Dog fooding your own software

So we're building a tool for software companies to collect customer feedback. Wait a minute. We're a software company, so why not use our own product?

That's exactly what we're doing. In fact here's our own product dashboard. Suggested is using Suggested, or more accurately, we're dog-fooding our own software. This isn't a phrase I've invented, go look it up. It's real.

In my opinion, this is one of the best ways of building and iterating super fast on a product. If you're using your own software, and something is bugging you about it. It'll be improved fast.

Going one step further

Since our founder is a serial entrepreneur, we had access to a few other companies to test our product on. This was actually the plan from the beginning.

Suggested was just small side project to build a tool to collect user feedback. That small little tool evolved into a product that we're now making available to other people. We've written a post on Medium about why we built Suggested

So, when we say dog food your software. We really mean it. We're doing it with Suggested on three separate companies.

It's not just us

Even large enterprises dog food their own products. Case and point - Apple. Steve jobs was using the new iPhone a month before it's launch. Microsoft run on Windows, they dog food their own software daily.

In conclusion

Use your own software! It can really highlight where the weak points are before your customers get a chance to see it.

Set up a regular event in your calendar to signup and go through the onboarding for your product. As your product grows, you may have to update the docs and onboarding steps so this is a good way to find the holes in your product.