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37 Comments

Please share! Dogfooding your own product.

heya IH

Do you dogfood your own products, if it makes sense? Literally, do you use it for yourself, and decide to add features/fix things according to your own use?

Please share!

  1. 3

    We don't use Logology for ourselves as we created our branding before the Logo maker app :)

    1. 2

      Looks fantastic, @xavier! I might use it myself for flockin.co when it comes to having a proper logo ;-)

  2. 1

    Yes I do.

    • I'm running a newsletter on Iteretta to send updates about Iteretta itself.
    • I'm using tweet2podcast to host a podcast from my twitter account: see here
  3. 1

    Yes, we do it.
    We at berlocks.com have features that help us in our daily works. We sometimes feel if we do not use the product ourselves, how are our customers going to use it?
    It allows us to understand what features are more helpful or buggy.
    What would you enjoy more? Working on a product? or Giving a feedback?

    1. 1

      @reubenraj Great stuff.

      What would you enjoy more? Working on our product? or Giving a feedback?

      Is that a question for me? If it is, I'm a bit confused :-)

      1. 1

        Sorry for the confusion, I guess I phrased it wrong. What I mean to say is that it depends on the one who owns the idea. Sometimes a feedback loop from the customer helps better development of features.

  4. 1

    Yes, frequently.
    Actually it's a side project that i made because of my passion for mobile phones.

  5. 1

    I dogfood all of the time! It's a great way to do quality checks and to find areas for improvements and delight. Plus, I personally don't like trying to sell something I wouldn't enjoy using myself.

    Interestingly, with my product Cleaver, we use it to deploy itself. 😱 Just don't ask what came first... 🐓🥚

    1. 1

      What came first? XD

  6. 1

    I do not, though the product I am working on started because I wanted to help out a family member, does this count? I also get feedbacks.

    1. 1

      Everything counts.

      Dogfooding allows yourself to see and experience the products you're building. Clearly, in some cases it wouldn't work - if your business is giving lectures on a subject, you're not really in to give the lecture to yourself. But for many SaaS products that would be a great fit ;-)

      Thanks for sharing though!

  7. 1

    Yes! I'm a few days away from launching (on IH first of course), but I'm building out an analytics platform for equity investing, and have been using it extensively the last couple of months for my personal investment account.

    1. 1

      Great stuff! Good Luck!

  8. 1

    I have a few stories on https://24hourhomepage.com that reference itself.

  9. 1

    Yes, I've built Site2Static to host the landing page for free

    1. 1

      This looks great. How do you manage the economics of hosting something for free? Is it a long game to find business later?

      1. 1
        1. That's my first product, I don't expect it to become a success, my goal is to just launch it, no matter if I can get a paid customer or not. I'll enjoy the learning process.
        2. That's my part of "framework" for a founder like me, who live in a developing country, my savings also very limited, I don't have a budget for most of the toolings out there. So I decided to create it by myself.
        3. My server cost is extremely low (almost free).
        4. I believe in reciprocity, the more you give the more you earn.
        5. Free plan first, introduce a paid plan later.

        Hope that helps ;)

        1. 2

          yea, that's exactly what I'm doing, regardless of the country I live in.

          Good job mate, keep it up!

  10. 1

    I've built Yomi.ai for Japanese language learners like myself; yes!

    If I wouldn't be using my own product, I wouldn't have found a bug just yesterday that's been around for > 3 weeks.

    1. 1

      This is a great point! Thanks!

  11. 1

    I do! I've been using SongRender to promote my band babygotbacktalk's music. Then I went a level deeper and created LetterWand to build the emails for SongRender.

    1. 1

      LetterWand looks great! I might try it out later for flockin.co

      1. 1

        Awesome! Thank you :)

  12. 1

    Absolutely! Sadly I have spent more time developing Skyhop than I will ever recoup using my own product myself, but deployed at scale that seems to work out just fine.

    1. 1

      Scratching your itch is a great motivator! Thanks for sharing that one, I'm not a pilot myself, but I understand how this can work for trucks, cars and other deliveries.

      Good luck!

  13. 1

    Yes I use https://www.npmjs.com/package/jira-cmd and https://www.npmjs.com/package/cmd-bitbucket almost daily.

    They are basically command line for handling jira issues and bitbucket pull requests

  14. 1

    Yup! I use Letterbase on my own website and app for support requests, questions, and feedback.

    1. 1

      Letterbase looks great, @richardchu! Thinking whether I can use it now.

      1. 1

        Thanks! Feel free to give it a try and let me know if you have any feedback or need any help :)

  15. 1

    Yes, I use Portabella to plan and develop Portabella.

    1. 1

      Fantastic! Exactly the answer I was looking for!

  16. 1

    I'm hoping to use it once more people join in

    https://getadvice.github.io/

  17. 1

    Yep we dogfood http://versoly.com/ a website builder, we have built multiple sites in it.

    I have a roadmap in my head. But sometimes customers have really good ideas that I will built into the platform.

    Recent ideas were adding noindex so google don't index page, tracking what page forms come from.

    I love it because any feature I add will help all our customers.

  18. 1

    This comment was deleted a year ago.

    1. 1

      great stuff! Solving the tabs problem is huge.

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