How do you dogfood your own product?

At my current startup, I make an effort to dogfood every single product, feature, or release. Let me explain👇

Crafting a world-class product means understanding:

1. The problem you’re solving

2. The solution you’re providing

That means becoming a true power user of your own product: using it day in and day out so you understand it and your customer. In the startup world, this is known as ‘dogfooding,’ or “eating your own dog food.”

The phrase’s origin is pretty murky, but it probably goes back to those dog food commercials—you know, the ones where they say, “I feed [brand] to my own dogs.”

Hence, we use dogfood Supademo everywhere at Supademo, like in onboarding, prospecting/follow ups, answering support tickets, help docs, product updates, or anywhere we need to show our product in action.

Couple of powerful advantages to this:

1. You catch a lot of minor quirks about your product before it goes to market. You catch all the little things that, when compounded over many sessions, would turn off a lot of users. Little details can make your startup sink or swim, and early users have a keen eye for this. So like any good hound, we dogfood to keep our nose to the ground.

2. You’re no longer just a producer, you’re a user. When you actually dogfood, you have to live with the ramifications of a malfunctioning feature, or a clunky UX. That puts you in the customer’s head — not just thinking about it in abstract. If a customer reports a bug in a support ticket, you’ll likely understand the feature they’re referring to. And empathize way better with their frustrations, too.

How do you build the ethos of using your product religiously? Curious to know how else other people are dogfooding.