked. It sucked so badly, I had to make it as good as I could just to not be frustrated every day.

People tell me it worked.