Do you dogfood your product?
https://twitter.com/donaldnzy/status/1578337954623168512
Comment below with an example on what is your product and how you do eat your own dog food. 👇👇👇
Comment below with an example on what is your product and how you do eat your own dog food. 👇👇👇
Good thread! Important points!
The way I've always seen it is: if you won't even use your product, why should others?
That's so right!
I started building Filma for myself to help me editing videos for my Youtube channel on the go, then it became my main solopreneur journey so far!
As it's a video editing app, I do use it to make the marketing videos, my personal videos and of course the Youtube ones. So yeah, I'm the first customer and I'm also constantly QAing it thanks to that.
It is an important question investors like to ask as well.
I'm building an OKR Management tool for Tech Startups, I used the tool to set Goals for the last quarter and I am still using it to plan the next one! It helps me keep myself accountable for growing the business!
Just a thought. I think it is a good idea to have an interactive demo site for your product.
Take me for example, I find OKR management tool very interesting and would like to incorporate it into my startup.
I "sort of" like it but not enough to make me pull the trigger to sign up for a new account just to give it a try which I will probably not use anyway.
And, you can always use Howuku to learn how new users experience your product. :)
All the best, Jean!
Good point, a demo app could definitely improve conversion. Howuku looks pretty cool, nice work!
WunderGraph (https://wundergraph.com) is a dev tool that makes it easy to easily and securely connect one or more APIs to your front end. We're using WG to build the cloud version of WG =).
It's awesome to eat your own godfood. We've recently had to integrate with GitHub using webhooks, so we've added a webhook feature to WunderGraph that handles and validates GitHub webhooks automatically. Sometimes, eating your own dogfood means you have to slow down, but at the same time, it helps you to improve your own product and make sure the developer experience is as good as we'd expect it from a tool ourselves.
Can't imagine NOT doing this.
I use my product senja.io for all the social proof on my website. I also use it to collect feedback from my customers.
I've found that by using my product every day, I constantly find ways that I can improve it.
That's the unfair advantage of dogfooding! You get to use it, QA it, and get first-hand feedback!
Perhaps not directly dog feeding my own product, but I developed my product based on frustrations experienced at my former work place, sold it to them and now I have them as my first customers. Invaluable.
My product - https://git18n.com - is a translation management tool that enables translators and developers to work together hassle-free. When building an app or software, developers simply request a translation when their pull request is ready and translators then push translatinos directly to the pull request. No config and super simple setup.
Super cool, translation is all done within git!
absolutely!
I built 6000 thoughts ( https://apple.co/3Mi1ra0 )to solve my own struggles and use it just like an actual user because the value is direct and tangible.
The one challenge though is: it is hard to switch on/off between builder mode and user mode.
An analogy is : if you try learning to play your favourite song, you get sick of it as you would have heard it so many times in order to learn it.
Can't agree more. Great analogy! There are so many times when I try to learn a song on an instrument and ended up hating it haha.
I've advantage of building dmbird.app application because I can use my own tool to target my potential users. It's a huge marketing advantage and I have some good results and going forward I'm not planning on any other marketing channel other than using my own tool and then the SEO of course.
That is super awesome. We can probably also give dmbird a try!
Absolutely! Our product, Double, ( https://doubleapp.xyz ) helps us do any kind of activity, not just work and fix bugs. For example, we schedule time to practice our instruments (me on violin, my cofounder on cello), go running, cook, etc. It’s a great way to become motivated to do whatever it is we need/want to do.
It’s still in it’s early stages - we just launched the beta last week - but even in it’s simple form, we find it extremely helpful!
Sort of like a work buddy program to keep you accountable for your task?
Just some feedback, I think the value proposition in your headline could be a little clearer.
This is my thoughts when looking at your homepage
You know that thing you've been meaning to do? “Yeah, I have procrastination problems and what about it.”
Let's do it together. “What do you mean do it together?”
Connect with others in real-time to do everyday tasks together. “Does that solve my procrastination problem? Like get a work buddy to check in on me?”
Then the CTA could be more actionable perhaps something like “Get a work buddy to spot you” because join a double now don’t mean anything to me.
First of all, thanks for the detailed feedback! It's very valuable to us. Copy is still very much in flux and we will definitely be incorporating your feedback.
To answer your initial question: yes, Double provides motivation to do activities through peer accountability. One thing I'd caveat is that work is only one kind of activity you can do on Double and, in fact, a lot of the users actually do non-work activities, like reading, painting, etc. However, the core idea is still the same.
It'd be great to get your thoughts again once we push new changes!
Thanks Donald.
Definitely, shoot me a dm on twitter when it is up! :)
My product adds video/audio recording capability to standard Html form <textarea>.
We are "dogfooding" it in the the job application page, asking applicants to record short video audio intro of themselves.
https://ecardify.io/careers
Btw, no coding is needed to add this to your website, just copy paste few lines of css and js imports.
I love it! I can already imagine how much time it can save me as a developer!
Thanks Donald!
If you try it out and send me feedback, I'll upgrade your subscription to Enhanced, for free forever.
Sure, will find a time to test it out! :)
I've been working on a journaling app, and I created a public journal to document the development of it. I also have many other journals for things like fitness or just my personal notes and thoughts. I've also used my own app on a recent backpacking trip to Yosemite. It was a good test of its ability to do offline / online syncing.
My landing page is really outdated and crappy, but you can see the journal here: https://theseasonsapp.com/blog
And here's a link to Seasons Journaling for iOS :)
https://apple.co/3CGlmMj
Pretty neat! I am not a journaling person, but do you have any users using it and how do you get product feedback?
I do! Retention isn't great, but still trying to find the best segment of users to target. I've mostly gotten feedback from cold outreach on reddit as well as just interacting with existing users.
Yes - I really suck at design so I use my product SnipCSS to build a page based on other people's designs.
While dogfooding today I realized the scoping of CSS in the Pro version wasn't good enough, so rewrote a lot of code for that today. I'm going to add more sections to my landing page using the improved version.
That is the best when you are eating your own dog food while constantly adding more flavor to it! 😋
Very cool product. I'll take a look. I feel like I need it. Haven't done a great job of tracking my landing page performance.
To answer your question, I definitely dog food my product. You can check it out at https://centsible.app/. I'm one of those "do everything on my phone" kinda person. That includes managing my finances. So I built Centsible. Love using it everyday. Very easy to spot all the pain points users might face and helps me improve the product.
Yo I’ve also had a pet project building a budgeting app long time ago. Do you run ads in it?
Yet another budgeting app haha. No ads. No tracking. Your data is your data. Manual tracking. You pay monthly or yearly.
Eventually I'll get to adding automatic transaction importing.
Perhaps some AI image recognition for receipt would be very rad. 🔥
I've always loved this idea, and until my recent product haven't had the pleasure!
I'm currently building https://responserocket.app which allows content creators to easily embed emoji widgets on to their pages and collect feedback from their audience. I'm dogfooding by adding this to my own posts at https://janestreetdigital.com/blog and event to my marketing site
Very cool, Jane. How far are you from launching?
Nothing is stopping anyone from signing up right now lol. I'm thinking about trying to find some folks that might be interested in joining a beta/validation group. Let me know if you are interested :)
Every Wednesday I take all the devs through our product. We simply go through the app as if we were a customer. And every Wednesday we find at least 1 embarrasing thing that no one internally saw before.
I am sure customers finds such things on a daily basis but never report it.
We have built a hybrid platform for better employee engagement, recognition, collaboration, and efficiency (https://www.workhub.ai/). Also, we are using it in our organization, which has helped us save a considerable amount of $ that we used to pay for similar tools. We also learn about the bugs or glitches and how we can improve them.
ERA (https://era.sh) is a markdown note-taking tool for developers. We focus on privacy and simplicity.
While developing ERA, we take every note and do all documentation in ERA. It feels super good to use your own tool and we see first hand where there is a need for adjustment and change. Mostly we compare our own feelings/needs with the user feedback and the opinions mostly cover each other.
Great way for good progress.
I didn’t do this for quite some time but have learned a lot since I started.
Im running https://edit.photo and https://edit.video both powered by my image editor SDK Pintura.
Using your own product is a great way to learn about integration problems. 😅
My customers are businesses and I talk to devs inside those businesses but rarely get to meet an end user. Running two free public facing websites gives me a direct line to end users which has proven to be super valuable.
Using your own product is the best way to find bugs and inspiration 🙂
We recently launched custom domains for limey.io and you can now visit my page by going to edanbenatar.com
I like how you included your value proposition in the demo description! Very cool and easy to understand what you do!
Yep, I’m starting to use it as of next week when I go live with it. I’ve built a headless learning management system to create and manage courses and I’ve made a few courses of mine that I’ll publish with it 😃
That is pretty awesome, all the best with your new project! 🔥
Thank you 🙏
Definitely need it. And I think each founder should dogfood their product as early as possible. Because you will force yourself to think about the value proposition of your product.
Like we're building a bio site builder called Curator Bio for creators to make an impression very easily. And from day one, I've updated each social media's bio to Curator Bio 🔥
https://www.curator.bio/charles
Agree, but sometimes you can also get tunnel visioned by how you view your own product and not from your actual users to market.
Cool product btw, do your users are mainly based in Taiwan?
Indeed, and sometimes it depends on your intuition and insights because users sometimes don't really know what they want lol
And thanks for asking donaldng, we have some early adopters in Taiwan but we focus on users in English for now. Feel free to reach out to us if any questions or feedback. And also welcome to introduce yourself on our discord 🤩
https://discord.gg/w4ACb3pygQ
Being your first customer is an unfair advantage.
I built a developer tool to ship static websites from your browser and I built it's landing with it.
https://www.makery.app
Unfair advantage indeed. Using a tool you love forever free, QA-ing, improving, and constantly getting real-time feedback from yourself. Which is the very same reason why I built Howuku.
Awesome product, shipping directly from a browser 🤯
For sure! We use our product, subsocket.io, to create and manage our own PayPal subscription payments. We like the feeling of our customers using the product and when they upgrade their SubSocket plan they see that we use our own service for it. It might give an additional sense of trust.
Brilliant, upgrade to Subsocket to see Subsocket play out in action ha!
We use our own product https://hire.win for our hiring process and for sharing a job opening or careers page to social media. Our HR team gives us quite a few improvement ideas which our customers also get benefited from.
Never had to worry about paying for another job portal, that's super awesome!
Thanks!
Ant Commander Pro which I'm working on is my daily file manager. It definitively helps to find many new ideas and improvements for the product.
I use my own product to build a collection of advertisement hooks that I reference in at my daily job.
Here's some absolute gems I found from Tiktok(for user-generated-content)
https://swipekit.app/boards/hookz-e7e6a14e-board
We use Squeaky to analyse visitor behaviour and trends, and capture feedback etc on Squeaky. We constantly use our own product to improve our offering because it's literally designed to help people improve their sites or web apps, it would be weird and hypocritical not to!
I love the no-signup product, an online markdown editor open anywhere on any device, with just one URL, I can share with other people and edit together, without signup.
https://doc.op52.com
I use it on a side project‘s to-do list, with my partner, we always message in IM, and no other tools are needed.
I use https://stormkit.io to host and manage Stormkit :) Also, as a growth strategy, me and my co-founder decided to create mini products and host them on our tool. The idea is:
It’s already proving effective.
I see what you did there. ;) Super cool, so you're like a competitor to Heroku?
Thank you :) More like to Vercel and Netlify, but Heroku is in the field. It's a super crowded field which requires too much trust from the end user for user acquisition. So it's a tough field I'd say. I'm still trying to explore ways to overcome these struggles.