8
5 Comments

Why you should use the product you’re building every day

You are building a new product? Great. But if you are not using it every day, how would you improve it and find early bugs? Let me introduce to you why it’s important to use your product every day.

For each « why », I will take an example of the « how » with Mindible, which is the product I’m currently building. Feel free to check it out at https://usemindible.com!

🧬 Bugs

Before launching officially your new product/startup, you would need beta-testers to find out bugs. Because you (and I) don’t want to ship a product filled with bugs.
But did you know that by using yourself your product, you will find tons of bugs even before thinking about the official launch?!
It’s especially true if your product is a PaaS or a SaaS.

For example, since I use my product Mindible to write articles, todos and notes, I found more than 10 bugs during the first days and found at least 1 to 3 new bugs every day.

🚀 New features

While using your product, you will get new ideas for cool features that could be really helpful.

On Mindible, I found that even while using tags, it was hard to find a specific note between all the others. The solution I hand up with was to create some sort of « groups » of multiples notes, to store them easily.

💻 UI and UX

When using your product, you will certainly find some strange things you built for the UI and/or UX. Just by using your product, you will be like one of your customers. So don’t be too kind, spot all the misconceptions you can find while using your product, and fix them all.

As an example, I found that the « Create Note » button was really not accessible before. Naturally, as a customer, I knew where it should be placed, but didn’t do so before using it every day.

🎉 Conclusion

I hope I convinced you to start using your product every day with all of these examples. And let me give you the last advice:

If you like using your product and don't feel restricted, your users will too!

Thanks for reading, feel free to comment down below to share your experience and tell me if you're already using this method or no.

  1. 2

    Dogfooding all the way!

    My prototype is so chunky that I can’t fit it in my pocket. Every day it’s annoying me to put it in my bag and take it out again when I set up my laptop to work.

    Dogfooding daily is prodding me to miniaturise, much more frequently than my users occasional and polite complaints 😅

    Nice write up 👍

  2. 2

    Good advice. We use Noora (noorahq.com) to help build Noora ;)

    1. 1

      I didn't know Noora, looks interesting too!

  3. 1

    If you don't understand your own product and feel the pain-points how can you build it for someone else. So totally agree!

  4. 1

    I agree Tom! We've been using MemberSpace to run MemberSpace from the jump. As the main designer, it's been invaluable looking at our own tool every day. I really notice UI, UX, and wording that's need improving much faster.

Trending on Indie Hackers
How I grew a side project to 100k Unique Visitors in 7 days with 0 audience 49 comments Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 29 comments My Top 20 Free Tools That I Use Everyday as an Indie Hacker 18 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments